Harmonizing a Melody

If you feel some of your melodies are a bit hollow sounding, or maybe even just one dimensional, there is no doubt you want to spice them up a bit. But how can you take a basic melody and turn it into a layered, textured piece?

You can harmonize it, of course!

Before we discuss harmonization there are a few important things you must understand. Firstly, not all harmonization will sound good.

Just because one and one equals two, doesn’t mean that two will sound any better than a trash can rolling down a flight of stairs. Before you approach harmonies, it is important that you understand your keys and scales. If you know your basic major and minor scales, that is more than enough knowledge to create some interesting harmonies.

Next up, you need to understand musical intervals. If you know the basic intervals up to a perfect fifth, that is a great start. If you don’t, I suggest you take the time to learn your intervals. While you don’t need to know them all, understanding the basics is the key to proper harmonization. If you don’t at least understand your basic intervals, you won’t understand why what sounded good worked, and more importantly why what sounded bad didn’t work.

Now that we have those grounds covered, and hopefully you have the knowledge needed, we need to discuss the difference between harmony and melody. Many musicians confuse the two, and claim they play one when actually playing the other, but they are in fact two very different concepts.

Harmony is two or more voices ringing out in unison to create one larger voice. The basic way to look at this and remember it is that chords equal harmony.

Melody is a linear ascending or descending pattern. This simply means melody is a single note pattern that moves in a certain direction, either up (higher) or down (lower) the neck.

Now that you understand the differences between the two, we can discuss some basic harmonies for basic melodies.

For our example, let’s use the C Major scale on guitar, as it contains no sharps or flats.

The C Major scale consists of the notes C, D, E, F, G, A, and B. If we were to play these notes one at a time from lowest to highest or highest to lowest, we would be playing a C Major melody. The possible combinations for harmonizing this pattern are nearly limitless, but we are going to create a simple harmony.

Each note we use to harmonize must fall under the same scale as the notes within C Major. Not only does this give us nearly limitless options (through all octaves), but it also prevents us from making unpleasant noise.

Creating harmony is trial an error. We will create a simple perfect fifth harmony, as this is the most popular harmony used today.

If we move a perfect fifth up from C we arrive at the note G. If we move a perfect fifth up from the note D, we arrive at A. Using musical intervals such as the perfect fifth is like using a cheat sheet. This is why it is important to know your intervals, because without the knowledge you will be searching your fret board for hours.

Now that you know how harmony is created, it’s your turn. Try out some different intervals and see which you like best. Good luck!

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