Perfect Pitch

[#1]

Is anyone around here aware that they have Absolute Pitch, commonly referred to as Perfect Pitch.

I don't, which probably explains why I play my guitars fairly badly.

I know one professional musician personally who does have it and if I hummed a note he would walk up to the piano and hit the note.

I would love to have it and regard it as a gift.

[#2]

I used to know a guy who would listen to a song and be able to recreate it almost perfectly on the guitar while listening to it. Was great to see at parties and the like. I have met a lot of musicians in the past but none of them could pick up songs at the speed he could.

[#3]

The guy I know used to sit with us, pick up a guitar and play anything we asked.

If someone suggested a tune he didn't know, a quit hum would put him on track.

He played we sang. Good times

[#4]

My eldest daughter had a talent for that and she was also able to sight-read. Loved her music but not enough it seemed to carry it on which was a great pity but her choice. Took us ages to get of that piano when we moved..... still have the stool though! 

[#5]

The ex-Mrs P had absolute pitch, like you Strat I don't either. She was at the Royal Academy of Music when we first met, she with her classical training and me with decidedly 60's/70's R&B/Glam Rock lead guitar group play (R&B had a different musical context in those days compared to the modern versions).

However, it could come in handy for tuning my guitars as she could accurately name any note I wished to play/test her on (electronic tuners were pretty well unknown in those days, I used to rely on a softly blown pitch-pipe - being short of a piano or keyboards -. pitch-pipes could be very easily blown out of tune if blown too vigorously).

At one time I played with a bass guitarist who was next to tone deaf and totally incapable of tuning his bass, which I used to do for him after having tuned my guitar first.

[#6]

Seeing in Wikipedia Linguistics
"Absolute pitch is more common among speakers of tonal languages such as most dialects of Chinese or Vietnamese,
which often depend on pitch variation as the means of distinguishing words that otherwise sound the same;
e.g. Mandarin with four possible tonal variations, Cantonese with six, Southern Min with seven or eight (depending on dialect), and Vietnamese with six."
made me think could those with the ability have some oriental factor in their DNA profiles.

[#7]

There's a thought.

[#8]

@Luzern

Interesting note about language, my daughter is also fluent in Welsh so.....

[#9]

When I was a school there was a lad in the choir with perfect pitch. He would hum the starting notes for bass, baritone, alto and treble. When the piano or organ accompaniment joined in it was always spot on.

On a good day I could pluck out an A for tuning instruments but that was rare.

@Strat My great aunt was similar to your friend. She had no musical training, couldn't read a note but played the piano by ear. But if she heard a song or we sung a bit she would be able to play along to it and we all joined in. Many a happy Christmas around the ol' joanna.

I actually think that the lack of music training was a bonus to her playing-by-ear.

[#10]

I can read music, but not fluently or particularly quickly and spent most of my guitar playing days playing by ear finding it relatively easy to pick out melody lines (when required) usually only using sheet music to get the key signature and chord sequence (most often 12bar or 8bar at that time), annoyingly, sheet music is mostly written in the key the composer used which is often different to that used on a recording, transposed to suit the vocal range of a vocalist. Arch composers most likely to write in one key but record in another I used to find were Lennon and McCartney, who would regularly write in Eflat (a horrible key for the guitar) but record in E, you couldn't get many clues from watching them on TV either, as they mostly mimed in those days, what they appeared to be playing bore little resemblance to what you were hearing.

This for TV led to one of my main gripes with shows like TOTP when a lead guitar (my main interest) would start a long and complex lead-break (solo) and the camera would switch to the bass guitar, presumably because on record the lead-break was improvised and couldn't be repeated easily.