[SwellJoe]

So, has it helped you "tune" your ear? i.e., are you able to correct your pitch without the tool now that you've spent time practicing with it? I've often wondered about that. I learned guitar at such a young age, that I don't have a good recollection of the process of learning to have a reasonably good ear, or if it was something I already had and had to just learn to listen to.

As an adult, I've often gone years without seriously practicing music, and yet the basic ability to hear notes and tune instruments remains strong, no matter what. The ability to name notes and recognize chords on demand (so-called "relative pitch") does require me to refresh my memory with practice whenever I take a long break from music, but recognizing when things are sharp or flat, and by how much, seems to be permanent and require no practice no matter how long it's been. So, I theorize (and have read about science on the subject) that there may be a variety of parts of the mind that handle these subjects. But, I don't recall reading if they're all in-born skills or are acquired. Perfect pitch may be teachable to the very young...but not adults, so maybe my tuning ability simply developed and "stuck" because I was young. I dunno.

[robhack]

Hard to say, I feel it helped a little, as in, when I'm playing with my teacher (without MeloCraft), I more often get the feeling « oh, that doesn't quite sound right, I should move my fingers a little bit ». But that's N=1 and I didn't do any meaningful before/after tests.

That said, even if the tool doesn't help for the musical earing directly, it can still help to correct the position of your fingers, and that's very important for muscle memory. So instead of training for hours on the wrong finger position because I don't have a musical ear, I can correct myself and properly train my muscle memory correctly.

Well, you're very lucky to have a relative pitch, I think you can still train for it as an adult, but it may require more time and still might not be possible for everyone. Don't take my word for it thought, I don't recall any solid research on the subject.

[SwellJoe]

Relative pitch is definitely learnable as an adult. So-called perfect pitch is the ability that has been thought to be something you're born with, or not, but more recent research indicates that kids can have it "turned on", or at least, kids can develop relative pitch that is good enough to be indistinguishable from perfect pitch, for all intents and purposes (the listener just has to refresh their pitch memory with a reference pitch now and then...maybe once a day).