There are some who believe that perfect pitch training is not worthwhile because they think a person cannot learn the skill, that you must be born with it. However, most people, including musical scholars, agree that it is possible to attain perfect pitch as an adult. The real issue of doubt is whether a person can deliberately attain the ability and, if so, how?

There are a few quite common methods used to learn the ability. To begin with, almost all perfect pitch training methods begin with the message, 'be positive'. It is true that if you keep a positive outlook, you stand a chance of learning. However, if you are excessively skeptical, your pessimism will dominate. Assuming you believe it to be possible to begin with, you can take steps towards learning perfect pitch and the improvement in your ear will encourage you and re-enforce your belief. This is because the skill comes gradually. It is best to stay positive, but that doesn't mean students should fall for any new-age rhetoric, such as, if you simply believe in something enough and imagine yourself doing it, you will achieve it.

The first stage in learning perfect pitch is learning to identify differences between the sounds of different notes, other than their fundamental pitch. Some methods will call these the "pitch colors" or "note timbres". Much of the training available will fail to really explain these timbres, which can lead to some frustration. For example, you might be instructed to close your eyes and play a 'C' on your instrument. Listen to the 'C' very intently and think about how it makes you feel or try to associate a particular image with that sound so that you can make a link in your brain to remember the note. An extremely vague guideline like this is common. It will only be of use to you to do this if you happen to start hearing the real quality of the note, which does distinguish it. You are more likely to just start daydreaming about any random thing.

Another common technique is to try to remember the sound of notes by association with melodies starting with the note. In the context of a melody, it is thought, the particular note can take on more meaning and can become endowed with a quality to remember it by. You can make an attempt to learn the notes with this method. However, the method is not really absolute. If you are trying to remember melodies in their correct key so as to remember note pitches, are you really learning perfect pitch?

It would be better to learn how to listen to harmonics (also known as overtones). We all tend to listen to the fundamental frequency of a particular note. We don't tend to tune in to the many multiples of the fundamental frequency. The timbre of a tonal sound comes from the harmonic levels. It is most likely that the perfect pitch "colors" are related to the way we perceive these harmonics differently for each note. Developing the acuity of your ear to hear the harmonic range of a note is the way forward for perfect pitch training.