Tomo Fujita Guitar Wisdom

I finally decided to practice with a chromatic tuner, to practice singing pitch along with playing scales. I noticed something very strange that I never realized.

When I am singing or humming along next to my amp, it is like I can feel it the moment I match the pitch. Is this something others have noticed, or is this something that most singers have always had a feel of this?

Or am I crazy and this is my imagination? I feel like might be crazy. I am still not good at matching pitch, but I can feel it when I do. It's like when tuning with octaves and the oscillation of dissonance cancels out, but I can feel it in my head from the vibration in my voice. This is so strange to me as something I never noticed like this, and it's freaking me out a little.

Here is Tomo's comment:

"Thanks so much for subscribing to my Guitar Wisdom. Ear training is an ongoing process, and singing pitches really helps . . . keep practicing! Don’t worry so much about using the tuner. Please record yourself, so that you can really hear what’s going on!"

Hi Mathus,

I notice this as well. If I sing along with lines I’m playing they lock in, when I sing alone it’s always out of tune, not on pitch and basically awful. I think it relates back to two different parts of the brain doing the work.

One part of the brain is very good at mirroring what it just heard, like a child copying or a parrot etc. This uses short term memory.

The other part of the brain is deep learning related, and can be trained to understand relative pitch but it takes time.

There’s an interesting Berklee ear training video on YouTube about it and the Berklee approach to ear training, it’s around 50 minutes long but worth finding.

I’m on the same journey as you, and feel the same frustrations, but we should keep going! Apparently with ear training we shouldn’t play the note first before we try to sing it as it will use the wrong part of the brain and we will learn slower!

Hope that helps, all the best.

Matthus, you aren't imagining it. When two you have two frequencies or notes close together, you start to hear "beats" which are like a tremolo sound. As the two frequencies get further apart, the beat frequency increases, eventually it's high enough that you don't even hear it.

But when the two frequencies get closer and closer, the beat frequency slows down until eventually it's imperceptible or even zero. But when they are close, it creates dissonance, the same way playing two notes one semitone apart does. The formula for the beat frequency is simply f1 - f2. You can search Google for "beat frequencies" to learn more.