I agree, and I don't think I said a good ear was the "bottom line" to being a good musician. If I did I messed up but what I meant to say was the better your ear the farther you can go in music. The better you understand (sound) what you want to play the easier it is to play. Thinking up a sound and knowing it is a G before you touch the guitar is already a mile ahead of most. Now when it comes to improvising, relative pitch plays a bigger part. You can find out what note (chord) is in the rhythm just by looking at the rhythm guitarist or if you have written music in front of you. You can easily find a good scale to put over that chord, and relative pitch tells you what each note will do harmonically to a note. Every musician has relative pitch, it just depends on what level you are on. Everyone can tell the difference better playing a M3 over a chord and playing a P5. Knowing that beforehand is the key. And yeah I've met people with perfect pitch who couldn't improvise cause all they could tell me was the name of a note when I played it. They weren’t all that good with improvising because they didn’t have good relative pitch. Music moves in relations of one note to the next, so this is the tool we use to improvise. Although having perfect pitch with multiply that skill, but you wouldn't need it to be a successful musician. And I agree having a creative personality is the bottom line to being a musician but then again I haven't meet a musician that isn't creative in some way. That's what being a musician is all about, creating. *not talking about the 15 yr old who just wants to imitate a pop star, guys like you and me.