The British Steelies Society

I can tell when something's in tune(I think), and boy does my playing of the pedal steel test that ability to the limit.

I've only ever come across 1 person who possessed 'perfect pitch'. A young English girl called Coral, who was studying music in Glasgow. She could tell you any note she heard, quite unbelievable. As her friend was recording the initial lead vocal to a song, this girl scored out three part harmonies on the fly, never having heard the song before
I asked her to explain how she could differentiate and define notes and she said they appeared to her as different tones of grey, that she could recognise. Needless to say I was none the wiser. Let's hear it for Peterson tuners

Hope the gig went well.

Without hi-jacking John's thread completely, my own experience of perfect pitch (in someone else, BTW) was when I was at Teacher Training College in the 1970's. A music major colleague who had had a 'classical' violin education decided she wanted to get into something 'different'. I played her Commander Cody's 'Honeysuckle Honey' - she then played the fiddle intro straight off, after hearing it once - note perfect! When I asked her how she did it, she said she didn't know but it was like 'silent reading' - you don't need to 'hear' the words you read - you just 'hear' it in your head. She 'heard' it, and could play it!

When I put new strings on my 6-string guitar or steel I can usually tune them straight up to concert pitch. For me it's a matter of timbre. There's a certain "twang" I can hear, particularly from the A string, that tells me when it's at the correct pitch(220 Hz). I can also "listen in my head" to a song I know very well and then find those notes on my guitar. I don't think this is any special gift. I believe anyone with an interest in music can do this or develop it. It's not quite the perfect pitch as described above. However, it does bother me, to the point of physical pain, when I hear anything out of tune.

In any case relative pitch is a much more important faculty/skill to develop. Given a note, any note, can you hear the 3rd, 5th, etc. Can you tell if a chord is major, minor, dom7, diminished, half-diminished? Can you chart out a song with only pencil and paper? There's a much greater payback in developing these skills. You don't have to be at your instrument to be practicing. For instance when driving and listening to the radio it's good fun and a great exercise to mentally chart out the songs you hear.