Recognizing Pitch

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Any tips or techniques for recognizing the absolute pitch of guitar notes? I’ve gotten fairly good at recognizing intervals but i’m not able to match notes from say justin’s ear training app to my fretboard other than painful pluck and try. That usually gets me the right note but i can’t even be sure i’m in the right octave.

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That’s a very interesting question Bill and I look foward to the replies the more experts among us will give, as I’m not myself able to help you with this; I also struggle to identify the right octave, unless I’m in the context of a song…I made it up for myself that I have no great/professional ear skills and I’m humbly human, as such I need a context and a meaning too.

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I should caveat what I’m about to say with the fact that I can’t do this - I haven’t tried as I don’t feel the need

…however…

One strategy I know works for at least some people is having a song they know really well and knowing the melody starts on a particular note. For example perhaps you are a major ABBA fan and know that the song Waterloo starts ‘My My’ - both As.
If you can sing the song in your head (in the right key …this is why you need to know the song really well) then you can get the pitch A.

BTW - matching shouldn’t be that painful a process if you know your intervals very well. Hit a note on the guitar and then sing the note you want to find. With practice you should be able to recognise the interval between them and make an educated guess at your target note pretty quickly - even if you are out by a semitone or two you should be able to quickly home in on the note you want.

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They say that very few people have Perfect Pitch - The ability to hear a single note and instantly know what it is. It’s also something that can’t really be learned.

Relative Pitch is the ability to hear two notes and know what the interval between them is. Relative Pitch can definitely be learned but it takes time. It’s also far more useful in music than Perfect Pitch.
You would be better off focusing on intervals than trying to develop Perfect Pitch.