ear confusion

Post 69 of 90.

My ear is quickly picking up on the G chroma. The G currently in play in Absolute Pitch Blaster is a G4, I think.

Things get confusing as the program switches back and forth and asks me to decide if C or G is present in a certain chord, cluster, or melodic fragment (and sometimes the pitch in question isn't there at all). Sometimes I need to focus and listen for the C, but a G is present and it sticks out to the point where it's actually a distraction. Occasionally the G lights up as it passes by, but I'm supposed to be looking for a C, and I screw up. My ear still also hasn't quite got a handle on the higher octaves of C, C5 and up. I think it tops out at C7, which is so washed out it's almost just a noise rather than a discernible pitch.

When I sit down with the guitar, I make a point of listening to the notes on the guitar to see if I can hear the chroma when it's dressed up in the guitar timbre. Sometimes I can hear it, sometimes I can't. On both the guitar and keyboard (with a piano sound), if I listen to C and G as a harmonic interval, the Perfect 5th relative pitch effect is so strong it pulls my ear up away from the deeper sound of the pitch chroma.

I wish my relative pitch was better. Burge says relative pitch is helpful, in the sense that if your ear is already comfortable on that surface level of sound, it's easier for your ear to dive in deeper to hear the pitch colors underneath. My ear is becoming more alert in general from this work, but relative pitch effects will still fool me now and then. The C melody word (a snippet of Bach melody) lays out a very clear C tonality, so I still hear C very strongly as a root/1/do of a key, so sometimes when there's an arpeggio or melodic fragment that spotlights, for example, A as the root, I'll hear that keynote effect and think I'm hearing C.

When working on Sun Music, I've been trying to direct some of my attention to hear the chroma of that open G, but there's so much other stuff going on with fretting and cross-picking and directing relaxation and so on, I quickly lose track of it. I retain an overall sense of how the notes are unfolding, but individual pitches just kind of wash together.