Apps

If you're walking around with a smartphone, or have an app simulator on your computer, such as BlueStacks, there are many apps that are useful for ear training and for checking your AP and relative pitch progress. Below I will list a few that I have found recently and what they do - all of the ones I list are free:

Pitch Perfect:   this is basically a virtual pitch pipe that lets you check notes against what you are hearing on the radio for example (or what you have in your head), or really any sound that you hear where you want to check the note, and it also has a 'notes' section where you can play a wide chromatic range of notes, and it gives you the Hz numbers. It also has a 'key signatures' page if you forget how to notate which is pretty nice.

Absolute Pitch for Piano: This is a challenging app that will test both your perfect pitch and relative pitch, because it plays a series of notes, ranging in difficulty. You don't need perfect pitch to play the game, because if you get the series of notes wrong, it will play it again, and then you can use your relative pitch. There is a 'guitar' version as well, called Absolute Pitch for Guitar.

Perfect Pitch Practice: This one plays individual notes and has you choose what they are, grading you out of 10 notes. You can choose from different note ranges, but if you're really testing yourself, just do the last level because it  tests you on a full range of notes. In practice, this is testing both AP and relative pitch but it is a good and simple app.

Perfect Chord for Piano: I was looking for an app that would test chord hearing for AP, and this guy made it. You can choose a range of difficulty, and again this will test both AP and relative pitch pretty well. You will have to recognize 7th chords and all their inversions, which is a good test. There is also a version for guitar, Perfect Chord for Guitar. In that one it shows a virtual guitar neck and you choose which notes were played in the chord. Some of the chords aren't physically playable in that position (if you were to try it on the guitar), but of course it still works to test you on the notes. It's also good for testing your relative pitch hearing of inversions.

Anyway I hope you are able to try some of these out - I wish I had discovered them earlier! I would certainly still encourage Burge style meditation listening techniques at least every few days, but I think these apps are a really good supplement to test your AP progress and improve your relative pitch as well. Overall, I think they will help accelerate your ear training progress. There are also a number of paid apps that are available, but I haven't tested them so I can't speak to their quality. Of course you probably want to keep things as musical as possible, so learning songs and solos by ear is great for your ear and musicality. Programs like Transcribe are really nice for that as you can slow things down/loop them, etc. and it also lets you slow down video which is cool.

Process / Why continue for so long? (continued)

Process / why continue for so long?

1st video demo

Do you need to train every day?

I have said earlier that I wanted to start training multiple times a day, in line with the notion that the more you practice something, the better you get. I changed my approach again a little while ago and have reduced the amount of time I am putting into the perfect pitch training. At this point, I am training 15-20 minutes one day, then usually having two days without training, then another day of 15-20. I am finding that this is enough to keep my ear at the level it is - actually enough to keep improving it. Part of my reason for changing the routine is simply because I want to spend more time improving other areas of my playing such as jazz improvisation, comping, etc.  Also, at some point, I'd like to get better with relative pitch.
I think that it is good to work on perfect pitch training every day for a while, but at some point switching to every other day could be just as beneficial. After doing it for a really long time (in my case, over 10 years), I think every few days is sufficient.

Developing perfect pitch: Art or Scientific Method?

Burge says various times in his course that developing absolute pitch is an art, and I never understood that until very recently. He says it's "not some recipe" where you add some of this ingredient, and then that one, etc. On the other hand, he does say that it should be approached from different angles, as I see it because sometimes it seems like you have to sort of trick your ear into developing further. That's probably where the art comes in. I had trouble with this because I tend to approach things systematically, like I'm sure many people do, and according to Burge this is really not the mentality to have. I think one way to step away from the systematic approach is to not be overly rigid in the training regimen - that is, do the training when it feels right - night, morning, whatever - and take breaks when it feels right to take a day or so off. With any art though, it would seem to me that in order to really improve, one would have to spend more than a half an hour a day - so I think I will try to put in a few training sessions daily from now on - unless I really feel like I should take a day off. I would say to start out as Burge says, doing just a bit each day (20 minutes or so), but as you get fairly far along in your training, step it up as you feel you need to. And take a day off when you feel like you need to. I guess it really should be approached like an art rather than a science...

As an update on my progress, the pitch colors are becoming clearer, and I've noticed that I'm just listening to the pitches themselves in my training, for the most part. That is, not hearing them as relating to some other tone. Burge calls the latter experience "absolute relative pitch". Absolute relative pitch is when you can hear a pitch and know what it is, even if you've heard no other pitches that day, but for some reason you hear it as relating to some other pitch. For example whenever I heard a C# (I usually think of it as Db), I heard it as a major third above A. This is something that probably everyone who does this training will experience at some point. It is a good sign, and actually you can use it to start learning pitches better. For example, I was having a lot of trouble with Eb, so I tried to associate it as being a major third up from B (although then I guess it would be considered D#). I heard F# as a major third above D, etc. This will happen when you know certain tones better than others. I am at the point where this is fading and I'm just listening to the notes themselves more. Not something you can force, absolute relative pitch will simply fade into absolute pitch on its own.

Reading Music

I've tended to avoid this throughout the course of my guitar playing, but I've always wanted to spend more time with it. As I've recently been giving reading music another go, I've realized that it reinforces any AP training I've done that day. Consider that it is just that much more time spent being aware of exactly which notes you are playing (at least if you read at a slow pace like myself - I'm sure people who read very quickly don't really even stop to think about exactly which note they are playing). I also have a suspicion that this was part of the reason Burge was able to develop AP so fast back in his high school days. Pianists in general seem to be more inclined towards reading than guitar players, and again I'm realizing that this is an advantage regarding AP training.