Methods For Improving Your Relative Pitch
Relative Pitch vs Perfect Pitch 🎶
Being able to hear notes, note relationships and chord qualities is a fundamental part of being a musician. It is an even more fundamental skill for playing by ear or improvising. It also happens to be a skill that is very rarely trained by itself. Many musicians will gain the ability to distinguish notes and chords as they get better at their instrument and come across different chord qualities and note distances (intervals).
Some people are lucky enough to have perfect pitch (also known as absolute pitch) in which they can identify a note just by the sound of it. Whereas others (like myself) rely more on context to determine the notes - and this (in my opinion) is a far more valuable skill, even for this with perfect pitch!
Relative pitch allows us to gain information about the music and use our theoretical knowledge to reproduce the music or understand something about the music. For example, if we hear the notes C and Ab (above the C) being played together, hearing this quality of sound and recognising that this is a “minor 6th” tells us that the quality of the interval is minor and the notes are fairly distant from one another. It can also help us identify the key of the music and the possible chords that are being played.
While perfect pitch enables you to identify the notes as C and Ab immediately, relative pitch requires some upfront knowledge, so identifying the notes can potentially provide much more information than perfect pitch can by itself.
2. Training the Skill 🚝
Relative pitch can be broken down into several different skills; identifying individual notes, identifying note relationships and identifying chords.
Identifying notes is the hardest to achieve if you don’t have perfect pitch, especially without any reference. Fortunately, this is also the least useful. The reason for this is because if you can identify note relationships and the different chord types then you can recreate a song in a key of your choice and if you want to play it in the original key then you can do this by playing any note and then relating the notes in the song to that note to work out the key! For example if a play an A on the piano and I hear that the song is using a note that is a minor 3rd above that A…then I know the song is using a C and now I can use relative pitch to work out all of the other notes in the song!
However, that doesn’t sound easy at all right? That’s because it isn’t - until it is! With some practice hearing note relationships and chords becomes second nature, but how do you practice it?
Well…firstly there are many apps out there that will test you on this. One that I used a while ago for a video about perfect pitch was an app called “Tone”. Unfortunately it’s only available for Apple users, but there are many similar apps for android. The idea is that it will play you a note and you have to determine what the note is, you can also test yourself to see if you can hear the difference between major, minor and other chord types.
Having said this, the best way to practice using your ears is by using them in a real situation; listening and working out some songs. However, this is best done if there is some logic so that you are training in a repeatable process.
3. The Repeatable Process 𝄆 𝄇
When listening to a song there are two main elements that you are going to need to work out, the chords and the melody. Working out a melody is a great way of hearing note relationships and working out chords is a great way of learning to hear chord qualities.
Songs are written using a scale and so it’s important to know that on most occasions you are only really listening for 7 unique notes, because a a regular major/minor scale is made up of 7 different notes. When listening to a melody we are trying to determine whether the note has moved up or down and by how much.
In the song “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”, we can assume that the first note is probably note 1 in the scale (although this isn’t the case for every song). This note stays the same for the two syllables that make up the first word “twinkle”, but for the second word “twinkle” the note moves pitch.
We can practice relative pitch by first asking “has the note moved up or down in pitch?”, in this case it moves up!
Then we can ask “how far has it moved up?”...is it one note higher, 4 notes higher, 7 notes higher, more than an octave higher…?
Making these determinations when listening to a melody will quickly becoming very rapid and require very little thought. Also notice how we are dealing with note numbers rather than notes themselves. This is because relative pitch doesn’t require us to know the key and the exact notes…if twinkle twinkle little star uses notes 1 and then note 5 (which it does), then we can play this using any scale and it will sound like Twinkle Twinkle Little Star! - To play in the correct key that you are listening to, you would only need to find one of these notes to know the other notes…if note 1 is C then note 5 is G, if note 1 is A then note 5 is E!
To practice chord qualities, it is first important to be familiar with the various types of chords that you will come across in music. The most important of these being major and minor triads. In a regular major scale, chords 1, 4 and 5 are major chords and chords 2, 3 and 6 are minor chords. So if we are listening to a song and we hear a minor chord, we already know that the chord is going to be chord 2, 3 or 6!
There are also diminished triads, augmented triads, 7th chords and chords that use extensions that all have very particular qualities of sound. Learning to hear these will make reproducing music much easier.
To practice this, I would recommend beginning by playing those various chord types for yourself and trying to gage how those chords feel. From here you can listen to various songs and try to determine the chord qualities before perhaps looking up the sheet music to see if you were able to identify them correctly.
Relative pitch is one of the most useful skills in music and is something that I use every single time I sit at the piano. So it might be worth practicing for yourself!
Matthew Cawood
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