Perfect Pitch Course

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mastahnke

mastahnke

Linux Man...
Ok,I realize this is mic forum, but I imagine that vocals could be discussed here. Anyway, I am sure most of you have seen that "perfect Pitch course" you can order in almost eveyr guitar magazine. If you don't know what I am talking about, then please just disregard this post, but for those of you who do, anyone ever used this thing? I keep thinking if I can have perfect pitch for 140$, damn, I'll order two of them. I can't imagine how much better my plaing and singing would be. Anyway, just looking for opinions. yeah or neh.
MIKE
 
Forgedaboudit..........

That stuff is tailor-made for the infomercial crowd....


Bruce
 
Blue Bear Sound said:
Forgedaboudit..........

That stuff is tailor-made for the infomercial crowd....


Bruce

Speaking from experience, or arse?
 
Someone piss in your cornflakes today, ametth??
:rolleyes:

Would it help if I added YMMV???

yikes...
 
is that the ad with the dude who's all spazzed out looking? rofl...saw that in acoustic guitar world...lol..ill scan it tonite to show 'yas..
:rolleyes: :D
 
Blue Bear Sound said:
Someone piss in your cornflakes today, ametth??
:rolleyes:

Would it help if I added YMMV???

yikes...

I dont eat cornflakes.

I was just wondering if you actually knew what you were talking about, if you had hands-on experience with this...or you just heard "That stuff is tailor-made for the infomercial crowd...." Curious.

YMMV as always, but in this case, it seems you have no mileage concerning this. YMMV.
 
Gimme a fuckin' break..............

It's very simple....

I've seen those ads in guitar mags... I've read them... they look cheesy, they sound cheesy... and to me they look like an infomercial on paper, which is why I said that....

I write enough I don't need to plagarize catch-phrases.... but thanks.........

:rolleyes:
 
I knew this music instructor who went through one of those perfect pitch programs. It worked, but it ruined him for a while. Even tiny little variations in pitch would drive his ears nuts.

Slackmaster 2000
 
Ok, thats all fine. But still no experience, enough said.

This is not a personal attack Bruce. I'm just tired of people commenting on things they know nothing about.

You still chat Bruce? I would love to one day...
 
That would drive me nuts too if I were like that. I do like things to be in tune, but some of my favourite records are out of tune, but the songs are really good, the emotion is there, so it doesnt really bother me.
 
Ametth....

I hit Yahoo Messenger occasionally... lately though I haven't been on.... too busy....

Next time you're on it, email me and if I'm on-line I'll buzz ya..... more likely very early morning or late evenings....

Bruce
 
Listen to enough Rolling Stones, and the very idea of learning perfect pitch becomes nauseating. Anything that would make it impossible for me to enjoy "Exile On Main Street" anymore gets a no vote in my book.
 
Whenever I see products such as "Develop perfect pitch" or "learn how to play guitar in one hour".....etc I am a little skeptical......
 
I agree with Bruce on the cheeze factor of those ads. If they weren't oooohhh soooo CHEEEEZY, I might have considered buying the thing, but it was like the ad was written by someone schooled at AMWAY U.

I see they've finally got CD's now, though. That was another turn-off.

Queue
 
mastahnke,

Off topic, but.

What is the problem with your sense of pitch? Most people do not have perfect pitch, or need to. 'Close enough for rock & roll' right?

Guitar is an easy fix, use a guitar tuner assuming your intonation is ok. If you don't have an 'ear' for notes being out of tune, then maybe some guitar instruction.

For vocals, If your way out of the ballpark, maybe consider some vocal lessons.

Pitch is one thing I think can be helped with lessons. The fact that your aware you may have a problem is good. If your sense of time (something I think your born with, very hard to learn) is ok, your more than half way there. Unless the timbre of your voice sucks... :0, not much you can do about that. Take up smoking or whiskey. Nah.
 
I do NOT have any experience with the mentioned program, so perhaps I am out of line in commenting at all.

However, I just wanted to point out that true "perfect pitch" is something that can, as one person pointed out, ruin your enjoyment of music, and that what is usually (and usefully) taught is not perfect pitch but the improved ability to identify perfect relative pitch, which can include increased awareness of "beat" frequencies or overtones, if your hearing is sufficiently acute. (You already know this, but for those who don't, two notes played in a chord create a third note -- sometimes referred to as a "beat" frequency in electronics -- that will pulse faster as you drift further from being in tune and slower as you approach perfect relative pitch; the goal in this type of training is to be able to play or sing the notes in a duet so that the note created by the intersection of the vibrations is stable, indicating that each of you is in relative perfect pitch to the other. Unless asked to listen for these specific overtones, most of us are consciously unaware of them, although they affect our perceptions of musicality nevertheless.)

A singer in a band facing monitors in a live venue will NEVER hear an overtone, and his or her intonation will probably depend more on physical support from the diaphragm and lots of practice than extensive training in relative pitch.

On the other hand, a classical singer or academic who wishes to learn to sight-read (a friend of mine uses a difficult passage from Alban Berg's opera Wozzeck as a final exam for his advanced voice students) would benefit greatly from learning relative pitch.

Whether a course that claimed to teach "perfect pitch" would be useful to you or not depends not only on what you wish to accomplish but also your cultural values. Any Anglo musician who has been to Mexico has noticed that standards of intonation are very different in a mariachi band, for instance, yet everyone is still having a wonderful time and making great, joyful music that is hard to resist. Likewise, other cultures, especially Asian, use scales that are completely unrelated to the corpus of western European music.

Keeping these cultural differences in mind helps put perfect pitch and perfect relative pitch in perspective. It's great (for others) if perhaps one person in a large symphony orchestra has perfect pitch to help tune sections and identify where pitch has drifted off. But aside from the certain cache that accompanies the mystique of this unusual ability, the person who has perfect pitch will usually tell you that all things being equal, he/she would rather not have it.

Mark H.
 
Mark H. said:
You already know this, but for those who don't, two notes played in a chord create a third note -- sometimes referred to as a "beat" frequency in electronics -- that will pulse faster as you drift further from being in tune and slower as you approach perfect relative pitch; the goal in this type of training is to be able to play or sing the notes in a duet so that the note created by the intersection of the vibrations is stable, indicating that each of you is in relative perfect pitch to the other. Unless asked to listen for these specific overtones, most of us are consciously unaware of them, although they affect our perceptions of musicality nevertheless.)

A singer in a band facing monitors in a live venue will NEVER hear an overtone, and his or her intonation will probably depend more on physical support from the diaphragm and lots of practice than extensive training in relative pitch.

.

totally agree with your post, but the resulting note (also referred as "diferencial tone") is actually below the two sung notes. The brain seems to hear two pitches always as part of the overtonescale and adds the diferencial note as supposed fundamental. I.e. If you sing a major 3rd your brain interpretes it as 4th and 5th overtone, adding a fundamental 2oktaves below the lower pitch. It's not that obvious when singing pitches, but you can very well hear it with brass instruments, especially in the high regist.

Once having learned to listen to these diferencial notes you will also profit from it in an noisy enviroment, as you can imagine how a intervall has to sound like to produce the low "humming"
 
Thank you for the refresher, Mr. Kuhn. It has been close to 25 years since I tried to learn a bit of flute, and I remember my teacher instructing me to listen for the tones while playing simple Bach and Handel duets, standing and facing each other as we played, but I didn't recall that the overtones were actually lower than the notes we were playing. Fascinating. I do recall that some I could not hear. Are they pitched out of range, or simply not present?

There is a part of your post that I didn't quite understand. I was always under the impression that the "third note" tones were physically present as an interaction of the two primary notes being played. Are you saying that it is our minds that create the third tone? Please clarify if you can. I remember it as quite an amazing experience when I started hearing them.

I probably borrowed the term "beat frequency" from my father, who was an amateur radio operator and electronics experimenter, and from early memories of hearing that pulsing diminish as he would tune in to a transmission.

I was raised as a trumpet and fluegel player, but I reserve the term musician for those wonderful people whose artistry transcends mere competence in reading music.

Thank you for any additional information you can offer me about this. Unfortunately, in the years I took trumpet lessons (late 50s through mid-60s), such techniques for improving intonation were not taught. Neither did we have the chops-building exercises that made some of the Vancouver boys real power-houses by the mid to late 70s. When a handful of teachers finally "got" how incredibly physical brass playing is, the training that developed nurtured some brilliant talent.

Did you ever run into the (I'm going to have trouble getting the name right after so many years) Akiyoshi-Takahara Big Band? They brought their ensemble to our local college a couple of times in the late 70s, and the level of playing was just awesome. She was the composer, and she required some precise unison playing on complex passages at tempi that defied imagination. They were so tight we just sat there with our mouths open, gaping at their perfection. Her husband, I think, was perhaps Dutch (so Takahara cannot be right).

Stan Kenton brought his band through town as well, and it was wonderful to see the old master working with very young musicians -- he was as classy at 60 or older as he must have been at 30. About that time, a group of local players put together the Humboldt Bay Brass Society, and it still exists. I sat in on a few early rehearsals, but I'm destined to be a listener and one who appreciates, not a performer.

With kind regards,

Mark H.
 
Mark H. said:
Thank you for the refresher, Mr. Kuhn. It has been close to 25 years since I tried to learn a bit of flute, and I remember my teacher instructing me to listen for the tones while playing simple Bach and Handel duets, standing and facing each other as we played, but I didn't recall that the overtones were actually lower than the notes we were playing. Fascinating. I do recall that some I could not hear. Are they pitched out of range, or simply not present?

There is a part of your post that I didn't quite understand. I was always under the impression that the "third note" tones were physically present as an interaction of the two primary notes being played. Are you saying that it is our minds that create the third tone? Please clarify if you can. I remember it as quite an amazing experience when I started hearing them.


Mark H.

As far as i can tell, and I learned all this from my trumpet teacher, these low notes are not "real", they are imagination. And they are not overtones, but you hear them much more intensively if two instruments with lots of harmonic content play together (such as two brass instruments). With some intervalls, they are very dificult to hear, as they drop lower with smaller intervalls. For a major 2nd, interpreting it as 8th and 9th overtone, the diferencial would be 3 oktaves below.

I once attended a workshop with the lead player of the akyoshi big band, Bobby Shew. He was talking about breathing all the time. That's what I always learned from other teachers, too. Chops are only 10%...

BUt this is about microphones, isn`t it? Lets talk about ribbon mics for brass miking (c:

Harald
 
Thank you, Harald. Yes, breathing. I remember when Maynard went to India to meet with some famous Guru, who told him he was the first Westerner he'd met who actually breathed properly! To play in those registers, he'd stand with his legs apart and feet planted firmly on the platform and lean back to force his abdominal and back muscles to support his diaphragm. I was always afraid he'd give himself a stroke on the spot!

I found an brief bio of Toshiko Akiyoshi (and Lew Tabackin was the name I was trying to remember) at

http://www.xrefer.com/entry/623905

which mentions Bobby Shew. Thanks for your reply.

Yes, microphone content. If only I had some experience to share. ;-) Ribbons, you say?

Mark
 
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