Learning "absolute pitch".

[Sesquitone]

On the subject of "it's not the very beginning of the piece but might as well be", the first note the trombone plays in Berg's Three Pieces is a high Eb.

Regarding "opening chord", I wasn't thinking of any particularly well-known piece. But I recall playing in a small pit orchestra (winds and percussion) for incidental music to Aristophanes' "Lysistrata" by Don Wilson. The "opening chord" of the overture was supposed to be a "surprise": a very loud C in octaves. So we tuned before the audience came in. For the trombone to hit a loud C5 precisely, absolutely cold with no prior pitch cue is a bit challenging. So, a few seconds before the downbeat, I cheated and "ghosted" a silent C4 to get the octave in my head. That always worked.

And, yes, I was also thinking of Berg's "Three Pieces". Oddly, after a few rehearsals, although the preceding eight measures have no tonal centre, it's not hard to hear that Eb5 in your head. Nailing it smoothly at pp is then up to your chops.


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[JTeagarden]

I honestly can't imagine any great use for having absolute pitch, given that even most top-end musicians don't have it.

Are you hoping to win bar bets with this ability?

[robcat2075]

Youtuber Rick Beato captured a person with perfect pitch and interrogated him...

How “Perfect” is Perfect Pitch?




Beato's son has perfect pitch




Why Adults Can't Develop Perfect Pitch (and why playing Coltrane to a baby will teach them perfect pitch)

[GabrielRice]

I honestly can't imagine any great use for having absolute pitch, given that even most top-end musicians don't have it.

Are you hoping to win bar bets with this ability?

I'm a professional musician and teacher, and I have had many colleagues and students with perfect pitch. I wish I had it myself. It doesn't guarantee success, but it can certainly help.

[JTeagarden]

I honestly can't imagine any great use for having absolute pitch, given that even most top-end musicians don't have it.

Are you hoping to win bar bets with this ability?

I'm a professional musician and teacher, and I have had many colleagues and students with perfect pitch. I wish I had it myself. It doesn't guarantee success, but it can certainly help.

How does it help? Not being rhetorical, I really want to know!

[GabrielRice]

Brass players with absolute pitch miss fewer notes, for one thing.

[BrianAn]

I'm a professional musician and teacher, and I have had many colleagues and students with perfect pitch. I wish I had it myself. It doesn't guarantee success, but it can certainly help.

How does it help? Not being rhetorical, I really want to know!

At quite a few gigs / jams I've had songs called on me that I didn't know; with perfect pitch you can probably figure out the chords on the bandstand by the time it's your turn to solo. For the simpler tunes you would probably even be ready to solo after hearing just one chorus. If someone starts playing backgrounds / riffs, you can join in in unison right away. I can transcribe melodies / solos / chords to songs whenever I want without access to a piano or my instrument; if I do have my instrument on me, I'm guessing I probably take far less time to figure out what the notes are.

Not that you can't do those things with relative pitch; as long as one knows what key a song is in, there are many jazz standards I would expect one to be able to pick up on the bandstand; you don't need to know the exact notes someone is playing if they're making up a riff on the fly, you only really need to have the rhythm down and choose notes that harmonize well; perfect pitch does help with transcribing but with enough experience I imagine the gap between perfect and absolute pitch folk would lessen. But yes, I am glad I have perfect pitch and I've certainly found it helpful.

[JTeagarden]

Thanks for the replies, those two reasons make sense.

I would now have what I would call "very good pitch," I used to be able to call out notes in a piano chord without any difficulty, but as I've gotten older, this ability has diminished, distinguishing between F and Gb for some reason now gives me fits.