Hey guys, a little backround first,

 I been playing guitar for bout 20 years, no bands or anything, just bedroom noodling..

Now my problem is, i wasn't born with perfect pitch, or even near perfect pitch... hell i would reallly like some mediocre pitch.. I have friends that can hear stuff a couple of times and figure it out in a matter of minutes, i have to learn from tabs....

I can hear the differences from a c to a d, but i couldn't name which is which...

And i have been stuck in pentatonic mode FOREVER..

Basically, what i am wondering is have any of you ever been through it? is there a way to break the ruts? or to learn notes by ear better? I love my guitars like my children, don't think i could ever stop messin around:)

P.S. i tried the perfect pitch course, and the guys voice that narrates it puts me to sleep, like literaly, 3 minutes and im snoozin... weird eh?

I wanna play just like him when i grow up...

Brian, would you know the name of the software by chance? and does it work with mp3 or cd's?

I wanna play just like him when i grow up...

For years I used CoolEdit 2000; I believe this got bought by Adobe and is now sold under a different name. You could also try Audacity, which is free. I used it to produce the podcast, it was pretty slick. The software works with any sound file. Basically you rip songs from the CD as a .wav or .mp3 files. Then you can slow them down and loop over the parts you are having trouble with.

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I'm going to second Audacity.

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IronMaiden
Take singing lessons. It will help your guitar playing.
Aslo play with other people, a bass player or other guitarist and a drummer. Playing in a band situation forces you to get good real quick. And it also makes writing songs 100x's easier. Most songs sound like doo-doo by themselves, but in a band even the lamest riff can shine.

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I agree with getting in a band type situation if possible. I like you, have been a bedroom star for 20 some odd years, But for a brief time, I was in a garage band.....no gigs, just met on weekends at a friends garage and wailed til the wee morning hours. You can learn alot by osmosis in a band and Iron is correct, the stupidest lick you can think of really comes to life with some good backup.

2012-2013: FILTHY POLAROIDS

I spent about twenty years being a solo performer in the acoustic fingerpick world of Blues and some Celtic. Yeah you can play originals, but there isn't much call for it. People want to hear a 20 second intro about why Charlie Patton was important before you play one of his songs. They don't want to hear some white boy who wrote a song about how the "meter maid be keepin' me down" "every time street cleanin' day rolls aroun'"

The funny thing is when I decided I wanted to get back into electric and specifically get into the whole instro thing, the biggest deficiency was playing with others, especially where rythm was concerned. I used to intentionally speed up or slow down sections of songs for dramatic affect. Somewhere around year 12 I stopped tapping my foot!

The solution for me was recording. It did a number of things:

First, it makes you be rock steady rythm wise, otherwise it makes it really hard to add tracks later.

Second my techinical abilities improved immediately and are increasing at a faster pace than they ever have before. I think when you play covers you instinctively grab ones you CAN play, or are just out of your skill range. At least a third of the music that I write I CANNOT PLAY! At least not immediately when I write it. The ability to record forces me to push to get it perfect, even just once, on tape. And once you've done that all of a sudden the door is opened to TONS of other material that was inaccessible before. Some times I do have to compromise and "dumb it down" to be able to record it, but even then I know I'll revisit it do it justice down the road.

Lastly as Danny said writing and recording my own stuff has really brought home just how "predictable" alot of what we listen to is. In trying not to unintentionally rip off something, you have to stretch and try to really be critical about the originality of what you write, and in doing that you come up with something and say, "Oh shit, that's house of the rising sun played fast!" or "Mississippi Queen tremolo picked!" and I started to see chord patterns much more clearly than before. An example is I had never played Perfidia before. I was just noodling and decided to play it, and without thinking got all the chord changes right the first time through. I was even in a different key. Is Perfidia a bone simple progression? Yes. Was I still thrilled that without even once thinking "Okay what comes next" I just played it? HELL YES!!!

I'd always read that Jimmy Page and Townshend said that if they hadn't had some of the first tape recorders to hit britain, they wouldn't have been who they are. I'm not Page or Trousers, but I get what they meant now.