Do You Have Perfect Pitch?

A few days ago, myself and a couple friends were gabbing,
and we heard a siren. Jokingly, someone asked what note it was.
Well, none of us could do anything more than make a ballpark
guess. At that point, the discussion turned to the subject of “perfect pitch”.

Naturally, I was reminded of a story I heard when I was working
at Caribou Ranch. So I told them my story -

I think it was Bruce Botnick who told this story, but I’m not
absolutely sure. It came up when we were overdubbing vocals. It

reminded him of when he was overdubbing  Art Garfunkel, Everyone knew that Art was incredibly sensitive to pitch, and probably had “perfect pitch”. So, the producer and engineer decided to play a prank on him. He was listening to himself in the headphones and “doubling” his vocal.The engineer routed his first vocal through a digital device that allowed.him to slightly “de-tune” the track. In other words, it was “flat” to the basic tracks. Art would match his voice to the original, but then he listened to the playback, he was always out of tune. They all acted like they didn’t hear anything wrong, and Art went crazy. He even threatened to quit singing forever. They finally told him the truth just as he was walking out of the studio!

After that, someone looked it up in the dictionary, and here’s what Merriam-Webster says, “absolute pitch, the ability to recognize or sing a given isolated note called also perfect pitch”

The scientist in me had to know more, so I turned to the internet.

I had the priviledge of working with Carl Wilson, so I was especially fascinated to see this;

Carl Wilson – Both Carl and Brian [Wilson] had perfect pitch, even though Brian was deaf in one ear.

Jimi Hendrix – When he first started learning guitar he couldn’t afford a tuning fork, so he went to the local music store, ran his fingers over the open strings, then went home and tuned up. Because the guitar has 4ths in its intervals between strings, which are much less ‘friendly’ than the violin’s 5ths, only someone with perfect pitch could have done this.
- Although Hendrix never learned to read written music, early in his career as a sideman he could learn a new band’s entire repertoire in an hour or two by just hearing the songs once. Again, this would be beyond someone without PP.

Don’t touch that dial!

Stay tuned for more exciting and incredible info. My next post will reveal more fascinating results of my Internet research . PLUS, learn how YOU can develop Perfect Pitch yourself!

To be continued …