General Music Chat

Vocal harmonys, I like a 5th, dont we all like 5ths!, and octaves personally, either a higher octave or in some cases a lower octave.

My band weve never actually practiced harmonys, but after playing so long together we just seem to fall in place, Ive played with other groups here and there and its not as easy for some reason.

Sometimes at gigs our singer will just say can you take the hi line on this one, my throat is hurting, or he may say do the lower line.

I think it makes it interesting.

On guitar I love a 5th octave up, in fact I have that preset in my whammy pedal. Occasionally I will do one octave up. For crazy sound effects with my delay unit I will do two octaves up, great for stuff like RATMs Killing In The Name. I think it was mentioned that you can easily overdo these effects, I try to use them sparingly. I recently sat in with a group and the guitarist had a great rig but he kept his flanger on constantly, just kind of sounded lame to me, and thin, I like a thick guitar tone. I even discussed it with him, but it was what he liked, I said man you should record a show and see what Im talking about, it just washes your guitar out in my mind, but to each his own.

Many truths and wisdom....

Harmony, not just in vocals but in every instrumentation you have ever listened to, are a double bladed knife.

They can be cool because they raise immediate listening interest, but they can also tire the average listener's ear quickly.

The next time anyone wants to listen to some of the great classical operas or symphonies, listen to how carefully extended use of harmony was avoided.

Now here is a great secret, UNISON can have as much impact as harmony if there is enough difference in every voice. It can have impact with out the tension that heavy harmony makes you hear. Why? It goes back to a general rule about resolution, you know the one that let's "BLUES" players resolve by any 1/2 step. (jazz and actually all music)
If you picked apart some of the harmonies you love you would be amazed at how many musical rules,,,, mmmmhhh,,, trying to clear my voice, are broken.

Thinking of UNISON like you mentioned, I could picture the Blue Angels flight show, where five jets fly in a formation all at the same speed, in the same direction (Same melody), and then how they gracefully peel off into separate directions, all the same speed (launching harmonies) . BTW did you know that the wing Commander for such a squadron actually "sings' out the commands over the radio? The purpose has to do with scripting the commands, for sake of precision, there cannot be an instruction that gets confused for some other instruction. So a melodic command helps the squad members to identify where and what in the script they are engaged with.