Perfect Pitch without teacher?

Is there anyway I can teach myself this?

Software.

But, you could say, that is a form of a teacher.

Get yourself Earmaster Pro and/or Auralia and a tuning fork, and you could say you've got your work cut out for you.

I found learning to play timpani has really helped me develop my ears.

Sorry dude, it has to be born with. The piano player/singer in my band who is a good friend of mine has it and it just blows me away. I have heard stories from her family about how she noticed the pitch of her grandmother's cat (C#) as a child and I'm convinced that you have to be born with it.

I'll bet you can work on your ear, I'd suggest learning the piano, but you can't teach yourself perfect pitch. I know that learning piano did a world of good for me. I have a terrible musical ear so being able to read suffices for not being able to learn parts by ear.

Red Menace said:

Sorry dude, it has to be born with......

....you can't teach yourself perfect pitch....

Click to expand...

You can train yourself to identify pitches quickly and also to sing requested pitches instantaneously. Basically, the things that people without perfect pitch wish they could do. It just takes time and diligence. It took me about 2 years, and I've found it to be very useful when I play timpani or sing in an acapella quartet.

get yourself a piano or a keyboard. memorize middle c, and become really good at recognizing intervals.

groovemaster_flex said:

get yourself a piano or a keyboard. memorize middle c, and become really good at recognizing intervals.

Click to expand...

In my opinion, this is not a very good approach, as it requires a cognitive process for each tone one wish to identify. It's far better to learn to identify tone by how they sound, without using relative pitch.

As user "caddywumpus" wrote, one can obtain perfect pitch. I'm in the process of developing this ability as we speak, and can clearly hear how tones on my guitar (I'm a guitarist) and on the piano are as different as visual colors are. It's not very difficult at all, but one need to understand the concept. I recommend David L. Burge's "Perfect Pitch" ear training course to get the knowledge, and apply this knowledge to work on ones "color hearing" ability.

- Kenneth