Music Meme #3

[exhilaration]

Day 03 - A song that makes you happy

This song makes me giggle every time I hear it. I like to play in the key of C too. It IS easier to play in! In the same vein, on piano, I've always been partial to flats rather than sharps. To the point where, if something is written in the key of, say... E? (That's four sharps) I will play it in E flat instead (that's three flats). This drives people with perfect pitch CRAZY!

I have some musical skill, yes, and I have a lot of musical appreciation. But honestly - a lot of the things I can do musically that maybe your average person can't do (play by ear, arrange music myself, write simple little songs, stuff like that) well I can do this stuff cause I was kind of raised with it. My mom was a professional musician. I knew how to read music before I knew how to read words. And I knew how to play piano before I knew how to read music. So it's not so much that I have any particular talent, I just have a whole lot of knowledge that I acquired very young, so it's sort of part of my thought process.

I do NOT have perfect pitch! I am pretty sure that's something you either have or you don't. I know you can train your ear to kind of "fake" having perfect pitch. Ummm I'm not even much good at that. I suck at tuning my guitar and often can't even tell if it's out of tune until I listen to a recording of me playing it. I mean if the string has lost like a whole quarter step or something, then yeah I can tell, but I'm horrible at pitch matching. Bevan used to come over and tune my guitar for me if it was sitting out. Just automatically. Because it drove him crazy to hear me playing it veryveryslightly off key too. And I couldn't even tell. Now before I record anything uhh, I use the electronic tuner on my laptop. Cause I know I suck.

One thing I can do decently is vocal pitch recall. If I have sung something many times already (even if it was several years ago) I can always find the correct starting note. But there is a specific trick to this, I mean, it's my voice and I pay a lot of attention to it, so I can tell how specific notes... feel? I guess? when I sing them. So I can remember specific pitches for specific songs. Meaning... if I go out for karaoke, I don't need that little MIDI starting pitch they give you, and if they don't give you one, I won't fuck up the beginning of the song, so you don't get to laugh at me!

I can only do this with my voice, though. If I hear something, I can recreate the tune on the piano, but it's not necessarily going to be in the same key.

PS: what's with lj_spotlightspammin' up my friends page, huh?

Comments

[ivy-poet.livejournal.com]

Re: music - I can read it well enough to carry a tune, but not well enough to play one. I don't know if I have perfect pitch, but it definitely makes me cringe when someone's off-key.

Re: LJ - OMG, it got so bad I had to unfriend them. Not such a big loss, but they were responsible for putting Joss Whedon's latest show "Dollhouse" on my radar. Oh well.

[lara-everlong.livejournal.com]

Well... if you hear a car horn or something and think to yourself, oh, that's A#3 - then you know you have perfect pitch. If you can always tell when something is slightly off key, that's having relative pitch. If I played you pachabel's cannon in d on my guitar, and I played it in C instead of D, would you be able to tell?

[zeegeek.livejournal.com]

Hey, that is pretty neat song. And well the video is interesting too. I'm not as big of a fan of the key of C though. I'm more partial to the keys of F, B-flat, E-flat, and A-flat. But that's probably because I learned the trombone and as it's a B-flat instrument, those keys just work better, because you end up in first position more frequently, and it's harder for me to screw up the pitch. Granted it's not like I have played it at all really since I graduated HS. We had a piano in the house growing up, but I never was really all that interested in playing it. Never even bothered to learn chopsticks.

Oh yeah and LJ_spotlight? yeah looks like whatever script they are running to do that just like barfed and spit up the last couple months of stuff. Go LJ :/

[lara-everlong.livejournal.com]

well I am pretty sure my preference for flats rather than sharps came from playing the flute. because flute music is generally NOT written in keys with sharps. B flat, E flat, A flat... F, I guess like the trombone, huh? So and of course I had to sight read in band like every day. So that's what I got used to? Dunno. Just don't like sharps on the piano anymore. Not that I've touched a piano In YEARS, but there will always be one in my head :)

[zeegeek.livejournal.com]

Yeah, unlike most instruments, the trombone generally is scored in concert pitch. But yeah it's interesting you think about the piano in your head. When I move and down the fret board of the guitar, I am actually thinking moving my trombone slide in and out. I get more hung up when on the trombone I'd have to change embouchure to get to a different partial. That doesn't really carry over to anything but another brass instrument.

[yasonablack.livejournal.com]

That's really awesome that you can do all that with the music. And you can always say that when you recreate a tune in a different key that you did it on purpose.

It was like LJ spotlight had it's special own version of Blue Screen of Death. o_0

[lara-everlong.livejournal.com]

And you can always say that when you recreate a tune in a different key that you did it on purpose.

Usually I just say it's because I like to play in the key of C - it's easier to play in.

Which is why this song just totally tickles me every time :)