Step by Step Guide to Learning to Sing Harmony Spontaneously (Part 1)

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll share my step by step process that I am using to learn to ad lib harmony.  This is the first of a two-part series.

I grew up singing.  In high school, I sang in choirs and musicals and I was in an a cappella group in college -- before Pitch Perfect made that a cool thing to do.  My dad's side of the family is musical.  My dad can harmonize with almost anyone at anytime -- so could my grandpa.  But I'm a soprano 1, which means in multiple part harmony arrangements, I have usually sung the melody, so over the years I haven't had the ear or voice training to be able to always successfully pick out harmony on my own.  Sometimes I can -- particularly with portions of songs that are easy to harmonize with, but inevitably I'll lose it and I'll end up singing the melody or going silent until I can pick up the harmony again.  I would LIKE to be able to pick out and sing harmony to any song on the fly.  Right now I have some time, so I'm attempting to learn how to do just that.

Turns out, when I've bashfully admitted to fellow singers that I'm just learning to improvise harmony at practically age 50, most people have confessed back to me that, although they can learn harmony when it is scripted for them, they can't always find harmony on their own EITHER and that they have ALSO been wanting to learn.  So, in this video, I'm going to share with you my process for learning how to find and sing harmony to practically any song.  Just a warning, I won't be doing harmony training or musicianship in this video.  Instead, I'm going to share the process that I follow to use the training that is available from experts to hone my own skills.  

There are three major components of learning that I wanted to make sure I covered in this video: Consistency, Training, and Practice.  First of all, for

Consistency

I established an hour each weekday to devote to this pursuit.  You could probably get by with a half an hour, but since much of this involves training your ear, it's best not to go too long between learning sessions or you start to lose what you've gained in previous sessions.  Once a week probably would not cut it for this kind of skills building.  Next, I wanted to receive some legitimate

Training

I didn't want to have to pay a private teacher and figured I could probably find some good materials online, so I watched a bunch of YouTube videos -- some were good, some were meh.  I really liked a video done by a guy named Saher Galt.  I'll include a link to his video in the description section below (https://youtu.be/qV4ZYIECZxE).  He was clear, easy to understand, and his explanations didn't go over my head.  Turns out that he has a website and some lessons for purchase -- one of which was a Harmony Workshop.  I purchased this workshop for $50, which may seem like a lot, but I figured it's about the same as or less than one lesson with a private teacher.  The bummer is that whereas his YouTube video had great graphics to help those of us who learn visually, his Harmony Workshop is audio only.  You download it onto your computer and go through the audio lessons one at a time.  I'm not entirely certain how long the whole workshop is, but it goes over many harmony concepts, demonstrates them, and then has you try them out.  I did not race through his workshop.  Instead, I learned about a specific harmony concept that I wanted to be able to implement and then I set about trying to 

Practice

that concept.  For example, one of the most basic ways to sing harmony is by doing a third above or a third below the melody line as long as you stay in the same key.  I'm not going to explain this fully since there are numerous videos that do a good job of this, but suffice it to say that for most songs, you can sing a line of harmony simply by working out what a third above the melody line is for each note.  So, just quickly, if a song is in the key of C and the melody is singing C, I would sing 2 notes higher or E for a nice harmony.  SO -- after I've gotten this training education from the harmony workshop, I think it's important to practice the concept enough that I can do it with a bunch of songs without too much of a struggle.  So, how and what do I practice?  Well, I started out by downloading an app called Sing Harmonies.  It is free to download and has three songs loaded to start.  You can pay extra for each additional song you want to add.  What's nice about this app is that the songs are arranged in four part harmony.  Once you figure out who is signing the melody, you can turn down or off all of the other parts so that you can practice singing your harmony just with the melody.  In addition, if you wanted to learn the other harmony parts, you could listen only to them.  It's a nice beginner's training tool.   Once you master the three songs that they give you for free, you can buy additional songs for a dollar a piece OR, you can do what I do and just download the original song by the original artist to practice singing with.  My family has a subscription to Apple Music, so I created a Harmony Playlist and I add the songs I'm practicing to that playlist.  With original music, it can be harder to figure out the harmony since it is further complicated with all of the other instruments and voice parts, so you'll have to decide whether you are comfortable using original music OR you can always stick with the Singing Harmony app.

Here’s a little clip of my third up harmony to a version of the Star Spangled Banner.

Okay -- now we've gone over consistency, training, and practice.  Join me in my next video where I share how I work out the harmony when it doesn't come naturally.  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!