I had one of my guitar classes yesterday and super impressed myself.

It was about learning to tune guitars, at least to a 'good enough' level, using only one's ears. You know, for those situations where you're killing the vibe of a house party by bringing out the acoustic to play Wonderwall or Creep, thinking it still impresses girls.

To demonstrate, I detuned my guitar, then retuned with my ears alone, then checked with the tuner facing the students.

BAM!

all 6 strings perfect to the digitized microtone. Hot Dang.

And this was in the context of traffic, students still trying to tune their own guitars and me telling them to be quiet mid-tuning... damn I'm good.

I don't have perfect pitch - the ability to distinguish notes perfectly without any prior context, but I wouldn't want it. That's a topic for another day. In short, it could be fun, but I'm increasingly glad I don't have it.

Many people over the years suspected I do have it though, because of some perhaps lucky guesses or situations where I demonstrated a surprisingly uncanny ability to distinguish pitch or tune a guitar or whatever.

But it's not ALL luck. I spend a lot of my time tuning guitars for example. At some point, the memory of what each string should sound like starts to set in stone, and the E becomes a fairly reliable anchor point from which to springboard off to quickly figure out other pitches. Some people call this 'True pitch', which requires a very intimate relationship between the person and their chosen instrument, so they get a kind of perfect pitch equivalent only for that specific context, like a piano at home or something.

I thought about this once but figured it's completely useless if you can only have perfect pitch if you're around your specific piano at home or whatever. So instead, I thought, what instruments do I have that I can carry around with me 24/7 for my entire life?

My own voice!

We (almost) all have a voice, and what instrument are we more intimately familiar with than that?

It was my hypothesis that I could learn to cheat the system by having the 'reference pitch' built into my vocal cords, giving me a kind of pseudo-perfect pitch, since 'relative pitch' fundamentally requires a starting reference to base any other pitch in context.

It never turned out so simple though, after a few minutes thought you start to realise that your voice kinda drifts with almost every possible variable, from the time of day, the hours you've been awake, the amount you've spoken, the temperature, whether you have a cold or not, and who knows what else.

So your lowest note, for example, might be a whole lot lower after a night on the town when compared to a day whispering in a library to an adopted kitten.

Simply put, it's not a reliable instrument. No instruments are, really. All families of instruments drift out of tune for pretty much infinite reasons, but the voice is probably the worst one for it.

HOWEVER. I figure if I can become used to a relatively comfortable low note I use most often during natural speech, say, a low F, then I could potentially train my brain to the feeling of an F within my body, in the same way most people can 'imagine' the note they're going to sing, and then immediately sing it, as their body re-shapes the singing organs in advance to match what they expect to sing (like, you know where your fingers on the keyboard are going to go before you type your message, so you can visualise where the F on the keyboard is. Is that equivalent? Who knows).

I dunno. I think I'm onto something. But in the meantime, the E of the guitar E strings will suffice. I'm pretty sure I am imaginary singing an E right now...checks tuner... YEP, spot on. Genius.

Look at that, another sub-1000-word blog! I'm trying real hard.