Relative Pitch

[Noah Berends]

Hey fellas, I have a bit more of a theory-loaded question here.
Recently I’d learned about the topic of Relative Pitch, which I don’t know a lot about. So I was wondering if some of the folks who are more familiar with the concept could give me some advice or gear me towards methods or information to improve my ability with relative pitch, or some good practice techniques to improve relative pitch knowledge/skill.

 

[Guest]

If you know all the notes on the guitar this will make it easier it’s basically just practicing and even listening to guitar players that help there’s even videos on YouTube that help. Also hopes this works good luck

 

[Filip Tomiša]

I don’t have much experience with relative pitch but I recently heard a nice way to describe it. It goes like this: music is like learning a language and with relative pitch it’s kinda like repeating a sentence

 

[Noah Berends]

That’s the analogy I heard as well, haha. I think we may have a mutual source for hearing about relative pitch. So from what I gather then, practicing relative pitch may just be like practicing a language: hearing a passage of notes and then attempting to repeat it.

 

[Filip Tomiša]

Yeah something like that . I heard about relative pitch before but I heard that analogy from TheDooo . Here’s an interesting video about that if you want to watch it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxEmaBqjUmY

 

[Syn Gates]

Relative pitch is the ability to identify intervals between notes. For example, if you heard 2 different notes in succession and were able to identify the interval, that would be an example of relative pitch. You have the ability to “relate” one note to another either melodically or harmonically.
Perfect pitch is the ability to identify the exact note you are hearing such as a “D sharp” or an “E flat” immediately upon hearing it with or without context.
You can achieve the former through practice, the latter unfortunately has been recently proven to be only given through the sheer luck of having the gene for perfect pitch(yes, there is such a thing), and then having that gene activated at possibly 5 months pre natal to 2 year’s post natal. There are many theories on this and my good friend and legendary producer and songwriter Rick Beato, has spent invaluable amounts of time and money studying the correlation of perfect pitch and advanced cognitive abilities with the introduction of high information music(complex music such as adavanced jazz and classical) at a very early age. He has a company called Nuryl you should all check out as well as this video(among many many others) on perfect pitch. https://youtu.be/816VLQNdPMM

 

[Noah Berends]

Man, hearing about perfect pitch makes me jealous, haha. Thanks for the reference, I’ll definitely be checking it out.

 

[Syn Gates]

Me too my friend

 

[D K]

Interesting video, makes me wonder if it’s possible that some adults actually have perfect pitch but just don’t realize it. To use the analogy of seeing colors: as if they can perfectly distinguish every color but they just never learnt the names of the colors.