What it means to have Absolute Pitch

a healthy respect for the challenges of playing on a transposing instrument.

So I was originally going to answer this in the comments but this is really a huge topic worth its own post. It's always been a bit weird what people think should be difficult vs. what actually is difficult.

See, playing a transposing instrument isn't supposed to be a challenge. In fact, I'm sure the whole reason transposing instruments exist was to make it easier, and for folks who only have relative pitch sense, which is most of the population, I'm pretty sure that's the case.

That is, you see a C on the page, C has a particular fingering ('O'/open, if we're talking about a typical valved brass instrument) and you're done. You blow, and you'll know whether you have the right note if it's the correct interval away from whatever pitch you're using as a reference, whether it's a previous note that you played, or that somebody else played, or there's this huge chain of inference leading back to the start of the session when whoever it was blew on the pitch pipe. If, say, your reference happens to be denoted as B in your part, and you're now being called upon to play a C, then you need to be up a half step, and you'll be able to hear that. And that's really all you need.

The question of what the actual concert pitch might be is quite irrelevant. That you might be playing on a B♭ trumpet so that a denoted C comes out as a (concert) B♭, or a D trumpet where the same written note comes out as a (concert) D, or that the person who's playing your reference tone thinks of it as some note that's completely different from what you're thinking it is, you don't have to care.

This way the individual instrumentalists just get to focus on playing the notes that are on the page in front of them. Making sure that the corresponding sounds will match up with what everybody else is doing is the composer's problem, not yours.

Now, I'm sure that, for the conductor, this is a huge fucking mess, but dealing with that is part of why they get paid the big bucks (hahahaha).

At this point, I'll just note the weirdness of having to reverse-engineer how relative-pitch-only people think of things. Which is the best I can do because I have no personal experience of this.

I can only tell you how it works for me. I can't even be sure how much my experience generalizes to how other absolute pitch people experience things, because this only shows up in 1 out of 30,000 people on average, and I still have yet to encounter anyone else who has it.

(except possibly for my son Philip, who I have reason to believe has it, or, rather, there are certain things that he's done that would otherwise be very difficult to explain if he didn't have it, but because he's autistic and thus doesn't have the language to talk about it, I'll probably never know for sure).

But first we need to straighten out some misconceptions:

What is Absolute Pitch?

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