Are there any good youtube pages or any material that can help one get better at singing harmonies? I think I have a pretty good voice and love to sing but as a “lead” guitar player in cover bands, my ear tends to go to the melody
I unfortunately can’t think of an existing resource but I do have a lot of experience with singing harmonies. Though for me, the difficulty was never ‘hearing’ the harmony. It was making sure I could sing it while doing the moderately complex rhythm (or lead) I was playing at the same time. We did stuff in the same vein as Tool or Killswitch so the guitar parts were pretty syncopated. Playing those rhythms and singing something else was always a challenge.
For your issue, are these harmonies ‘new’ (like, you’re making up a part that wasn’t in the cover…or it’s an original song you want a harmony in) or is this what the backup singer in the recording of the material you’re covering is already singing? I’d have different suggestions depending on the situation.
simple stuff really. I mean ideally, I want to be able to sing harmonies very well for most contexts, but this is for my cover band. So pop, dance, pop punk, classic rock, etc… Top 40 stuff
Cool! So if you try to sing along with the harmonies on these recordings, what happens? You drift to the melody?
absolutely, or i end up just doing octaves lol.
I’d try playing the harmony on your guitar then. Once it’s under your fingers, turn off the recording and sing along with your newly learned guitar part. Once you’ve got that, try bringing the melody of the tune in (playing doubles stops) and keep singing the harmony.
My wife has this similar issue. We occasionally record stuff (that we’d never want the general public to hear lol) and she just can’t hear the harmony. So I’ll record her harmony with me singing in falsetto and have her sing along to just the falsetto track. After awhile, it becomes just a new ‘melody’ to her.
I guess another thing is to start simple, so make sure whatever tune you do this with has a pretty easy melody/harmony to begin with.
I will try this but i feel like it shouldn’t be this much work haha. Is there a way to isolate vocal harmonies from a song or track?
Spend some time routinely just singing with the other singers, minimal instruments. It will flex that muscle you need to both listen to the melody and sing around it. It gets easier with practice like everything (most things anyway lol).
Unless you can get the multi tracks, no. Fun thing though, if you are listening to something with headphones (1/8 jack) and you pull it out just slightly and wiggle it just right, you’ll remove stuff panned ‘center’ (vocals, drums and bass on any modern recording). It will leave stuff panned right/left which is often where vocal harmonies are panned. Maybe play around with that? It’s not as good having multi tracks in a DAW and being able to solo stuff. Plus, sometimes harmonies are still centered in which case my little headphone jack hack won’t work.
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