How to Sing Harmony for Deeper Music

Melodies can be very catchy, but harmonies can be very beautiful. A melody is a simple series of notes you can sing. When you sing harmony, you combine your melodic notes with different melodic notes from another to create a rich pitch blend. If you're skilled, when you sing harmony you will create music with much deeper meanings, in addition to the meanings found in the lyrics. Of course, if you don't know how to sing harmony, attempting to do so can create something that sounds more like noise than musical beauty.

Learn the Scales

Typically harmony is done with a main melody while one or more others sing either different melodies or a set of notes centered around the main melody. To understand harmony, you need to have an understanding of scales. In the simplest terms, a scale is a given set of eight successive notes in an octave. As you probably know, notes are notated with the letters A through G.

The major scale runs in note intervals of 1-1-1/2-1-1-1-1/2. The minor scale runs in note intervals of 1-1/2-1-1-1/2-1-1. Harmonies are most often done using major scales.

Practicing Harmony with Another

Having a musical keyboard around while learning to sing harmony can be indispensable. You can find your note and begin your part, while the other person finds his starting note. If you have experience on piano or guitar, you're probably familiar with chords. The concept is basically the same for singing harmony.

In some cases you may need to work on just your own melody for a while before you try harmony. Many people struggle to sing at the same time as someone else, while singing different notes than the other person. So knowing your own part really well is very helpful when you are learning how to sing harmony. You will run across people who have a lot of experience playing instruments. For them harmony may be second nature to the point where they can harmonize with any melody they hear without reading any music. For most of the rest of us, it takes some practice learning the parts for each song.

The good news is that the more practice you get as you're learning how to sing harmony, the better you'll get at sensing how to harmonize with others. Unlike singing melodies, harmony is actually easier to sing with piano or orchestral accompaniment, as much of your part may be duplicated by an instrument. So you can learn how to sing harmony by playing around with your musical keyboard, trying to sing above, on, or below the note you play, forming a nice harmony.

This is why many online singing courses have instrumental or vocal accompaniment files that can be played while you learn how to sing harmony. You can learn to sing in harmony much more quickly with these files at your disposal.

Learning How to Sing Harmony Isn't a Mysterious Process

No doubt, most of your favorite musical groups use harmony for vocals, instrumentals, or both. Melodic music may be catchy, but it has little depth to it, and thus your mental and emotional responses to it are also limited. Harmony is an important part of our music culture in the West. This may be why we take it for granted. It is also why so many musicians perform harmony effortlessly. This is the type of music they've been practicing most of their lives. If you take time to learn how to sing harmony, you'll not just gain further appreciation of its depth, but a greater sense of the meaning in music as multiple pitches combine into a beautiful array of wavelengths.