How do you create a harmony line?
Simplest way: sing or play a specific interal aove each of the original notes of themelody.
Most common type of parallel harmony is played a third above the original notes while staying within the existing key.
–this means the notes you play will be either a minor 3rd or a major 3rd above the original notes.
Tip: to train your ears to hear natural harmony lines, the best approach is simply to listen to — and sing along with — songs that employh close 2-part vocal harmonies. Early Beatles tunes and Simon and Garfunkel…. good.
Why play a 3rd above the melody and not a 4th or a 5th or a 6th or a 2nd or 7th?
There’s nothing stoppign you from harmonizing on these other intervals but the 3rd-based harmony tends to present fewer problems than using other intervals. The reasons are:
1. close harmony tends to have a more plasing sound than harmony notes spaced farther apart. You don’t want to play a harmony line a 2nd above the melody as that is too close, creating a dissonant sound. The 3rd is the ideal close harmony interval.
2. you want the main notes in your harmony line to fallwithin the underlying chords.
Chords are composed of 3 notes stacked a 3rd above each other: R, 3, 5
When you play or sing a harmony part a 3rd above a given melody note, chances are that note will be one of these 3 chord notes. Another interval could fall within the chord but the 3rd is more likely to. For that matte,r playing a 3rd below the melody line is also likely to fall within the chord struture, and is also acceptable harmony.
3. the next most likely interval to fall within the chord structure is the 5th. Problem with playing 5th-based harmony is that it is reather primitive sounding. Traditional music tells us to avoid parallel 5ths whenever possible. While this is often ignored in popular music, it’s still not the ideal interval to maintain for a 2-part harmonyh.
4. otherintervals — 6th, 7th, 9th and so on — tend to fall outside the basic 3-note chod, more ofthen than not, and create extended chrods with more complex harmonic strucures. That doesn’t make this type of harmony wrong, ust more musically sophisticated. It’s also harder to hear and for vodalists to sing.
For all these reasons, it’s best to start playing harmony using 3rds and explore more complex intervals only as you become more exp in the art.