The Music Making Blog

You don’t need perfect pitch if you can master relative pitch. Relative pitch simply means that if you are given a note or chord, from there you can sing another note that you are asked to sing. For instance, if I pay the “c” note on the piano, I can sing the G note. But with perfect pitch, you could simply sing the G note accurately without first hearing any note at all.

You can learn relative pitch by learning the sounds of the various intervals. To do this you can select a song whose first 2 notes represent a certain interval. Take for instace “Here comes the bride”. There´s 5 half notes between “Here” and “comes”. Then if you need to recall the sound of that interval, just sing to yourself the first 2 notes of that song. This is called ear training.

Each note in music is defined, i.e. it never changes. C is always C, D is always D, and so on. If you use an electronic tuner to tune your guitar, for instance, it will enable you to tune to perfect pitch, which will match all other instruments in an orchestra or band. If they weren’t all tuned to this predetermined note, the sound would be a mess and no one could stand to hear it.

In this way a musical note is similar to the temperature. Seventy degrees is 70 degrees no matter where you are in the world, and no matter the time of day or year.

Another way to define relative pitch: You use one note or chord as a musical foundation. From there, you can hear another, i.e. a certain interval, in your mind and sing it or play it on an instrument. Without the foundation and starting point from which you hear music, i.e. relative pitch, music is only a jumble of sounds. You still hear a song but you don’t hear the nuances, the depth of feeling.

Knowing relative pitch means your perception of the music is more refined, accurate. Relative pitch gives you the ability to hear what chord is being played. Each chord has a tone, which can be compared in the abstract to the colors. Each color has a feel or mood – i.e. Red is loud, blue serene and so on. It is the same with chords.

Minor chords sound mournful. Major chords sound bright. Augmented and diminished chords sound jazzy. You have to play each chord on an instrument or listen to the chord being played. Then, listen carefully to songs on the radio or on your iPod. Make a game of it, and see which chords you hear. You’ll be amazed by your skills. Once you hear, say, an augmented chord and are told, “This is an augmented chord”, you have the ability to identify it again when played within a song. People without musical training don’t know when they hear an augmented chord because they never sat down with someone saying, “listen to this sound. It is an augmented chord sound.”

Just like if you were never told the names of the colors as a child, you would not be able to point to something and say what color it is.

The point is, learning relative pitch is child’s play, so get a teacher or a program to work with and start learning those sounds! You’ll be a virtuoso in no time flat (no pun intended – flat – get it?).