Q: i remember watching a late night show video where a guest was being interviewed and at some point they quoted a song i think and started singing it in whatever key, and after a few seconds the band joined them in that very key. how does this happen, is there like a player with absolute pitch making some sort of gesture to the rest of the band or does each one start playing very silently until they find the key (i don't remember if there were any wrong notes at the beginning)
A: even if you don't have absolute pitch, you can get away with it. all you have to do is flick a note, and you'll immediately know what key everything is in. the other players may also do the same, and/or if the keyboard player finds the key they can tell the other players. if all the players know the song, then that's great. if they don't, they can fake it using intuition and try to guess where it's going to go, and/or make ambiguous decisions until they get it. also what is quite common, if the keyboardist knows the song better than the others, they might say numbers or give number symbols with one hand. you may never believe this, but i think all the skills necessary to do this are actually skills that are not particularly common among people with true absolute pitch. absolute pitch may help you find 1 note if you're in handcuffs, but in terms of finding the chords and the rest of the song, it comes down to musicianship/music, which is quite unrelated to absolute pitch