Music Tips

Perfect pitch is the ability to instantly recognise the pitch of a musical note when it is played. As a guitarist, this is a wonderful skill to have in your armoury as it enables you to easily work out the notes in a song just from listening to the music being played. Guitarists with perfect pitch are often able to play whole songs after listening to them just once. You will be able to play guitar by ear far more easily if you learn perfect pitch.

It is thought that people with perfect pitch have a model of each musical note stored in their brain. When they hear a musical note being played they simply compare the note played with the model notes in their brain.

This then allows them to select the name of the note. The more advanced that their skills are the faster that they can make these decisions and therefore the quicker that they can work out the notes used in tunes and songs. This model also allows them to accurately tune their guitar without using a tuner of any kind. Perfect pitch therefore allows you to work out songs and guitar solos by just listening to them. This is the ultimate ability when used to play guitar by ear.

Without perfect pitch it is still possible to work out songs and tune your guitar without a tuner. You just have to go about the tasks in a different way. You need to use a different skill called relative pitch. This is the ability to compare one played note with another. In order to tune your guitar you get somebody to play the correct notes for your strings on another instrument such as a keyboard. Electronic keyboards are a good choice as the notes remain constant no matter what happens to the instrument. You can also use another already tuned guitar or a set of pitch pipes which produce the string notes when they are blown.

The technique used, is to play the reference note such as an E note on the keyboard and then play the E string to be tuned. You should then compare the two notes. The string note will either be the same, higher or lower than the reference note. If you can make these decisions it means you are using relative pitch skills. You then turn the machine head on the guitar to try and make the two notes the same. Once you have the E string in tune you should move on to the A string and then the D string until they are all in tune. For this to work you need to play the notes of each string on the keyboard or pitch pipes.

You can also use this technique to tune your guitar to the recording of a song that you are trying to work out. This will enable you to try playing along with the song. You can use the relative pitch idea to try to find the notes played in the song by comparing the notes on your guitar with those on the recording. This can be hard work and involves a lot of trial and error. However, if you persist you will eventually be able to work out the tune and the chords played. Every time you try to do this sort of thing you will be slowly improving your relative pitch ability.

Relative pitch and perfect pitch can both be improved by practice. Perfect pitch ear training and relative pitch ear training is done by performing certain set exercises which try to establish the reference notes in your mind. After a while you will notice that your pitch recognition abilities improve and you can play guitar by ear.

Further information on playing guitar by ear and the things you can do to improve your perfect and relative pitch ability can be found on the setting up a guitar web site produced by the author Tim Vincent. http://www.settingupaguitar.co.uk/playguitarbyear.htm