How Relative Pitch Can Improve Your Guitar Playing

Recognizing notes by ear is a crucial skill for musicians. It can help you to discover new patterns, new ways of playing, as well as allow you to learn pieces and songs by ear. In fact, there is no way that you shouldn’t want to improve your musical ear.

In this article, we will discuss how relative pitch can improve your overall guitar playing.

Relative pitch isn’t just the ability to hear notes correctly; it is the ability to identify notes and key signatures within their context.

Chances are you have gone to a music store. More often than not, there are over a dozen guitarists wailing away who think that they sound like Steve Vai or John Petrucci. We know that they don’t, but they don’t know that they don’t. Why?

Their ears are underdeveloped.

If a singer with bad pitch thinks that they can sing, it is because their ear is off. In their head they sound great. The notes that they hear are perfect and fluent. Someone with a trained ear hears the notes for what they really are. This goes the same with guitar. Some guitarists believe that their shredding and sweeping sounds unbelievable when it actually sounds believably bad.

This is usually due to an untrained ear. If your ear isn’t properly trained, you hear things differently. This is the reason why forty year old cover band musicians who still cling to the hopes of becoming a rock star get gigs even if they are awful; they are playing to untrained ears. To people who don’t know anything about music, they might sound fantastic. Sort of.

Relative pitch will allow you to hear your music for what it truly is. Sometimes, especially in the beginning, this may be a bad thing. You might become a little overcritical of your playing. It is better to be a little overcritical than to not care at all.

If you find yourself wondering how some guitarists are able to create such amazing licks, a large part of it is their ear. Because they have relative pitch, they are able to take the ideas inside of their heads and translate them to notes. They have the ability to identify guitar notes by ear when listening to a music passage.

This is extremely useful, as many musicians tend to have a million and one great ideas in their heads, but when they try to play the ideas keel over and die. This is due to the inability to find the proper notes and values.

If you simply like to play covers, relative pitch can not only help you to separate yourself from the endless pack of forty year old dream chasers who think that someone will still discover them while they play covers (they won’t –it never happens). You won’t have to pay for tabs or sheet music because you will be able to listen to a song and almost instantly recognize the notes.

In the end, you lost more by not learning relative pitch than learning it. If you want to improve your writing skills, learning skills, and overall playing skills, training your ear is the way to do it.

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