The good thing about not having perfect pitch is that you never lose it.

Rick saying that the guitar won't be in tune and then it ended up being perfectly tuned was the best laugh I've had today. Thanks Rick!

Here’s a weird scary story: I’ve been in a band that toured nonstop several years until Covid. 250+ shows a year. One morning our lead singer listens to some music on his phone and says “something is going on with my phone, the music is out of tune”. I pop them in, it’s fine. Then we turn on the radio and he starts freaking out “it’s out of tune too”. We figured out that one ear was hearing music more sharp than the other ear (like a full semitone off). Obviously you can’t perform like that as a vocalist!! Turns out he had a bad ear infection and there was fluid trapped in one ear, and it was altering his ability to hear anything in tune at all. The ear infection got cleared up but for a day, his brain couldn’t hear music properly through his ears. Only time I’ve ever seen him really freaked out

Losing your perfect pitch must be the musical equivalent of an existential crisis

I can name any pitch, I only need 12 guesses.

Fascinating stuff Mr. Beato! I have what is called “relatively poor pitch”.

Rick, I'm 63, had a perfect pitch my whole life until into my fifties. I did not know that it is normal to lose it, so this video is a great relief to me! REALLY! And yes, my current mistakes also differ one or two semitones like you mention in the video. Amazing! Now l want to add something I have experienced too....curious if any other PP'er have experienced the same. Before my fifties it was very hard for me to improvise or compose. My whole life I was very jealous on jazzplayers etc. I could instantly repeat playing any song I heard on the radio, but improvising on it....no way. It simply was not there. Composing: the result went immediatly into an existing song. That changed with loosing my perfect pitch. Now improvising easily an hour on a good song...... composing songs: give me a good poet and two hours...... Anyone the same experience? Please react on this comment. I read in other comments that people are freightned to loose PP. No worries, playing with others hardly changed and I have exchanged it for something even more beautifull. Andre The Netherlands

As an audiologist with perfect pitch, I’d like to argue that these older people losing their perfect pitch may actually have high frequency sensorineural hearing loss, which is typical with the aging population. Really what this means is that less of the overtone series, and therefore less pitch information is getting to the brain, making it more difficult to identify. It’s also not uncommon to have high frequency hearing loss after having a heart attack or stroke. It’d definitely be an interesting research topic. I’ll have to keep checking my pitch perception in the next 20 years to see if it deteriorates also!

"He's playing all these notes and he doesn't know what they are" welcome to my world.

I never knew this about Gary. So wild I took his course on improv and he’s hearing different tones than I’m hearing. Only on Rick’s channel!!

Let me start by saying thank you for sharing your knowledge, skill and talent with so many. I was brought to your channel by a friend 4 years ago who linked to your first video on perfect pitch. Normally I don’t watch these things but I must have been bored that day...in any case I have no regrets. It’s very easy to get sucked down the Beato rabit hole. Dylan’s PP is far more developed than my own, which I know is due to all the early music theory exposure. Watching this video was absolutely terrifying. It was discovered that I had perfect pitch when I was 9, but earliest memory of it was when I was 5. As a blind musician (flute and piano), I rely on it too much. I guess if I ever needed motivation to learn braille music you’ve definitely given me more amunition. Thanks again for your awesome content.

I just want to leave a comment saying that your videos have helped me out a lot in my guitar playing. Always great to learn something new even when you’ve been playing for a long time now. Keep killing it with the great content. 🤘🤘

This is why I love this channel, never knew you could lose your perfect pitch or that you can be off by a semi-tone at one point in your life. Thanks once again for some great info! I know 2 people in real life that have perfect pitch but I'm not that close to them to know more. However, I know at least 10 people that think they have it and I have no problem letting them know they are fooling themselves. It's like they just wanna be ''cool'' and have it. Anyway, I'm ok with my relative pitch, and I love the way you train it every morning, I might try that!

Rick, your relative pitch speed with it jumping in octaves is damn impressive.

Rick! You're an amazing educator. Thanks for your tireless work to share this information with us all. I'm blown away by your work ethic and consistency. I've been watching since 2016.

Very interesting. My son is an audiologist and has a great interest in brain plasticity. He's mentioned to me in the past that many double bass players' intonation goes out as they get older, and that it's recognised in modern medical science.

Some Australian researchers theorise that all children have perfect pitch and use this as well as other auditory elements to recognise their mother's voice. When they get older, it fades and usually disappears. They think that people who begin learning music early are more likely to retain this faculty. Also, some people have it acutely on instruments they play and experience but not as acutely on ones that are less familiar to them. I haven't lost my perfect pitch, which was very strong when I was younger, but it's fading. I think i might have first noticed this when I was about 60. And, like others, it is now regularly a semitone off. I can even be sitting watching someone play the piano and what it looks like is not what it sounds like! This is a great channel. You provide so many interesting topics and can speak about a heavy metal band with authority, but also you're not too shabby on the greatest musician of all time, JSB.

Dude tunes his guitar faster by ear than me with a tuner.

Excellent video. Watching your videos is like having a musicologist at my disposal. Rick, you always seem to answer my musical questions with all your videos.

Thank you for this, Rick! I was like Dylan as a kid. Now I'm 49 and I've noticed this "drift" over the last couple of years. I had a feeling maybe I wasn't the only one... this was good to hear!

im 70% deaf on both ears i love music, watching something like this is making me cry inside my soul but my curiosity overweighs my pain.

My mom had absolute pitch. She was a concert pianist and studied with Abby Simon at Indiana University when I was a small child. Abby Simon taught me how to shake hands, which I remember to this day. I'll be 53 in March 2021. My mom started hearing pitches a half step low when she was in her early sixties. I used to teach voice and I would occasionally have a student that couldn't match pitch. I found that if I taught them the physics of sound, I could get them to match pitch, but if I tried to first teach them traditional relative pitch concepts, they would not improve or would improve very slowly. This was too small a sample to be scientific and it was not set up to be a study, but I recall that in the half a dozen of so instances where this happened, I successfully taught the students to match pitch. Of course they didn't develop absolute pitch and I'm not implying that they could have, but I always found it interesting that learning simple ideas about vibration - frequency and amplitude - allowed them to learn to match a pitch with their voice.

Since I was a young boy I could always tune up & the pitch would always be spot on.. fast forward to my sixties and now I am half a step down which drives me nuts! Great video as always Rick !

this is my second time watching this video. I've spoken to many people about this video and channel. great job, love what you do.

Rick saying he was tuning Eb instead of E is a result of his 90's grunge binge.

So my grandfather, the last decade of his live, always complained his left ear sounded a half step lower than his right ear. I don't think he had a perfect pitch, but he was a professional musician, so he might, and this reminds me off this.

Excellent work, Rick. Fascinating and enlightening. Thank you.

This is VERY interesting! Rick, it's like you crawled inside my brain. This is precisely what has happened to me. I once had perfect pitch myself. (I never had the ability to break down a cluster chord like your son, like Jacob, or like another girl who was in my class at Berklee, which I also attended for a few semesters. I was always envious of that high level of ability and thought those people must be mad geniuses!) That said, I was pretty good at being able to pick notes one by one out of the air and have them proven on the piano afterward. My mom even tells me (though that memory is way too foggy to recall) that when I was in first grade, I told the school music teacher that the piano was out of tune. I think it was off by a semitone. Of course, teacher went to Mom and was telling her this and was commenting on my perfect pitch. It's just something I had that I considered a luxury. Fast forward to the present - for at least...oh, gosh...maybe 5 or 6 years now, I've noticed my ability to sing a note by memory has dwindled considerably. In fact, when I do test myself, I'm...yep...usually 1/2 step off. I'm now 50 years old. I'm still good with being able to hear a note on the piano (my main instrument since age 5) and name it, but sing it from memory without that reference first? Not very often anymore. So strange. Your title captured my interest, but I was floored when you said "a half step off."

This has been happening to me lately and I've been really confused by it. I haven't been working on much music lately and I assumed it was a "use it or lose it" kind of thing, but this sheds a lot of light on what's going on. Thanks for making this video on such an obscure topic, Rick. I really appreciate it.

I'm sure Rick drinks Dos Equis beer because he is The Most Interesting Man In The World. GREAT video. Kevin O'Rourke

Thank you so much for your videos. Your son's ear is amazing. I had perfect pitch when I was a boy (only one note at a time) and now that I am older I've lost perfect pitch and now "rely" on relative pitch...ironically I related to Jacob Collier. The music gene is very strong in our family! Thank you again for your wonderful videos.

Oh, goodie. Another Beato vid. I was missing them. Here, I get to learn more about music. This makes me happy. Personally, I am glad my Mom gave us kids piano lessons when we were young. She also gave me music appreciation lessons, whatever those were. I still remember some of it. My appreciation grew from classical and 1950's singalongs to rock and roll when White Port and Lemon Juice arrived on the scene in 1958 or so. Then the wonderful 1960's and all those "trips" to the Haight Ashbury. We lived just across the bay. So I have had a wonderful musical life of sheer enjoyment. Somewhere in there I became friends with Dizzy's close friend Ramona and she needed another gal to accompany her while she listened to all the guys are various gigs around the Bay Area. Wow! One night we went to a concert in SF because she wanted to see their homie, Woody Herman. She used to refer to Lalo and we went to see a lot of movies which I now realize was part of all this for her. I was relatively clueless. We were both housewives with children in Contra Costa. Now, today, years later I am finding just today material on Lalo and watched the sweet little Part 1 bio about his roots in a classical music family in Argentina and then his move to Paris and later to the USA to join Dizzy. Oh, and my childhood piano teacher was an Italian woman with two daughters married to a butcher out here who had been a concert pianist in Italy at the age of only 18!! So I have been truly blessed in my life, not remembering it all except just now I cannot leave out how I was there at the St. Mary's College gym when the fabulous four Brubeck classic performed for an audience of less than 100!! just before they hit, also 1957 or 1958. Amazing! and now I can really enjoy the wonderful Beato. Thank you, man, and a big thank you to my God. Ain't it great??!!!

This is a known issue. I first knew of it because of Allessandro Barrico's book, where the town's maestro starts losing his Perfect Pitch and goes mad because he can't find the note on his head on the piano and the church's bell. The loss of his perfect pitch was to him like loosing his musical soul and ultimately his mind! The maestro was so creative, and moved the whole town with him in his musical escapades. A very fun one (something that could come out of John Cage's head) was the Human Organ, where he assigned different pitches to a bunch of people each one with a cord connected to a carrillion machine. He then would play the carrilion keyboard and expect people to sing their assigned note when they felt the pull in their wrist (wich would almost never work)! A wonderful book with wonderful characters!

I used to have perfect pitch but i blew my arm out

Right on! I lost my perfect pitch in my mid 50's. I was in a choir and got quite upset that they had changed the key of a song we had been singing---and hadn't told me. Except they hadn't! Losing it is like.....you always knew what 'red' looked like, and suddenly your told that 'red' is now 'yellow'. Oliver Sacks, if I remember right, talked about people who had reported losing their perfect pitch. And he stated that the loss reported was approximately 1 1/4 tones. And that's about what it is for me. I hear something as E when it's actually D. (I wish it were as simple as just 'transposing' it....but I never know for sure if I've already transposed it in my head when I hear it as an E.....in which case it actually WOULD be an E). So yes...I agree about relative pitch being so much more important. When you were doing that little exercise of naming all the notes using relative pitch, I had my 'perfect pitch' hat on and kept getting them wrong. But half way through I thought 'relative pitch'....and got the rest of them right.

So here is my case: My grandmother started teaching me when i was 2 the name of the notes. I started to develop perfect pith and I have it since today (Im 23). I can recognize groups of 2, 3 and sometimes 4 notes. But the thing is: I think (im not sure about that), that the piano i learned was out of tune (just a little bit). So sometimes I hear a note like Ab but i get confused if its Ab or A. All the white notes I recognize easily, Eb too but C# sometimes i hear C and F# i hear F. But its crazy for me because i started my ear training 2 years ago to develop relative pitch so i use both of then when im hearing music and sometimes i hear a note like C# and i think its C, but then i hear the REAL C and im sure its C, so i correct inside my mind that mistake(so the relative pitch helps me). Yesterday I listened to a song and i heard A but then I heard C but the relation between the notes were a perfect third, i was sure about de C but not so sure about the A, so i corrected inside my mind(A to Ab). But there are somedays that i feel that my ear is more 'in tune' then other days. This is my experience, i hope it helps someone =D

Im looking for this video for years!! I was born with perfect pitch and played by ear my entire life but a few years ago my ear is flat , just like you explained ! I go to the note for sure but its half above 😱 I gone crazy ! My play was afected too. I talked with my first piano teacher and he told me it was happening with him and some friends , I was more relieved because it seemed to be a normal thing. I tried to discipline myself, and concentrate my energies to understand what was happening to me and get my perfect pitch back. I tried to think always half above (lol) but not worked, because some notes was so clear to me and others dont. Totally crazy ! Thanks for the video ! Im your fan !

Lifetime PPer here, and sure enough, somewhere around age 45 I started to be a half step off sometimes. What's weird is it was always exactly 100 cents off, never an in-between pitch. Now here's what's weirder! When I was a child, I could name pitches without a reference, but it was a slow and cumbersome process because I had to pause and think about the sound of middle C on my mom's piano, then compare it to whatever note I was identifying. Over time, I came to have more references I could call on, and eventually I didn't need them and could just call out pitches, Dylan style. Now that I'm "losing" my perfect pitch, I find that I'm often wrong if I just call out the pitch without thinking, but I can *still* conjure the middle C from my childhood piano or the A string of my violin, and get it right after all. So, did I lose perfect pitch. I'd say yes and no. I can still name pitches correctly, but I just have to go back to the way I did it when I was 11.

An amazing video, as always! Thank you Rick. Just great.

I learn more about music from you than from any other thing in the world. Thank you so much!

Hey Rick, this was a very interesting video on a great subject. A similar phenomenon is when I am feeling tired, songs seem to be playing at a faster speed/tempo than they actually are. I've actually been working on songs and after a day of mixing and equalizing, I tell myself that the song might be recorded a bit too fast, but the next day everything seems fine. Would be an interesting topic!

This is fascinating! And actually quite encouraging, too -- I was trained by ear early on, so my ability to hear intervals of notes relative to one another is pretty decent. I can only sight read enough to figure out intervals in, say, choir (monophonic part). It's good enough to survive, though, and now I know that I can just improve upon what I have...won't matter if I never have "perfect pitch," I can just get better at interval training. Super helpful.

So interesting as usual. For what I learned from my psychoacoustics class in college, the pitch memory is based in the basilar membrane (that works like a mic diaphragm). Each freq excites the diaphragm in a singular point, and this organ transduce the stimulus into electric signal. Makes sense that with time, the hole organ deforms and we get different electric stimulus with the same source signal. Glad that I have relative pitch. Cheers

As with everything you do , this is excellent. Thanks Rick. We are so lucky.

I lost half my hearing when I was 34 years old fro a virus. I adjusted the way I hear to compensate for the loss. It sounded off for a few years before it made sense. I’m 56 years old now and had to readjust my hearing once again back in the direction I lost my hearing.

I dont have perfect pitch, but my pitch memory have become impressively accurate over det last couple of years! I havent really practiced it, but played, engaged and educated myself alot in music. I find this stuff so interesting!

As a person with perfect pitch, somehow I can relate the story of Perfect Pitch and Relative Pitch to one of the lessons in life: No matter how special your individual self are, it's simply how you are to people around you that lasts.

Awesome lesson, Rick and super-inspiring and I use the Beato ear training program every day!

For me, perfect pitch is a case of can't lose what you never had.

My mother had "perfect pitch" I however, always had "relative pitch." It hasn't changed in my 64 years on this planet but, I do have to practice with my hearing often.

Wonderful presentation Rick, thank you. Explains much. As a life-long perfect-pitch possessor I too have noticed the loss of that function. (I'm 61 now) The huge indicator to me when this loss started happening was that where I was always 100% sure what note I was hearing, I now find myself not sure at all - almost feels like I'm guessing. I'll have to do a controlled test to see if it's 1 semitone down as your Theory suggests. To me it was always just about the "certainty". My relative pitch is still as strong as ever but where pitching a note used to be as black & white as... well, determining black from white, it's now like trying to figure out whether it's pink or magenta. Horribly disconcerting, I must say... I wish I'd known about this eventuality earlier in my career.

I have wondered if someone else has had this problem for so long, thanks for making a video on it :)

I have a good relative ear and similarly to people getting older, whenever I get very tired, my perception of pitch and tempo drifts, the more I'm tired, the more music seems faster and higher than it actually is, which means if I try to sing a note when tired, I will be off by probably a half-step down.

My piano teacher told my folks I had perfect pitch when I was 5 or 6 and started piano lessons. She may have been snowing them to get them to buy more lessons, but now I only have well developed relative pitch. I'm also 53 so I've had time to lose a lot of things.

Love the channel, keep the good vids going.

I too used to have perfect pitch, but interestingly, I lost mine in my early twenties, and I noticed I was starting to be a half step off, just like Rick said! (And many other comments) Many people have commented that it would be devastating to lose perfect pitch, however I feel like losing it was a BLESSING, not a curse... When I was a kid it used to drive me nuts when instruments and singers were out of tune, and it was like nails on a chalkboard. I just couldn't stand it. Now I hear the value of being out of tune, and all the imperfections that make performances human. It's almost as if my ear relaxed, in some sense, and now music is so much more enriching and meaningful. Anyone else experience this? For instance, there are certain singers who are consistently slightly flat, like Sam Smith for instance, and that's one of the elements that makes him sound so melancholy and emotional. I thought for a while that maybe this "shift" was a result of me maturing further as a musician, but it's awfully coincidental that this all happened right around the same time, so I'm sure that losing perfect pitch had at least something to do with it. And if so, I'm better off because of it. Perfect pitch, good riddance!!!

Thanks Rick! After having perfect pitch all my life, I’ve gone down a semitone too! Soooo frustrating. My daughter was learning piano on an old family piano that was a semitone down. I knew what she was supposed to be playing and i think my ear (brain) has re-learnt the pitch. Could also be approaching the magic 50 mark too. Just need a follow up video on regaining perfect pitch!

Rick, I am honestly so relieved to have come across this video. I'm 30 and discovered I had perfect pitch when I was 5. No trouble tuning guitars, can hear huge chords, hear some microtones etc... the last 2 years I have started hearing things a half step off... So if it's an Ab I'll interpret it as a G. It's not all the time but it has definitely happened several times now where it's been incredibly alarming and disorienting. It's also slowed down my processing of notes, whereas I used to instantly know what the notes where. In certain ways it's helped my improvising, because I'm less analytical of a chord when playing free for example, and I'll just try to play to the "sound". It bums me out on some days, but I've made peace with it. Do you know of anyone having experienced the loss of perfect pitch, or the start of the loss as young as 30? Thanks for the great content!

Thank you for making this video!!!! I’m 45, and I’m about a 1/2 step off. I literally thought I was losing my mind.

Right on point again...definitely been experiencing occasional excursions. It does surprise you once you notice. Especially playing fretless. Sounds great while playing through monitors, then start hearing all kinds of weird stuff on playback through different speakers. Usually tune relative, but technique can also throw a twist in there. Gotta keep working it...

It's harder though to train relative pitch while having absolute pitch, because your brain instantly tries to go for the absolute method. I could follow the ear training test in the end, but only because my brain instantly switched to "absolute mode" and once it's on, you cannot simply switch it off (at least for me..). Also there are different levels of perfect pitch. Mine was never that fast as Jacob Collier, but I am still able to recognize chords, individual notes and scales. I tried to train it, but you cannot simply upgrade it. I eventually started to appreciate it for what it is and I don't try to change it anymore. :-)

I've had perfect pitch right up until about three years ago. Exactly the same thing has happened: down a half-step. I've managed to re-train my brain up a half step but it's taken a very conscious effort. It started like relative pitch--since I knew exactly what a middle c sounds like, I found myself having to sing that for reference at first, and slowly I've been able to rework things back to where they were almost 100%. Beforehand, hearing a note was like seeing the colour red and just knowing it's red.

I was fortunate enough to see Gary Burton play a solo performance in Johnstown, PA 20+ years ago. I was then fortunate enough to meet him, as he happened to be sitting at the table next to me and my wife at a dinner following his concert. I hadn’t heard of him before then, but his vibraphone skills made me plenty aware that he must be a well known musician. I commented to him that I was amazed at his performance, and he engaged me in conversation for the next five minutes. Very nice and gracious guy. I was tickled to see him mentioned in this video.

OMGGGGG! I'm shocked because I'm barely familiar with Eb and I recognized it before you say the right answer :D I'm gonna practise more on my perfect pitch now I got so much hope!

I imagine that Gary Burton story is going to keep some musicians up at night, it sounds like a nightmare..

Rick: I don't have perfect pitch Also Rick: *Tunes the guitar perfectly without any reference*

Hi Rick, greetings from Chile! Love your channel, and i have a story about precisely what you're talking about in this video. Turns out i kind of have perfect pitch. Haven't trained to the point where i can recognize complex chords, but there it is. The thing is when i say "kind of" is because when i was a kid there was this piano at my house (my folks still have it, german piano from aproximately 1915, wonderful sound), and this piano was not played for a very long time. Well, long story short, when we got this piano the strings were, well, a little rusty, not in the literal way, so they had to keep them tuned in 430 for a couple of years. I think you know the rest by now. It took me years (and have not been completely successful) to hear an actual C and not a B. So what i did was to turn to other memory "banks", like songs, and i "correct" my diapason, sort of speak. Very, very interesting topic, i have to say. Thanks for your videos, always a pleasure to watch them. Big hug!!

You just an endless source of inspiration, man !

Thank you so much for making this video! I had searched for more information some time ago and never found much out there on this topic. I have a different hypothesis though: musicians DON'T actually lose their perfect pitch! So I'm in that transition period, I've been perfect pitch since the age of 5 and now in my forties, everytime I hear classical music, everything always sounds sharp by almost a half step. However, if I start playing piano again (several hours a day for a week), my brain can actually calibrate to the "sharp"-ness and I begin to hear perfect pitch again in that "sharp" key. If I stop playing again, I go back to thinking everything sounds sharp. So I think what's happening is, as you get older, the ear starts making everything sound sharp (a similar effect to paintings done at the end of a painter's life have a different hue because the older painters stop seeing blue). When I try to calibrate the "A" in my mind to what I hear coming from my own voice or the piano, it ends up matching "A flat". Now I was never as talented as your Dylan, I always had difficulty hearing dissonance and complex chords. But here is an interesting phenomena to consider. If I heard a tone in between 2 half step notes, I sometimes had difficulty telling you even which 2 notes were closest to that tone, sometimes even confusing it by a 4th or 5th interval! If I heard a perfectly tuned piano, the notes sounded as clear as I could see the keyboard. But when someone sung the notes, unless they hit perfectly, I had to really think hard, and I was frequently wrong. When I listened to music with nonstandard/historically accurate baroque tuning, I pretty much lost my perfect pitch. So this is my hypothesis (which would be interesting for you to test out if you ever get the opportunity). If you find someone who claims to have "lost" perfect pitch: Take a song that they are familiar with, and using software, detune the pitch until it matches what they hear in their mind. My hypothesis is that musician will instantly hear perfect pitch again! Perfect pitch is merely being able to recognize these 12 tones of a scale that just happen to be arbitrarily tuned to A-440hz. When the ear starts to hear sharp, then the person can no longer recognize the tones and seems to have "lost" perfect pitch. However, these tones are completely arbitrary. And if you are able to calibrate to one set of tones, you should be able to calibrate to another set of tones. And if the musician who "lost" perfect pitch has difficulty recalibrating to the new tones they hear, this would be another interesting experiment to consider: get a keyboard that is able to modulate tones and detune to the "key" that matches what the musician remembers. Then slowly over several weeks (and a lot of piano practicing), modulate the keyboard back to standard tuning. I'm convinced that the musician will be able to recalibrate to standard tuning. My other hypothesis is that as musicians get older, they also practice less. If they continually hear the tones of standard tuning daily, I don't believe that a person who has perfect pitch will ever lose it. But it's just a hypothesis, and one that I would like to believe.

Hi Rick, I am an Audiologist and I believe the loss of perfect pitch is related to the loss of the hair cells in the Organ of Corti, in the inner ear. It leads to hearing loss and frequency discrimination problems.

I love this channel. Thanks Rick Beato.

Rick Beato’s pitch videos are extremely comforting

I had absolutely ZERO issues with my perfect pitch until I started having severe chronic migraines when I was 25. I had to step back from playing piano for a few years because of my health issues and when I came back, I noticed my pitch had drifted down a half step. I was convinced it was my medication. I switched EVERYTHING around. It made no difference. I’m 33 now and it’s something I struggle with every day. I’ve noticed that sometimes if I “calibrate” my ear when I go to practice, as though I have relative pitch, I can hold onto my ear for the rest of the day. But it’s nothing like it used to be. I have to remind myself that my ear is a half-step flat.

This sounds like something Smarter Everyday or Veritasium would find intriguing to investigate.

Got nervous while Rick was tuning - thought it was gonna snap a string!! Great video. Love Djesse!

I had me and my musician son both sing an E and thought we both nailed it. He did - mine was flat. Fascinating stuff, thanks!

With everything I've learned about perfect pitch, I actually feel perfectly content to just have strong relative pitch

Rick, I've attended Rock in Rio in 2013 and one of the bands was way, way louder than the safe limit should be. After that festival I noticed that every sound I heard was half step higher than it should be. After researching a bit I found there was something to do with pressure in your ears or something like that. After one month things went back to normal, and I wonder if the same thing that happened to me isn't the cause of what you talked about in your video (I mean, something in your ear, not your brain). Anyway, great video as usual.

5 notes , so beautiful . Great video

realy blessed Rick))Thank you for this video!

Last time I was so early Henley hadn't blocked the video yet

This should be a KZfaq crossover with Ryan George: Perfect Pitch Meeting.

Great content as always Rick!

This was the best an' the longest ad for Beato's Ear Training Course.

I remember how adults were upset because you said they would never have perfect pitch on those videos back in 2016.

I don’t have perfect pitch, but I remember actively memorizing C, and having it down to the point to where I didn’t have to think about it to recognize it. After a while, I stopped “memorizing” it more because I had it nailed. Within a few months though, I started saying B was C. I wonder what psychological events take place in order to do that.

This was a truly fascinating insight. Thank you.

Great video. Love the channel super informative always.

OMG, thanks so much for this. I am 55 years old, started piano at 3, and knew I had perfect pitch at 7. But about 10 years ago, had noticed that my perfect pitch had migrated down by "1 semi-tone" exactly as you describe. I thought it might have been as I had to play on a few out-of-tune pianos in my 30's. I have to say, it was an insult to say the least! But the reality is it didn't affect any of my abilities other than, touching a single note to clarify my thoughts. If I had played the piano earlier in the day, I would retain my pitch all day, like a reset button, however, if I didn't for a few days, chances are, I would be off a semitone. None the less I can still write a song entirely in my head and run to the keyboard without a second's delay and play it. No need to work on my relative pitch, as I guess that was already locked in. If anything, it has helped me, as I can adapt to an out-of-tune instrument.

''I was playing all the right notes, but not necessarily... in the right order'' (Eric Morecambe 1926-1984)

I’m a classically trained musician; specifically a singer. I thought I was losing my mind and would have to stop singing altogether! I wasn’t aware that this was possible. I happened to stumble upon this phenomenon of perfect pitch loss in a video on “Nebula” last night. One of the examples you used was a clip from that video. I began to remember noticing that this was happening gradually in the last few years. I thought it was from depression or stress. I even alienated a few friends because I was so sure I was right and they were wrong. The saving Grace of this newly found awareness is that I immediately started working on my intervals and my pitch recognition improved in as little as a day. I’m relieved that I’m not crazy but sad that my pitch doesn’t work any more and is causing me confusion and self doubt. I’m really gonna start plugging away at the relative pitch training so I don’t lose my musical life altogether. I now have a language and understanding of what’s happening to me and how I can remedy most of the problem and not be consumed by anxiety and confusion. Thank you for this!

Wonderful Rick, in the spirit of music, you rock

I heard perfect pitch is when you throw an accordion in the dumpster and it hits a banjo.

Perfect pitch is incredible to me. I’ve been trying to get it for years, probably never will, but somehow I’m getting closer every day

I didn't mean to come here. KZfaq just started playing this in the background. I enjoyed this. Good content.

My favorite relative pitch exercise is 'given the following named note [note struck and named], identify the resultant harmony (as well as name the other notes and their structural function - root, third, thirteenth what have you) [more notes struck]' where the named note can be in any voice, maybe it's the bass note, maybe it will be an inner voice, etc.

That’s what I’ll tell people when I sing off key. I lost my perfect pitch.

Whew! So it's not just me... I've always had perfect pitch since I was a young kid. Was able to hear any song and play it on any instrument (guitar, bass, drums, keyboards) just by ear, without ever having any music training. I could also name notes easily including environmental sounds (like machine hums, clock chimes, etc.) Nowadays, not so much, and I thought something was wrong with me or I'm just out of practice... but nope, I'm just old now (about to turn 57.)

This is scary because I thought I had perfect pitch until seeing this video about losing it! I turned 50 this May 2021. I’m watching your video and I answered E along with Chick Corea and we were both WRONG by a half step! I don’t know what you ear training course costs, but this video scared me enough that I am going to check it out! Thank you for your videos, channels, and your lifetime of hard work put into educating people in MUSIC the WAY that you do!

Absolutely fascinating. Thanks!!!