I've been practicing my relative to a level where I'm real comfortable with it and I can do like a 2nd harmony voice straight off my head when somebody sings a melody I know. I think it's a really cool valuable skill and I would like to explore it more and get into some more advanced changing stuff.
The thing I did was to sing some of my own simple melodies and then multitrack a backing voice. At first I needed to get some notes from my guitar, but eventually I could do basic fifth and third harmonies by heart.
So what are your experiences with doing backup harmonies? Do you work from relative pitch or do you think of a note to hit in the chord. Maybe you stay on one note and maybe you jump around in the scale doing a countermelody. Tell me about it!
Behold! The great northern viking's pinnacle of evolution! Behold my wavy blonde locks, my icy blue eyes and my muscular physique! Behold my.. screw this, I'm going to McDonald's.
Hey Illicit,
Usually, if I'm trying to do a particular harmony, I'll go through it on the guitar first, and learn the harmony line as though it were a melody line, and then practice that on its own. Once I get that down, I'll start trying to sing it over the original line. I used to try and do it by listening for the harmony between the two lines, but I found that my ear wasn't quite up to scratch :cry: so now I do it this way, and I find that it helps my ear training too :D
btw, if you're looking for some good songs to sing for harmony practice, try listening to some of The Eagles stuff or the Red Hot Chili Peppers :)
Cheers
Use the Big Muff, Luke
I starte with doing Alice In Chains songs like "Down In A Hole" (the unplugged one, of course, much clearer harmony) or "Them Bones", which is really simple and I can recommend it to anyone who wants to try it out.
Behold! The great northern viking's pinnacle of evolution! Behold my wavy blonde locks, my icy blue eyes and my muscular physique! Behold my.. screw this, I'm going to McDonald's.
I've done the harmony vocals briefly when i was jamming with a friend of mine. We were doing the red hot chili peppers' Road trippin', which is kind of hard to do, but the tab-book i had displayed the vocal line so that made it easier. The first thing I did was figure out what line was the melody and which was the harmony (had to do in some points), and then i took Elgalad's approach of using my guitar to figure out the pitches and singing them seperately.
I find singing along while playing guitar to be fun, but I'm not sure I could ever be a lead singer (I'm not that confident yet and I don't think I have a good voice in terms of tone or anything like that).
I think maybe i'll try and figure out the harmony vocals to those Alice in chains songs, i have noticed that they have awesome harmonies in most of their songs.
Steve-0
