Hey, everybody, my name is Adam Neely and I'm here answering all of your questions about bass and music in general so let's get started
So, no. I do not have perfect pitch. You read the thumbnail. Am I curious to know what it's like? Sure.
Do I think that it will enrich my music listening experience? Of course.
Would I be a better musician if I had perfect pitch?
That's debatable.
So, on the surface, yeah it might seem like it would be pretty useful to have perfect pitch
—the ability to identify notes purely based upon sound alone with no reference
So if I was to play this note— If I had perfect pitch I'd be able to correctly identify this note as a D just by listening to it.
That does seem pretty useful but here's the thing: I have a pretty developed relative pitch
which means that now that I know this is a D natural I'll be able to hear any other note and relate it back to this note and calculate the difference.
So if I was to hear this note, for example, I would be able to hear the minor third relationship between this and the original starting pitch of a D natural.
If I was to apply my knowledge of the theory of music I would know that B is a minor third down from D
So the second note that I heard is, in fact, a B.
This is why I think listening for intervals and chords and developing a very strong relative pitch is so useful because it more accurately reflects how we listen to music.
we don't listen to music as this sort of atomized collection of notes with no relationships to one another.
we're hearing chords, we're hearing colors, we're hearing the relationships of notes to one another.
Perfect pitch by itself does not explicitly give you that. It just gives you the ability to identify notes
and you know I think relative pitch actually can be even more important. Check this out:
If you had a good relative ear and also a developed understanding of music theory
you would be able to correctly identify this chord progression as a two-five-one chord progression.
You'd be able to hear the functions of each one of those chords.
You'd be able to hear that the first chord is a minor 7 which is the 2 in whatever key it's in
You'd be able to hear the second chord is a five seven which is the 5 in whatever key it's in
and you'd be able to hear the resolution to the one major 7.
If I told you now, as somebody with a developed relative ear, that that was a two-five-one in the key of E flat
you would be able to tell me what all of those chords are.
Aha! ok we're in the key of E flat that is, of course,
an F minor 7, a B flat 7, and an E flat major 7.
Now if you had perfect pitch you would probably be really annoyed right now.
Why would that be? So it turns out that all the examples so far in this segment have been on a keyboard
that's tuned a half step sharp
So this is actually what a two-five-one in the key of E flat would sound like
Now for those of us with relative pitch, this doesn't actually sound that much different.
It might sound a little bit darker but we're conceptualizing it the same way
It's still a two-five-one in the key of E flat even though it might not have come out that way
but for people with perfect pitch, there was a disconnect between what I was playing and what I was saying.
It's kind of like if I do a hue rotation in Final Cut. Now all of the colors are all slightly off and balanced with one another in the same way but they're all slightly off.
These examples with the piano being kind of tuned incorrectly do come up in the real world.
There are examples of people who learn perfect pitch on pianos which have not been properly tuned
and so when they listen to any other music with their perfect pitch it's like all the music in the world has been hue shifted
Basically what I'm saying with this is that I think that perfect pitch definitely does add to the musical experience.
It adds another layer.
but I don't think it is absolutely necessary or even in certain circumstances desirable
because it adds a layer of complication and translation to something that is fairly relative to begin with.
I think it's more important as a musician to learn to listen to the differences between notes
and develop a good relative ear.
having perfect pitch doesn't guarantee you the ability to listen to music this way.
So, me personally, I haven't been in any situation where I would prefer to have perfect pitch
rather than the relative ear I've developed so no I don't have perfect pitch and um
Never really...never really missed it.
So approaching jazz music for the uninitiated can be fairly daunting
and I've linked in the description a pretty decent article from Smithsonian Magazine:
Which kind of breaks down how to listen to jazz.
'cause for the most part, it's not super self-explanatory
and you kind of need to know how the moving parts actually move in order to know what the heck is going on.
Jazz has many genres but the genre I think you should check out first is "hard bop" which came after bebop.
hard bop is a style in the 1950's and the early 60's
and a good album to check out is Relaxin' with the Miles Davis Quintet.
Typically speaking you're gonna start out with the melody or "the head" of the tune.
You would typically borrow this head melody from the song that was popular at the time
so in the case of Relaxin' with the Miles Davis Quintet, they open up with "If I Were a Bell" from Guys and Dolls.
After the melodic instruments finish playing the head melody
then everybody in the ensemble takes turns improvising solos
that are directly based upon the harmonic progression of the melody that you just heard at the beginning.
What this means, and it actually kind of varies depending on what style of jazz you're listening to,
but no matter how chaotic it gets, everything
always relates back to the harmonic form of the melody
that you hear at the beginning of a piece of jazz music.
So if everything is sounding fairly disjoint like everybody is playing different songs,
try listening for that underlying chord structure and try humming the melody to yourself.
You would be surprised at how quickly everything sort of clicks together.
There is a very definite and rigid structure to it all.
Once everybody is done soloing then the original melody returns.
Now this is definitely not the only way that jazz is structured by any stretch of the imagination
but this is typically how it's done in a fairly conservative hard bop style.
I recommended Relaxin'' with the Miles Davis Quintet because it follows the style pretty well.
Now the most popular jazz album of all time, also by Miles Davis, is "Kind of Blue"
but it doesn't follow this rubric quite to the letter.
Instead, it uses a slight variation of this idea.
Instead of the musicians improvising around a harmonic scheme based upon head melody,
they're instead basing the melodic choices on around what we would call "modes" or "scales".
This is sometimes called "modal jazz"
One of the many many different kinds of jazz each with its own unique approach to improvisation and composition.
So I hope that tiny primer and also the Smithsonian Mag article
gives you a tiny idea of what to actually listen for when you're trying to do a deep dive into the wonderful terrible world of jazz music.
In my last Q&A I spent 8 minutes talking about an Fm7 chord, the second chord to the chorus of Stevie Wonder's "Sir Duke".
Now, 8 minutes in YouTube time is an eternity, but in the grand scheme of things 8 minutes isn't actually that long.
I spent the first minute talking about how Stevie Wonder probably thought of the chord as he was writing it.
He was looking for a chord that created drama, and so he picked a chord that was out of the key that accurately harmonized the melody that he wrote.
The rest of the time was spent giving context to this choice, and how we actually might experience the sound of this Fm7.
It's this idea of contextualizing things that actually has made me think more and more about comparing music theory to history.
You don't actually need to know the history of the modern world to live in it, but that doesn't mean you aren't profoundly influenced by history.
I just finished listening to the 20 hour Dan Carlin hardcore history take on WWI,
and it really made me think about how influenced the modern world is based upon the events of WWI.
You can think of how the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent divvying up of lands in the middle east between French and English colonial interests
led to a century of sectarian strife, which directly led to 9/11 in our current modern era.
You don't need to know that, but you're still profoundly influenced by it.
It's the same exact thing with music theory.
You don't need to know why we have 12 notes; you don't need to know why we have major chords and minor chords,
but that doesn't mean you aren't profoundly influenced by all of the developments over the past millennia
that have lead to the music that you know listen to, and that you now create.