Identifying Notes without Perfect Pitch

It’s been well-established that if you don’t have perfect pitch as an adult, you can’t develop it.  You might be able to develop a very good educated guess, but it’s not the same as playing a cluster of notes on a piano and being able to identify and sing each note perfectly, as Rick Beato’s son can.  (Beato is a well-known and wonderfully informative musician and vlogger whose YouTube videos I highly recommend not only for musicians but for music fans who want to delve a little more deeply into songcraft.)  Of course, learning relative pitch is an important skill that you can develop.  When I attended Berklee College of Music back in the 80s they had classes devoted to ear training, and while I found these useful at the time, these days anyone can train their ears at home without shelling out gobs of cash.  Just download an app at your favorite store and start learning.

That aside, it does come in handy to be able to identify pitch without first plucking notes on a keyboard.  So what can you do if you don’t have perfect pitch? Once again, Rick Beato comes to the rescue. Part 3 of his video series “How to Develop Perfect Pitch” was an eye-opener for me, even though it shouldn’t have been; sometimes the most obvious pursuits are the least likely to cross one’s mind.  In this video Beato recommends choosing twelve songs – one for each pitch – and using these as references for pitch identification.  I had done this for years for the key of C with REO Speedwagon’s “Roll with the Changes,” and once I found C, I could identify all the other pitches through relative pitch.  But Beato’s method works better because it’s quicker – why identify C first if what you really want to do is identify an A? – and also because if one reference fails you by a half-step – as it sometimes does for me – then having another reference can help correct your error.

Watching Beato’s video, I recognized immediately that I’d be better off choosing songs I know well, that are a part of my DNA.  This is easier said than done, because while there are ample pop/rock songs in the key of E or D or A, finding songs to help identify a C# or Aflat are fewer and farther between.  Even now, I’m not positive that some of my choices are the best, but I’ve been able to employ Beato’s pitch-identification strategy while playing piano at church and it works pretty darn well.  It’s really helpful to look at a piece of music and know what the first note or chord is going to sound like before playing it, as it can be jolting if you’re expecting the pitch to be different.  With Beato’s technique, I can more often than not correctly identify the pitch before the song begins.  This isn’t to say that I can identify a note in the midst of a complicated song whose key I haven’t already identified – Beato’s strategy isn’t a substitute for having perfect pitch and has its limitations – but it is useful.

When identifying songs that work for you, it’s important that the note you’re trying to identify plays at the start of the song. A song might be in the key of E, but if the first note is an A, then pick this song for A, not for E.  This is the case for “All my Loving” by the Beatles, which I’ve chosen as my “A” song.  Another helpful tool is to create a playlist of all twelve songs on Spotify or some other music streaming service so that you can quiz yourself quickly and often.

Without further ado, here are the twelve songs I’ve chosen for my pitch identification.  Some of these may be obscure for you, but there are several lists in the comments section of Beato’s video that might prove helpful. 

• C:  “Can’t Buy Me Love” by The Beatles, and “Roll with the Changes” to confirm.

• C#:  The opening to “Mr. Brightside” by the Killers.  Finding a rock song in C# wasn’t easy!

• D: “We Can Work It Out” by The Beatles.  This one really works well for me for some reason.  “Another Brick in the Wall (part 2)” by Pink Floyd is another good one.

• Eflat:  The second note of “The Long and Winding Road” by The Beatles.  Ideally, I’d pick nothing by Beatles songs – they are so ingrained into my musical memory.

• E: “Eleanor Rigby” by The Beatles.

• F: The first note of “Goodbye to Love” by The Carpenters.

• F#:  The first note sung in “Oh! Darling” by The Beatles.

• G:  “Christmas” by The Who.

• Aflat:  “Ripples” by Genesis.  This is one that works almost 100% for me.

• A:  The first note of “All My Loving” by The Beatles.

• Bflat:  The first note sung on “Guide Vocal” by Genesis.  The “Star Wars” theme works well here, too.

• B:  The original version of “The Revealing Science of God” by Yes.

There you are!  I just tested myself again for each pitch using the above reference songs (first clearing my hearing palette) and I got 10 of 12 notes correct, with two off by a half-step, which means I probably need to practice some more.  This method may not be a perfect pitch substitute, but it does have value if you’re willing to put a little work into it.

20 Greatest Keyboard Intros

If you’re a music fan and haven’t already heard of Rick Beato, I highly recommend you visit his YouTube channel and poke around a little, or – more likely – so much so that you jeopardize your job and marriage.  Music is a rabbit hole that’s easy to fall into, and Beato makes it all the more enjoyable by relating interesting aspects of music without dumbing things down and without condescension.  Particularly enjoyable is his “What Makes This Song Great” series in which he dissects classic rock songs, isolating tracks and playing along with amazing virtuosity, while revealing what makes the song stand out.

Rick recently made a video of the “20 Greatest Keyboard Intros Ever,” and since I’m a keyboard guy, before watching the video I quickly made my own list, inspired mostly by song intros that I learned (or tried to learn) starting back when I was around twelve years old to – most recently – intros I learned for bands I play in now.  Only three of the songs Beato covered made my list, but I kicked myself for forgetting to include Rush’s Signals and Genesis’s Dancing in the Moonlit Night, both of which I learned back in the early 80s.

Without further ado, here are my Top 20 keyboard Intros that I recall learning over the years:

1)     Bloody Well Right – Supertramp
2)     Foreplay – Boston
3)     Angry Young Man – Billy Joel

These overlap with Beato’s list, all essential inclusions, and although I thought I learned them all when I was a teenager, even performing “Foreplay” in the 1984 Brookfield Central Battle of the Bands, it wasn’t until I reached my 40s that I actually learned how to play these intros correctly.  All are great fun, highly satisfying intros that still mess me up from time to time.  The latter is a bitch to play unless you’re on a grand piano – I’ve found keyboards don’t have the action required for the rapid repeated notes.  Then again, maybe it’s just my playing.

4)     Another Man’s Woman – Supertramp

I could fill my Top 20 list with nothing but Supertramp songs (“From Now On,” “Take the Long Way Home,” etc.), but if I limit it to two, this has to be the other inclusion.  Another wonderful Rick Davies intro.

5)     Levon – Elton John

Buying the Elton John Greatest Hits album in the winter of 1979-1980, followed shortly thereafter by an accompanying piano book, was monumental for me, opening up a whole new world of piano playing that went beyond Michael Aaron lesson books.  I could easily pick twenty Elton John intros for this essay (“Skyline Pigeon,” “Idol,” “Take Me to the Pilot,” etc.), but “Levon” is the one that made the biggest impression on me.

6)     Nobody Home – Pink Floyd

That same winter of 1979-1980, Pink Floyd’s The Wall made its debut, and – prior to me playing by ear more frequently – this was another piano book that inspired me.  This intro isn’t earth-shattering, but it sets the melancholy song up so well.  Very tasty.

7)     Fooling Yourself – Styx

For a young keyboardist, this Styx song was highly satisfying, as it was easy to reproduce the original part note for note and even get the synth patch pretty close (often not such an easy task on a four-octave Korg Delta keyboard).  Nothing fancy here, but effective.

8)     Fire in the Hole – Steely Dan
9)     Aja – Steely Dan

My brother challenged me to learn “Fire in the Hole,” and I got it kinda sorta down before moving onto “Aja.”  Today, I could learn these songs with a bit of hard work, but I remember struggling mightily just trying to figure out the opening chord to “Aja.”  I didn’t even know what a major seventh chord was at the time, so I was at a distinct disadvantage!  I remember showing my piano teacher Fred Tesch what I had written out on manuscript paper, and he immediately wrote out a bunch of chords that I needed to master, which subsequently made learning songs a helluva lot easier. 

10)  Trilogy – Emerson, Lake and Palmer
11)  Awaken – Yes

These songs provided a different sort of challenge.  Instead of blues and jazz-based chords, these intros were more classically-influenced, and once the patterns were deciphered, they weren’t too difficult to learn.  The fast runs of “Awaken” are merely suspended chords and pretty easy to play.  But again, they sound really tasty.

12)  Trampled Under Foot – Led Zeppelin

Perhaps an odd one to include, as it’s a whopping two measures long, but in the days when learning a song meant placing down the needle on a record, lifting it, plunking out a few notes on a keyboard, placing the needle back down on the record (but too far to the right, so the fade out of “Houses of the Holy” was still audible), listening, lifting, playing, dropping, listening, lifting, playing, etc., learning even a two-measure intro wasn’t so easy!  Also, not understanding pentatonic and blues scales made it a lot more challenging. 

13)  Jungle Land – Bruce Springsteen

Roy Bittan’s handywork was a lovely work of art to reproduce, not only the intro here but the entire song.  Monumental.

14)  Abacab – Genesis

My high school band took on this song and did a pretty damn good job of it!  Once again, when I relearned this song about five years ago, I realized that my ears hadn’t picked up on a few things back in mid-80s.  YouTube set me straight as it always seems to do.

15)  Target – Joe Jackson
16)  Be My Number Two – Joe Jackson

The former’s Latin-based piano part is probably a joke to those who know the ins and outs of this style of music, but for my young ears in 1982, I didn’t understand what was happening here at all.  It wasn’t until the late 80s that I finally wrote out the parts to figure out the syncopation.  I never did master Latin patterns and rhythms the way I’d like, but I got this Joe Jackson part down pretty well.  “Be My Number Two” was more my speed, and I love hearing what Joe’s done to the middle section lately when he plays live, modulating every two measures or so before resolving back to the original key.

17)  The Way It Is – Bruce Hornsby

I can’t tell you how exciting this song was for a piano player in 1986.  In a decade awash with synth sounds, this was an honest-to-goodness piano track, and playable too!  The solo later in the song required more finesse, but even that was doable.  Bruce put piano back on the map.

18)  Locomotive Breath – Jethro Tull

This is another one I kinda sorta learned until recently, when YouTube came to the rescue.  Slowing things down at half-speed sure makes the faster runs a lot easier to dissect!  I just played this intro last month at a gig and had a lot of fun doing it.

19)   The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway – Genesis

This gets my vote for the best keyboard intro ever.  In typical Tony Banks fashion, the chord progression here is insanely odd – something I’d never come up with in a million years.  It’s also – like “Angry Young Man” – hard to play (for me, anyhow) without a grand piano, and even then I’ll still mess up the final run.  I learned this intro for a proposed Genesis tribute band that never came to fruition, but it was so much fun to learn.

20)   Year of the Cat – Al Stewart

There’s more to this intro than meets the eye, as after the initial memorably eight bars the piano delves into some interesting voicings that aren’t so easy to hear initially.  This intro captures the mood of the song perfectly.

So there you are – my Top 20 Keyboard Intros.  Oddly absent are any songs by Ben Folds, especially “Philosophy” and “Landed,” but only because I haven’t actually learned those songs.  Why?  I don’t know.  Ben Folds was a breath of fresh air when the debut album came out in 1995, as important to me in my late 20s and early 30s as Elton John was to me in my teens, but I still need to learn the tunes.

Some other honorable mentions:

1)     Sweet Dreams – The Eurythmics
2)     1000 Miles – Vanessa Carlton (it once again put piano back on the map in the 2000s.)
3)     Take on Me – Uh Huh
4)     Waiting for a Girl Like You – Foreigner (read about how Thomas Dolby came up with this intro – amazing!)
5)     Lady Madonna – The Beatles
6)     Don’t Do Me Like That – Tom Petty (the piano is sparse and simple, and the organ is perfect)
7)     Jump – Van Halen (of course)
8)     Atlantic – Keane (man, I love this eerie opening)
9)     The Great Gig in the Sky – Pink Floyd
10) Vienna - Billy Joel
11) Head over Heels - Tears for Fears

Lot of great stuff to choose from!  If you’ve got any others I should have mentioned, send them my way.