Derek is streaming on RU-vid on the first Sunday of every month and taking live requests! Music is very much Derek's way of reaching other people and so it really means a lot for him to have this kind of interaction with his fans. He is having an absolute ton of fun taking your suggestions and trying new things.❤Here is the full video of Derek improvising on Peril in Pantomime after hearing it once - ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-6JPLbrEvO60.htmlsi=qkmC42qkZIbbDucG
This isn't just perfect pitch. This is the ability to hear music, remember music, and immediately play it back. That is the rarest of the rare gifts in music.
True, but it's not like he didn't spend thousands of hours practicing the piano. You can't utilize that talent without working to master the fundamentals
@@MakoBallistic why do you people hate religion so much? i dont understand. you feel a need to "attack" them or something. as a christian myself, we experience prosecution and mockery all the time. im tired of it. just stop. you arent doing any good. why dont you go bother actual cults? i genuinely dont understand. i wont push any belief on you, but disrespecting god is dangerous.
@@bentleyepic1731 That's right. There is an even more disturbing aspect of this whole attack on our faith and it is that the people who are making these attacks are the ones who claim there rights are being limited (e.g. by the ban on abortion). Personal freedom includes the freedom of faith.
@@octaviancatana2570 They are of course two different talents and this man seems to have both of them. As we see and read, he not only copies the music he hears, he adds new notes not found in the original, so he enriches the pieces he hears. That means he has the potential to create his own pieces.
in addition to the fact that there are parts of our brain that we have yet to tap into. They are not a different species they have the same brain just wired differently
About 20 years ago I was doing a degree piece on autistic savants. I had the huge pleasure of meeting Derek. I visited him at his house. He played piano for me, we went for a walk in the countryside around his house, then back home for more music. I got the feeling he would’ve happily played all day for me if had wanted him to. Watching and listening to him play was incredible. He was charming and lovely guy.
@@iAmDislikingEveryShort well if you want to pretend to be an idiot with facetious comments like "he's not playing by hAnDs? Whaaaat?!" then yes you should be prepared to be called out for the stupidity.
I watched a hour or so long documentary on him and it’s not just that he can quickly memorize and perfectly play anything he hears. It’s more that he makes the music his own, in hearing and memorizing it, when he plays he ads slight subtle variations that are intentional and are present in any of the greatest pianists of all time. They had multiple expert pianists in the documentary all praising him for his ability to include subtle improvisations into his pieces, even upon hearing a piece for the first time ever. He is a savant for sure, but more than just able to quickly learn or memorize, he is on another level not seen before.
Well perfect pitch when hearing multiple notes and being able to distinguish the individual notes is somewhat rare among people with perfect pitch aswell
@jwoz8517 I've seen the documentary he doesn't just lack social skills, he can't function without another human, as amazing and incredible as his gifts are Derek can't even feed himself.
Derek is one of the most chill, happy people I've ever met! I've never seen him angry or upset. He absolutely loves meeting new people and making music. He loves playing live for audiences the most (including his online audience, who we connect him with via requests and reading comments) and the more people who hear his playing the more excited he is. Sometimes when we film with him, we have to remind him that it's time for food as he will just keep playing for hours and hours asking for new suggestions.
My mom used to sit for a blind autistic girl that was around ten. She was non verbal but she would sit with her different instruments and here a tune on TV then immediately play it. It blew my mind.
Yes he did. He incorporated a bit of sustain pedal, which is more the style of the day, though his piano is tuned considerably better than a typical rag piano. I am sure he tunes it himself as people like him are able to do it better than even expert piano tuners.
@@marioqueseither the force used hitting the keys is different or it has more to do with the recording itself. Seems to have some clutter on top of the notes
@marioques rag is supposed to be wild like a drunken man slapping the keys, his version was much tighter and professional sounding and def not rag style
@@douggieharrison6913that's not what all rag is. Saying stuff like that is like saying all classical music is sad. Only honky tonks and Tin Pan Alley rags could maybe be described that way. Even then, that stuff was considered junk in its day and is a bad representation of the genre. The most famous rags, by Scott Joplin, Joseph Lamb, Bolcom etc, are serious pieces of classical music. If I remember right, the piece played here was composed by Tom Brier. Brier was more loose with ragtime than the prior, but still chose to write more serious music. This is still definitely ragtime.
This isn't exactly true. I have absolute pitch and I'm a violinist. It's much less manual than that for me. For instance, when I listen to a song, my brain doesn't focus on style, technique or tempo. For me the way I hear music, translates to numbers scrolling in the background. It is almost like singing karaoke, except the words are the numbers. Everything else is just feeling, almost like a heartbeat. I don't ever think about my bow strokes, but I get an uncomfortable feeling I'm my arm if my bow stroke is backwards from what it should be (the bow moving up on a specific note rather than down.) As much as it is astounding to be able to do this, it's also a curse. Every note that is wrong, I can hear. I can tell when an ambulance siren is old because the pitch of one of the tones is flat. I can't go to concerts because I can tell who is playing off (if it's amateur musicians).
@@ArchangelAdaine Uh? You may not be "thinking" technique but you are USING technique? Technique does not come from perfect pitch. It comes from thousands of hours of disciplined practice. But you know that already. Perfect pitch alone is not going to allow you to memorise a piece and position your hands correctly. Rhythm and fingering have nothing to do with perfect pitch. But you know that too. I can't understand how somebody who knows better than me (unless you're a troll) is arguing against something so basic (basic even for a bog-standard musician like myself).
i remember him from a special on tv, many many years ago, he's not only able to replay entire pieces right after hearing them, he'll even remember it years later, the man has 1000's of songs archived in his mind.
Yes. We never know what he may know or not know! Very often we will ask him if he knows something none of us have ever heard him play, and that he has probably not played in years if ever, and he'll play it perfectly. We almost never record more than single take for anything on the channel either. He never has to warm up - It's always right there at his fingertips.
@@memehierarchy6226 yeah i've seen him on there as well now you mention it, but the show i was thinking of is a Dutch talk show hosted by a man called "Ivo Niehe", who travels the globe in search of people with a story (more or less)
@@derekparavicini he is absolutely amazing, and that is putting it lightly i feel. I have mad respect for his abilities and his personality seems to be that of one of the most gentle people you'd ever meet. His love for music is almost jealous making.. almost ;)
I remember going to a music camp as a kid. At the time I thought I was hot shit. The kid I roomed with was like 1/500th of this guy. It was incredible, anything he heard he could play on the guitar instantly nearly flawlessly, could adjust to alternate tunings, knew whole books of scales etc. I looked him up years ago and discovered he worked at a bank which makes me wonder how insane you have to be as a player to be a studio musician.
Lol that kid totally could have done music or been a studio musician. Sounds like he gave up on his dreams. And yeah most studio musicians can't do that unless they happen to have abaolute pitch. Which is so unlikely. I happen to have it and I've only met 2 people in my life besides me with it. I can't imagine settling for working at a bank and having perfect pitch that's honestly kinda sad. That kid shoulda stuck with music.
It's not about skill, it's about having the confidence to actually go up and do it. How many times have you heard a song and been like "wow. That person was utter shit"? That's because they had the look, the confidence, and just enough skill that the company could turn that person into a star. That's why you see so many influencers that are way better than any commercial musician out there
I've been keeping up with this guy for about 19 years. His ear has gotten better that I thought any ear could get. He picks it up in like 3 seconds. He can literally map sound to frequencies (like people walking). Insane to think like that.
Not really insane. Just different reality than what we are used to. We can see, it has thousands of benefits, he can not, so he gets his unique spin on his reality. Things happening and movements and sounds are just that. No matter how, when, or where you place them. Is the guy extraordinary, or is he just different? It's more amazing in my mind to have a person not comprehend these things and get enthralled with a thing a human is doing vs the prior. God bless that man and his differences in the world. May he continue to fill minds with wonderment.
@@Nex41354you don't have to try to make it something deep lol. He's pretty amazing, in that its pretty amazing how his brain works. A human can learn relative, but not perfect. He's different in an amazing way. Don't take it away
If there's something cool you want to be able to do, I suggest you start practicing and repeating, obsessively. If you're willing to put in the time, you can tap that potential, too.
Perfect pitch isn't that rare. Having the memory to remember a whole song at once, is. If I say a whole poem to you, you'll understand my words, but can you then recite the poem back to me immediately?
@@robloxtop5009 He means hearing it once and remembering it in it's entirety. Like he said reciting a poem after a single reading would be equally impressive
Being blind, and autistic, and having perfect pitch and memory is such a crazy combo. There weren’t many possible outcomes for this guy and he completely excelled, hell yeah dude
@@matthewsteele2070 who knows, might've been a lot of them that did, but the diagnosis and knowledge of autism isn't around for long enough to really know that
Mozart could do this too. He went to a orchestral and choir recital at the Vatican where the sheet music had never been released. He went back to his hotel, wrote the whole thing down for all the instruments and vocals and sold it to an eager buyer.
It was a special mass actually that the Pope kept for himself and the mass in the Vatican. it wasn't allowed to be published so no one else could use it. Mozart attended that mass and the story is that he went away and wrote out the mass. Mozart certainly had perfect pitch
It's nice of you to say that and it's very true. Working with Derek just brightens all of our days, including his. Apart from his musical abilities, Derek is a wonderfully warm, kind and special person who really loves meeting and interacting with people. In fact music is really his way to reach other people.❤
Absolute pitch is different from perfect pitch. Absolute pitch is an even rarer gift. This is just insane. He can just hear anything and play it back note for note. That is absolutely remarkable. Derek is truly a special gem.
@Tombsar knowing the pitch of a tone without a reference point. That is absolute pitch. Perfect pitch, you would have to hear the note to name it. That is my understanding of the difference between them
@@josephlavecchia8069 I don't think they are. They are commonly referred to as the same, but there is a difference described in some articles. So I believe they are different. I could be wrong as I have neither perfect or absolute pitch. I don't even have relative pitch. I am just going but what I have read.
@@jambertin54”you would have to hear the note to name it” doesn’t really make sense. If there’s no pitch to be heard, there’s no pitch to be named. Perfect pitch is the more casual (or laymen’s) term for absolute pitch; they’re the same thing. The people who study this have two fancier terms for different varieties of it: latent absolute pitch memory, and overt absolute pitch memory.
No? Maybe I'm misunderstanding but, you definitely don't have "restraints" put in by your brain to keep you from doing that. You're utilising your brain exactly as it is, and so is he, but his brain is built different
I think what blows me away about this is the fact that not only he remembers exactly what pitches go where, but he has the technique to execute an efficient enough way to physically play what he heard without too much trouble. That's not an easy thing to consolidate in your head even if you're really talented. Especially for songs that require a high level of technical proficiency to play things like fast parallel 6ths or the back and forth left hand low octave to higher chord jumps.
I think what you said about his technique being efficient enough without trouble is interesting because it's like his brain also knows exactly what is possible and eliminates everything else. So essentially once the notes are heard and recorded it is cross compared to the physical and narrowed down to only one possible pattern and this is with 100% confidence
@@vanhalenps4 It’s not only ONE possible pattern. Pianists often use slightly different fingerings when they aren’t fixating on it. But within the range of possibilities, yeah. That in no way makes this less impressive by any means.
I get asked about this all the time when I'm playing with other musicians. The way this works is that when you hear music this way (both with relative and absolute pitch), you are mentally analyzing and practicing every single second you are listening to music, despite not having an instrument present. You're constantly visualizing how you would recreate it/arrange it (and I for one can't ever turn this off). Having also developed an efficient technique for playing in general allows you to then call it up and essentially play along in real time to any song in your head, or comfortably jam along to a totally new tune. It explains how I can retrieve untold thousands of tunes from memory and play an improvised version of them live in any key you'd like, despite never having "played" it before.
@@CourtWatchAu He's been confronted and tested, over and over and over by ranks of real experts, both in cognition _and_ professional musicians. He's doing it for real.
Maybe also a "hint" that we barely know what consciousness and brains ARE in the first place..... Not to get all "burning man" about it....but who knows man......we live in a Fog.....
That last piece was very advanced. I have the ability to hear roots, guitar tunings, keys, 5th, and 7ths. This guy is superhuman. He is beyond my comprehension
thank you so much, underrated comment right here. tried shazam like 30 times and it wouldn't give me a result. how did you find out? or were you simply just previously familiar with the song?
@@azup8235Tom Brier was very much like Derek until he had an mayor accident and bad health care and family care afterwards. So probably someone the algorithm brought here that has shown interest in these kinds of Savants.
He surely has struggles unknown to most, but he also highlights a part of the human condition that is so impressive and beautiful, a monument to what our minds are capable of. I hope he's happy.
Something similar has happened to me, and I gotta say, there's trade-offs that come with these types of gifts, but there's also coping mechanisms for those trade-offs and I feel so blessed now that I have a better hold on them 😊
He can't dress or wash himself properly, but he has such an incredible musical gift in part due to his lack of sight, but also a childhood brain injury. It's amazing how his brain has rewired itself to work like this. But also very sad as he needs constant care.
@@Dalton_w Why? Just because someone needs extra assistance with certain tasks doesn't mean it's something to be endlessly miserable to grieve over. I say that not only as another autistic person, but as a physically disabled person who is bedbound and requires 24-hour care, because I can't even sit upright without support, and even then, only for a minute or so at most. Despite that, I enjoy my life, I am happy (for the most part - but who is ever happy 100% of the time), and I have a rewarding, fulfilling life for the majority of the time. Sure, it's frustrating sometimes that there are things that I can't do, things that I struggle with, pain, anxiety, etc... but the absolute LAST thing that I want is for people to pity me, feel sorry for me, or like my life is somehow worth less and I am pretty sure that Derek wouldn't want that, either. Being disabled (for whatever reason) comes with huge challenges, absolutely... but it doesn't have to be the end of the world.
I'm about two months in to my efforts to improve my audio recognition of notes. lots of exercises.. lots of getting it wrong, but lots of excitement when I don't get it wrong. I was fed up of being unable to play piano without sheet music, so I found a new teacher who's showing me how to play by ear, without music, and not the classical I've played since the start. I know I won't ever do what Derek does, but I'm making progress and it's great fun.
Good for you I would impart that a practice regimen is so important, I unfortunately have developed a burnout condition that has no known cure. Be careful.
@@barneyboyle6933One of them is called “Mind Field: Divergent Minds” by the channel Vsauce. It’s not entirely about him but it includes decent segments.
He knows many styles and i'm sure hes played something close to that many times. Not negating his abilities at all just from my musical experience i can understand how he does the rythm so quickly. Some things he's never played may be more of a challenge but i'm sure he could still get it since he's so advanced at it. The more you play the better your ears get at picking up music, but with him he has an emmense leg up being blind, all he has to work with all days is his ears and touch. I hope this helps.
@@jflamen txt can seem that way, but no i love this guys playing, just saying what he d9es, i can partially do but not to that degree. Sorry if it seems that way.
@@dextersbeard3472 Except it's not 1 in 10,000. At LEAST 4% of music students have perfect aka absolute pitch and it's also not binary - it's not something you either have or you don't. It's something you can train and improve at. It's also far more common among autistic people, those with certain forms of blindness/visual impairment, as well as those from East Asia (possibly related to tonal languages) and around 20% of those with absolute pitch also have synaesthesia. It's ALSO worth pointing out that perfect/absolute pitch isn't the ability to just name a note they hear, but the ability to produce that same note without hearing a reference first. So, assuming that the person can actually sing, then you ask them to sing a note, and they correctly do so. Being able to hear a note and figure out what it is, that's actually easier to do (especially after the first note, at which point it becomes relative pitch). And even IF the 1 in 10,000 (0.01%) figure was accurate (which is absolutely isn't), do you know how many people there are in the world? That makes around 800,000 people with perfect pitch. Also, human beings make up around 0.01% of life on earth. Don't get me wrong. The ability to hear a piece of music once, repeat it and then still remember it years later is impressive. But it's not as insanely rare as people are making out. But it's just not as impressive when the person doing it is a professional (or even amateur/hobbyist) abled and/or neurotypical musician instead of an autistic guy who needs profound support day-to-day because you know... it seems like abled people have gotta have their daily dose of inspiration porn. And as an autistic person who is also dependent on 24-hour support and care, it's weird to me that the only time disabled people aren't seen as a burden to society is when they're "gifted" in some way.
He hears the musical language as words being played while we just hear the combined sounds of the musical notes. What's really wild is the amount of actual memory he has to have to be able to play back the whole riff or song by just listening to it once.... But then again.... He's hearing a language being (spoken musically) and can spell the musical words he hears as individual notes just as we can spell words we hear. He then can play it back like we can recite sentences and passages we listen to in the languages we understand and can spell those words. Just incredible to wrap your mind around that one... Indeed... Such a gift!..
I think this is actually something normal people can pick up on and do. You've got it dead right that he is interpreting it like a language and words that he hears, and it probably is the same for him as if I were played a line of audio dialogue in a film and asked to repeat it in the same tone.
@@highviewbarbellRight on. Love your example of repeating a line in a certain tone. John Wayne comes to mind, when as kids we used to try to say his famous lines with his tone. And believe it or not, my mind just blanked on his most famous movie lines. Lol. Looks like I'm not playing the piano any time soon! Take care! J Pol.
Perfect pitch is just being able to correctly identify notes to their names and positions relative to each other. The only reason its all that rare is that the majority of people simply don't know the names of notes. Most people are perfectly capable of distinguishing notes from each other, even if they don't know their names. Its why we can reproduce any music at all. You do it when you hum a song in your head, and likely with fairly good accuracy. Honestly, perfect pitch is one of those things that is used to hype up artists because it sounds like it has some mystique. Its not enough that this guy is incredibly talented, has an incredible memory (of which perfect pitch is a simple function), or has overcome adversity; he also has this cool mystical superpower I have to explain so that audience *knows* they should be impressed.
@@CheezMonsterCrazyyou’re thinking of relative pitch. perfect pitch means you can hear a single pitch and instantly know the exact frequency of it. people with perfect pitch don’t even need to think about it it’s like how if you look at a banana you don’t have to compare it to something that you know is yellow to figure out that the banana is yellow, you just know.
The reason I find autism amazing is because it feels like proof of how powerful the human brain is. We aren’t impressed by what neurotypical brains are able to do (despite how incredible they are) because we’re so used to it, but autism remaps the brain in a sense to favour alternate focuses, such as this where one has impeccable sound recognition and rhythm.
Oh it’s the “I can play that Derrick, yeah!” guy! I remember seeing a piece on him on… maybe 60 minutes? Probably a decade or two ago. Fantastic to see he’s still doing well and of course still has his remarkable gift!
Saw that same 60 minutes! I was only a kid at the time but it has stuck with me ever since. At one point I believe they asked him to play Fur Elise in the style as if it had been composed by Mozart and he did it without hesitation. It was insane
he is autistic and i am too but somehow im not as talented as he is so it make me a retard therefore i am an autistic retard (my iq test results was 60 not a joke)
I think the colour analogy is really helpful here. Like how most people can instantly identify if something is blue, he can instantly identify a G, or any other note. Simple for him, and others with perfect pitch. The really impressive part is that it’s like looking at a painting and remembering every single colour and where it was used and painting it again yourself.
@@michman2you only think you can whistle the first note, you can only remember and sense the differences between the notes, not the notes themselves. You would not be able to tell if you are in the right key or not.
@@LiamOBrien-ph8uj So true. I think we should discuss, debate, deliberate, and then consider taking a vote in which we decide if being greatly offended is the proper way to proceed. I'm leaning towards being greatly offended. It's very popular right now.
My autistic uncle was like this. It was a miraculous gift. He once accompanied a song I had been rehearsing for a vocal course in college having only heard it once “15 years ago”. I would put money on it being 15 years and not 14 or 16. I miss him. He is making music with the angels.
We agree completely, two legends! Derek is a master of playing by ear and Tom Brier is a master of sightreading. Two complementary talents! A lot of people actually asked us to play Derek some of Tom's music.
@@derekparavicini Yes!! Another Tom Brier crossover would be fantastic!! We all would love to see Derek play his own version of Tom's Redneck Rag, one of his signatures "barn-burner" pieces 😁
please give this man the platform to amaze the world with his abilities, make him shine over what most people would call „impediments“ and prove that he is so much more! lots of love you derek and all the best!
