July 10, 2010
My Blog by Kuba Suttles
www.bowtownmusic.com
Harmony
While I am waiting for the cable guy to show up, I thought I would write some thoughts about harmony. I know, you're thinking, no, don't do it, you don't need cable! You're right. I already watch too much TV. But it was a deal I couldn't refuse!
Anyway, about harmony... I have several vocal students with whom I have begun to work on harmony. As with most people, they are finding it very difficult to get. It is difficult enough to learn some melodies, let alone a variation of that melody, then to be able to do that variation while someone else does the melody. It can drive you crazy!
For those of you learning to play an instrument like guitar or piano, when you are playing chords (more than one note at the same time), you are playing harmonies. So harmonies are basically playing or singing chords. And chords are made up of a few, specific notes or intervals. These are usually the root, do, the third, mi, and the fifth, sol. Do, Mi, and Sol are the harmonies for the major chord. If you flat the third, you have a minor third, which creates a minor chord. You can also create jazz chords by adding the sixth, major or dominant seventh, ninth or combinations of these intervals. There are also fourths, diminished and augmented fifths and many other exotic chords.
Even before I get into the theory behind harmonies, I introduce singing them, to my students right from the beginning. I have always believed that being able to play or sing something, and being able to hear it first, is more meaningful than to present the theory first. So, part of the warm up routine that we do, includes some harmonies and interval work.
The first exercise is a series of triad arpeggios beginning with the tonic. The tonic is called the first degree of a key. For the male vocal students I use the key of C, which means that they sing do, mi, sol, or C, E, G. For women, I use the key of G which is G, B, and D. Then we go to the subdominant, which is the fourth degree. For the subdominant, I use the second inversion, which means that we start with (for men) C, then F and A (do, fa, la). For women it would be G, C and E. Then we go to the dominant, or fifth degree, and we sing the first inversion, which for men is B, D and G (ti, re, sol). For women it would be F#, A and D. We always end with the do. We do this exercise with all the vowels A, E, I, O, and U. Go through the three arpeggios with each vowel.
The second exercise involves singing thirds all the way up the major scale. For men we start with mi in the key of C and sing mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do and back down to mi. That would be E, F, G, A, B, C. For women it would be C#, D, E, F#, G# and A. While the students are singing thirds, I play and sing from the root so that we are creating third harmonies all the way up and down the scale. At first, I will sing the third with them while I play the root. Then as the student becomes more confident with their harmony, I will change to the root and eventually leave out the piano, so that we are singing harmonies acapella. The next stage of working on harmonies is to try it with a song, which I will continue in the next instalment.
