Perfect/relative pitch ear training

[Wallengard]

So I just purchased the two supercourses of perfect and relative pitch ear training by David L. Burge.

I'm wondering about how to approach this. Should I start with one first until I got it (I do realize there is a huge time span here) before I move on to the next? Is one of them more reasonable to start with than the other? Right off the start I listened to the introduction of perfect pitch and at the end there are different drills I'm supposed to do before moving on to the next step. Now Im starting with playing any 2 white keys on the keyboard simultaneously and listening to the notes and trying to hear which 2 are playing, and confirm to myself that I heard them both clearly by singing them from bottom to top at the end.

 

[bandcoach]

relative pitch will be more secure for you whereas the perfect pitch course is going to take a lot longer to be confident with

- I have not done Mr Burge's courses but have done other university level courses and subsequent workouts with macgamut and teoria.com

- however, long experience in learning this for myself and tehn teching it to students suggeststaht it can take from 2 to 10 years to become comfortable with doing the various drills and exercises.

when you can do 4 part harmonic dictation then you know that you are getting it under control - we had to do this from term 1 at university and it drove most of the class crazy trying to do it - it is a capstone skill combining melodic dictation in 4 parts simultaneously as well as harmonic dictation (chord progressions) - if you can hear the chord progression and hear the bass and soprano then hearing the other two parts becomes very easy in a short space of time -if you struggle with any of the first three skills then you are going to be lost very quickly....the class got gradually better so that by the end of the second year they were getting 85% or more correct

 

[GirTheRobot]

^I can vouch for that...Harmonic dictation was a *****, no doubt. I could usually get soprano and bass just fine, but my ears refused to pick out the inner voices and separate them. Even if I knew the progression, I was basically always guessing at the inner voice placement. Still to this day have trouble with inner voices. Probably why I just use my own voicings =P

 

[Wallengard]

So would it make sense to start the 2 courses along side each other? I haven't actually heard what the relative pitch ear training course is about. But I imagine this drill that I mentioned is going to take me a while and I was advised not to overdo it either. Just half an hour a day or so every day until I got the hang of it. So technically I could be doing the relative pitch training as well?

 

[bandcoach]

I'd start with the relative pitch course first and then add the perfect pitch once you have the concepts down - the idea that you can do everything in perfect pitch is nice but there are certain things that tend to come much easier if you can hear the relationships between notes first - which is what your first exercise is trying to get you to notice right now any way, but based within the beat frequencies you can hear between the two notes

 

[Wallengard]

Then that's what I'll do. I was just a little confused as what would be the better priority, but it's clear now.

Cheers