Here in Brazil we have churches that allows members to sing songs from a book that we call it Christian Harp[1] as part of the worship, the result is a lot of people who can't sing to save their own life end up singing and musicians from the church try to find the song key and chords in real time, it ends up being a great practice to develop a good ear.
Thanks for the video link! Very cool. The poor singing combined with the on-the-fly guitar tuning gave the piece a grungy punk-like feel, at least to my ears. I rather enjoyed it.
A cute (translated) comment from the video: “To sing with this guitarist is easy! Just praise the Lord and he does the rest!”
Yeah my mom is a piano teacher and described the same difficulty. In university (USSR) they would play the same song twice. The first time she got all the notes and the second time she’d fill in the melody. Other students without perfect pitch would be able to transcribe the entire thing the first time and just use the second time to correct any mistakes they made.
Ah, this answers my question above about “switching modes” to relative. Sounds like that’s not a thing. But can you hear chord qualities independently of pitch? I hope you’re not just getting a bunch of individual notes and doing interval math all the time!
I can tell chord qualities fine. But I'd never be as good as someone with good relative pitch. For example, music majors have classes in sight singing: this is where the professor plays a note, say, a C, and tells everyone it's a C, then proceeds to play a sequence of chords and people learn to write down the chords based on relative position. But I and another student with perfect pitch would ace the class by just writing down the chords based on what they actually were. This went on until he started playing, say, a C and then telling everyone it's an F#. Then he'd play a sequence of chords relative to C and everybody would write them down relative to F#. Everyone except for us two, who were totally hosed.
When I went to my parent's church, the organist would spot me and then immediately transpose the organ down a half step. Nobody noticed in the entire room except for me -- I couldn't sing any hymns because the notes didn't match what was on the sheet. It was his private prank just between us two, and he knew that I was the only other person in the room who knew what he had done to me.
It also makes it really difficult to play out-of-tune instruments. The piano in our local pub is a whole tone flat and it confuses the hell out of me... there's a mismatch between what my brain thinks I'm playing and the sound that's coming out.
Interesting, I also play jazz with perfect pitch, but I always just think in absolute pitch even when there's a lot of modulation (and also learned my instrument in concert pitch).
