Posted on 11/16/2014 7:51:18 AM PST by CharlesOConnell
I knew a man with perfect pitch who was so handicapped by it, he couldn't play anything if it he was hearing the music sung in a different key.
I learned to sight-read while transposing on the fly into a different key. It used a certain neurological pathway; it got to be difficult to play in the written key—the customary neurological pathway was different, "too simple".
What is perfect pitch? Neuroscientist Diana Deutsch at UC San Diego found that people whose native language is tonal—Chinese—have a higher propensity to have perfect pitch. Also people with mixed-hand preference, the form of left-handedness that makes them write "scrunched-over", have abnormally high communication between brain hemispheres through the corpus callosum, the dividing membrane that's deliberately injured in lobotomy. People in non-literate societies have a much higher incidence of perfect pitch, as do children before kindergarten. It's an ability that's lost when undergoing the neurological transition to the world of spatial, technical object use.
What's it like having perfect pitch? The ususal "trick" is that, in music class, one geeky, teacher's pet "can tell you what key is being played on the piano". That's not the lifelong reality.
The reality is like Jason in The Giver, being able to see colors while everyone else in his society is color blind.
It can still be a disability: Listening to someone who sings flat, is like eating a piece of sour, unripe fruit. That poor person who wasted a life in thousands of hours of practice, only to run up against a glass ceiling of achievement, should have been evaluated while first being triaged in elementary school music class: "Hmm, Suzie, maybe you'd better take percussion."
Still, when transported into ecstasy listening to Jascha Heifets or Midori playing violin, it's worth the pain. Not so with Anne-Sophie Mutter or Yo-Yo Ma—they have other gifts, of phrasing, or dynamics, or expressiveness—but they very distinctly "do not have perfect pitch".
I have relative pitch. I use the “Mash” theme song or the sax solo on “The Heart of Rock and Roll Is Still Beating”.
I have relative pitch, but this is as a result of ear training and I believe many people can acquire it should they want it enough to put in the effort.
I’m not that sure having perfect pitch would be all that helpful. The people I have known who have PP somehow found out about it at a very young age (probably from such obsolete neanderthal programs as music in schools) and were far more involved than average in music training from a very young age. So, if they stuck with music from such a young age, they have lots of years of training/exposure under their belts and have developed various abilities to highish levels. Nothing unexpected there.
I am *very* sensitive to pitch; Hearing out of tune music will really bug me. Some Kenny G records drive me completely batty, as he is rather frequently out of tune.
I play guitar, when my strings get too old, they lose upper harmonic content and they will sound flat; for a brief period of time I can’t get them to sound in tune at various points on the neck unless I tune the open string sharp, but that only goes so far, and not very. At that point I have to replace the strings or the overall effect impinges on my ability to “play what I hear”. On a 5-night a week gig, a set of strings will definitely not last a full week. By night 4 I will be in hell. So they have to get swapped end of night 3, and frankly I am happy to see them go because by then, they suck.
Someone once told me that the best instrument of all is the base - from a professional standpoint - because every band needs a base, and there aren't enough good ones.
He advised me to learn to play bass if I could because I would always be able to find work.
That’s what I was expecting from the title.
It’s the only thing that makes sense to me :-)
Perfect pitch, like Madison Bumgarner in the World Series.
After years of playing in bands with the misery of transposing “on the fly”, I now let my roland do it for me. I just play it in C or G, etc, and it comes out in the key I set it too. I know, it’s not purist, but it works for me. I started on trumpet but never learned to read bass clef (left hand) too well, I go by the Nashville numbering system and use fake books a lot. But, I have fun with it!
Ugh. I was rooting for KC.
Years ago, I predicted that popular music would devolve into white noise. I’d say that today we are about halfway there.
I've heard a few contemporary groups that have at least some musical merit. Two names that come to mind are Linkin Park and Nickleback.
But compared to the musical eras you mentioned, the pickings are pretty slim.
I have come to enjoy the backup musicians one can hear in the music of those times. For example, the session people who can be heard backing up Olivia Newton-John, or Al Jarreau, are remarkable in my view.
Kenny Loggins and Lionel Ritchie also hired the best of the best.
Any of those singers can sing rings around the current crop, whom I find completely uninteresting.
Taylor Swift seems to me to have some real talent, but I think she "dumbs herself down" to the level desired by her management.
That’s very decent advice, in my experience.
Here’s what I would say about bass: While *every* instrument requires work to learn to play VERY well, fretted electric bass (aka “Fender” bass as it used to be called) is probably an instrument that’s a tad easier to learn “kinda sorta” well = good enough to play with others and have fun with. And that’s a sufficient end in and of itself. Upright bass is not that way, it’s an enormous thing to haul around and challenging to learn for most.
Learning bass is also a challenge because for years of learning the basics, you’re learning stuff that few people want to hear on its own, at that could include you! And yet, those basics have to learned by tens of thousands of repetitions and there ain’t no other way.
Bass also is not for the faint of heart, in the sense that over the course of a performance, you are moving maybe 10-20x the amount of metal around as would a guitar player. And it gets to be real work, which of course you can get used to. It is work to play and to be good at it (meaning, to be a player that others want to play with) requires a certain vicious discipline because in your typical pop-music band of 4-5 players you’re right at the juncture of rhythm and tonality. It is by far the most powerful instrument in that type of setting and if you play crappy, you can make the drummer sound bad and if out of tune you will make the rest of the music sound bad. Because the tonality of the music is heard relative to the tonality the bass produces. (If you don’t believe that, put a fretless bass in the hands of even a good bass player who is not used to playing fretless. Everything will sound grossly out of tune) So as one who has played in those types of combos for 45+ years, bass carries awesome responsibility. A bad bass player will make everyone else in the band hate life.
Bass is ultimately the confidence of the band.
http://knuckleball.com/that-crazy-r-a-dickey-knuckleball-gif/
80mph knuckler. Like Something out of looney tunes.
Freegards
That’s crazy!
Some of the bassists you hear these days are brilliant. I love all of the glissando moves they make, the way they use the bass to make these little "editorial comments" from time to time.
I guess with the emergence of fretless basses and "the Stick," the bass has changed from strictly background to something more out-front.
I guess Jaco Pastorius had something to do with that. Also Nathan Watts' work with Stevie Wonder back in the '70s and '80s.
Tony Levin's solid bottom for Carly Simon and others also deserves mention.
There's a documentary about Steely Dan in which he talks at some length about how he learned to give Fagin and Becker what they wanted. For a musician, he's extremely articulate and insightful about the bass, the role of the bass, how the bass relates to the rest of the production, etc.
Some of that documentary is on YouTube. You can see the whole thing if you have Netflix, IIRC.
You expressed that so well I feel better just for reading it.
The current music seems to have a goal of never being uplifting at any point.
I wouldn't know myself; though I can more-or-less match pitch in a group, my own tendency is toward a flattish contralto, and I can be strangely annoyed by the odd, pointy twanginess of a piano.
I had a door bell with one note off and had to replace the whole thing because the thing just drove me crazy.
I think some people either with relative, like myself, or perfect pitch are able to accommodate off key music better than others.
BTW - my husband who has neither, loves the music of a certain singer, who regularly sings off key, thinks I'm being petty for not also liking her music.
Hmm. Whom can you be describing?
Give me a hint. From which decade?
The "scrunched-over" doesn't happen if one simply angles their sheet of paper from the right-handed position at 10 o'clock to the 2 o'clock position. Opposite hand = opposite paper position. Simple. No brainer.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.