Hello Again,
I was on Wiki last night looking up some singers and bands from the '80s to see what they are up to these days. I came across the Journey entry and went to the entry on Steve Perry. The article said that he was one of the very few pro singers that had absolute perfect pitch. It got me thinking, what makes a good singer? I don’t mean that “they sound good so they are good”. I mean is it the design of their throat, their ear, the way they are able to process sound in their brain? What is it that makes someone a pro and the rest of us not able to carry a tune in a bucket?
Red herring. It doesn’t matter. You ever seen those old movies where some old biddy has a pitchpipe and blows it before every tune? Same thing.
Oh, there’s that whole thing that A=440Hz ain’t exactly “perfect.” Just means they’re liable to be a pain in the ass.
Pure bullshit. Any musician knows “perfect” (if you mean A=440) pitch is at best a handicap. What if you have a job (as I frequently do) where the piano is down a few cents? It means the person who uses “perfect” pitch as a crutch and didn’t learn the basics of relative pitch is the odd man/woman out.
ETA: that means, they’re going to sound like balls and ass and everyone else can just deal without getting a migraine because of the “out-of-tune”-ness. I liken it to being autistic – good if you can pick horses who win or show, but not if you want to be a good musician who “plays well with others.”
Just expanding a bit on Jaledin’s answer, which not all non-singers may understand:
“Perfect pitch”, nowadays also (and somewhat more precisely) called “absolute pitch”, just means that a singer or other musician has the ability to mentally hear, in their “mind’s ear” so to speak, the specific sound frequency or “pitch” that’s associated with a given note in musical notation.
Most of us ordinary music performers, whether amateur or professional, have some degree of a different ability called “relative pitch”. That is, we can hear in our “mind’s ear” how a given pitch changes in accordance with a given sequence of notes or melody. For instance, you can probably make yourself hear in your head the tune of “Happy Birthday” or “Three Blind Mice” or whatever your current earworm happens to be, even without hearing it performed or actually singing the notes. You think of a starting note and then imagine the pitch going up or down from that note by a lot or a little, depending how the melody goes, and then shifting in turn to the third note in the tune, and so on.
But for most of us, if somebody said “Listen in your head to the tune of ‘Three Blind Mice’ starting exactly on the F above middle C”, we couldn’t do it. We’d be able to imagine a starting note that was somewhere around that note, say in the same octave, but we don’t reliably hear in our heads the exact pitch associated with a certain written note. The comparatively few people who have “perfect” or “absolute” pitch can do that.
But as Jaledin says, that absolute pitch ability is usually more of a hindrance than a help to a musician. For instance, a singer with absolute pitch has a hard time singing accurately from a score that happens to be in a different key—i.e., using the same melodic pattern but starting on a different note. And as Jaledin points out, if an accompanying instrument isn’t tuned to precisely the same pitch that the music calls for, then an absolute-pitch singer will find it tough to adapt to that. They will sing, say, the “absolute” G above middle C that they hear in their heads, and if the piano’s G happens to be at a slightly lower or higher frequency than that, they’ll be a little bit out of tune.
What makes a singer sound good is not having some kind of “magic pitch pipe” in their heads that lets them mentally hear absolutely accurate pitches, but having good control of relative pitch techniques (as Jaledin also noted). If a singer has good breath control and good muscle control and well-formed resonance spaces, etc., that let them produce a naturally attractive and “musical” sound, and if they practice hard to be able to change their pitch and volume and tone in a variety of ways so it seems smooth and natural when they reproduce the patterns of a given song, then they will sound good.
Here’s an analogy: What makes somebody a good gymnast is not an innate perception of absolute distance. A good gymnast doesn’t go through a routine saying to herself (let’s assume at random that this is a female gymnast): “I can tell that this point is exactly 2.3 meters above the ground so that’s where my shoulders should be now, and now my left foot needs to be exactly 2.4 meters high and exactly 1.2 meters in front of my shoulders”, and so on.
Instead, she starts out with a naturally strong and agile body that is capable of producing graceful and vigorous motions, and then learns and practices various ways of changing the relative positions of her limbs and torso so that she can accurately reproduce the movements of a given routine.
it’s how well you “hear” yourself singing. that’s what music majors tell me. they take a tuning fork with a knobbed handle at random, strike it and stick the knob to that soft depression just ahead of my ear and ask me to “tune” it. i often hum it right and they sound surprised, saying i can sing (well, that’s them telling me.)
hearing one’s self is particularly improtant for chameleon singers who try to imitate the original artist exactly. i go to acoustic houses and notice singers who really have a good ear.
Over time, with lots of practical experience and training, it’s possible to develop a quasi-perfect pitch. Basically, really good relative pitch and some good pitch recall.
I can generate any pitch on demand, accurate to within ~ 3-4 cents. I can’t hear a given pitch and name it though. (well, sometimes, but depends on the octave, timbre and pitch itself…I can always recognize F# for some reason, and often D, A, E, or G.)
If you give me a note name and then play it followed by a second note, I can identify the second one instantly, though…but that’s a combination of really developed relative pitch and an innate recall of intervals - also developed through drilling and 25 years of practical experience.
But, it’s NOT perfect pitch…I’m just an average pro musician with formal ear training in school, plus 10+ years of assiduous self-training in relative pitch and a lifetime playing improvised music, mostly jazz.
I do wonder if the fact that I’m also an audio engineer/producer has had an effect. When I went back to school for that degree, I stopped my regular ear training regimen and instead replaced it with ear training from that perspective - learning to hear octaves & harmonics, band-pass and q ranges, and dB changes in general and across narrow ranges.
Who knows? Ear training is weird stuff. Some people love it, some don’t. It works, but you get out of it what you put into it.
In all my teaching and training other musicians and engineers, I emphasize ear training and active listening over everything else, period. The better you listen, the better you play.
Thank you **Kimstu[/]–this is in general a hot topic. Like most musicians, I guess I can get within a few cents of 440Hz=A, but it’s basically meaningless. That’s why I spend 4-5 hours a day transcribing in whatever key, and see how close I get. I think that’s probably pretty typical for most serious musicians who aren’t gifted with absolute pitch.
That said, there are some major benefits for those who are both trained and have absolute “perfect” pitch – even though I, e.g., have good ears, it takes me a long time to transcribe brass or wind things accurately – I have to check it and try it out. The best ears in the business can hear it once and write 17 parts out, note-perfect.
Not me. But those are cats who know how to do to “solfege” (missing the accent – too lazy!) and have proved it underneath the stage. Those are the real cats – I’m just a rock and roll / jazz / whatever cat.
I have (or used to have; haven’t tested it recently) perfect pitch, and yet I can barely sing a note. Why? Well, I can hear where the note is, but I can’t make my voice go there.
Also, not so much now but when I was younger, I would hear some simple tune like “Three Blind Mice” in a different key than when I first heard it and it sounded vaguely familiar, but not exactly like the same tune. Like the same tune but in a different color.
I knew my time recently starting an EE degree wouldn’t be wasted! I thought I’d just be designing mic preamps and compressors in a borrowed garage and getting nowhere near the Neve! I hope we can do some more threads about pro audio and audio engineering in the future – I’m lucky to live in Portland with Larry Crane and his excellent magazine TapeOp. Let’s stay in touch, man!
Absolutely! TapeOp is my favorite engineering pub, hands down.
If you want to try some ear training from that perspective, try this. Totally different but very useful.
I found that this type of ear training REALLY helped me develop as an arranger and conductor. Probably because I was so much more attuned to balance across spectra and subtlety in dynamics.
Haven’t scanned the book, but if you’re talking about spectra, I think I dig – that’s how I’ve been thinking about (as a keyboard [piano/Hammond] player mind you!) the octaves since I got some small mixing jobs. Hey, it ain’t just an octave anymore, is it! My Electrical Circuits class what with the breadboards and the resistors and the pots and the caps is so fucking cool! Love it!
(Don’t ask how a full-time professional keyboardist is free on a Saturday night – it’s no good for nobody, that question, boy!)
Ha! Yeah, I was running a workshop and then came home to catch the Badger game…I’m so much happier running workshops than hauling gear most nights…
I still have one weekly gig, but spend most of my time producing, arranging and writing educational material/doing workshops.
As for the book, you really want to get it…the spectra is huge, but even more so is the training in learning to recognize degrees of change in dB, ratios of comp/expansion etc.
And for real world utility, there is no better book than this. It’s the engineer’s equivalent to Hanon, Fux’s Counterpoint and Levine’s Jazz Theory and Jazz Piano all in one. I swear by the 1st edition, can’t wait for the new one.
From the EE side, are you familiar with recproaudio? (sorry…that’s like your first hit on a crack pipe for an audio geek/EE.)
I have all the links you gave and shall gratefully follow up on them – sounds intriguing. You ain’t kidding – people think drummers have a hard time shlepping, but keyboard players (I usually use two boards for my bread and butter, private functions) have stand(s), a shitload of pedals, lots of cables, a mixer, an “amp” (I still use an old model JBL Eon 15) – it’s a pain in the ass to haul all that gear unless I make bank from that job.
Like that old corny saw, “I play for free – you’re paying me to haul all this stuff and tear it down.”
And I don’t have to make excuses for not playing on a Sunday in sleepy-town – live music is dead. I made a whopping sixty bucks off some students today, and it took my whole day out.
I should have mentioned, my 4-5 hrs transcribing regimen comes at a price – that’s time I don’t have to work on technique or digital patterns. My technique is adequate for what I need, but it’s about priorities IMO.