How to Write Harmonies for Beginners: Music Theory Tips

Harmony is one of the elemental parts of music, and vocal harmony is an especially soulful and human thing to hear. Writing harmonies for vocals is its own skill, but with some thought and knowledge, it’s not hard to learn. Like much of music, half the battle is knowing what not to do when it comes to writing a harmony.

In this guide, we’ll tell you how to write a harmony for vocals, but the principles apply to other instruments just as well. Along the way, we’ll use Waves Harmony, a plugin that – as the name suggests – greatly expands the possibilities on offer when you’re searching for how to write harmonies.

Once you’ve got your harmonies pinned down, make sure you know how to produce perfect backing vocals, and how to synchronize backing vocal recordings, to come out with the ideal mix of professional vocals in a song.

TL;DR - How to Write Harmonies

• Stick to notes of your scale
• Write harmonies higher than the lead (usually)
• Try using chord clusters
• Experiment with voicings
• Try different deliveries
• Add vocal FX for sparkling harmonies

How Do Harmonies Work?

Harmonies are to lead vocals as chords are to single notes. You can think of a harmonized melody as a sequence of chords, but it’s probably a little more refined than that…

Each line, the lead vocal itself and each individual harmony that goes alongside it, can sometimes be thought of as its own melody. When played together, these three or four vocals weave together and make something great. But each one could sound like an alternative take of the vocal itself.

Early examples of harmony singing that most music fans will appreciate include Simon & Garfunkel; Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, The Supremes and The Shirelles.

Types of Vocal Harmonies

Consider these four strategies for writing harmony parts, to help you come up with something that speaks best for you.

Chordal Harmony

All voices join together and sing the same line but with different notes. This is the style of harmony you’d expect in barbershop groups and similar. The effect is usually complex and very impressive.

Back-up Singers

It’s not always necessary for the harmonies to carry the exact same vocal line as the lead singer. For example, in Baby Love by The Supremes (below), you’ll find the two backing parts singing together in unison, adding many types of flourish and backing vocalization.

Counterpoint Duet Harmony

This might be the classic version of harmony that most people think of: two singers, singing the same thing, in different melody lines. Often, both melodies will make sense on their own but will join together to make something bigger. You may find the harmony line going below and above the lead line, weaving around, depending on the song.

Pad Harmony (Ooooo, Aaaah)

More along the spectrum towards incidental harmony. In the example below from the Shirelles, you get everything – a few chords of Oooh and Aaah, shadowing the main line in unison, and some doo-wop “sha-la-las”.

Call and Response

Another real backing vocal classic, call and response is one of the deepest-rooted ways for people to sing. The lead line is sung, then a ‘response’ comes back from other vocalists. That so-called response doesn’t have to be “an answer” exactly, but it’s more about the timing with which it bounces back.

How to Write a Basic Harmony

In the following steps, we’ll show you the basics of creating entire vocal harmony arrangements out of a single vocal lyric. We’ll do so using MIDI in a DAW, simply to make it easy for any music producer to understand, regardless of the particular software you use.

1. Duplicate the Original Notes to Make a Start

Start with your original vocal line, which should be worked out before you embark on any harmony generation. Using our MIDI, we can just duplicate this MIDI part. If you have any existing vocal, you could duplicate it, convert it to MIDI to create a draft duplicate, or use Waves Harmony to generate vocal harmonies as an effect.

2. Create a High Harmony – One Octave Above

Let’s try making a harmony that’s higher than the original. A whole octave (12 semitones) is one place to start, so both vocals are playing the same notes, just one plays higher. This is ‘harmony on easy mode’, and isn’t really hard to achieve at all. From here, though, we can start making some changes to the notes in our next step.

3. Tweak Some Notes – Create Variation

Now to move some notes to different positions, with the aim of creating some variation. Here, we’ve taken the edge off our exact octaves by lowering and raising certain notes differently. This also makes the harmony more musical – less of a straight copy of the lead line.

4. Reduce the Volume of Harmonies

Your lead vocal (or voice) is the focal point, and the strongest one in the tune. As a producer or mixing engineer, you might have to help it to come across like that. Harmonies should be placed lower in the mix than the lead vocal, but they should work together as one. Instead of five things: ‘lead vocal and four harmonies’, you want to perceive two: ‘lead vocal and harmony vocals’.

In the DAW project, we can reduce MIDI velocities as a demonstration, but taking down the gain of any recording is probably a more to-the-point way to get this done.

5. Another Lead Line to Balance Notes

If you look at our previous notes, you’ll see a lot of jumps in the lead line (yellow), and these are mostly copied in the first harmony (green). Now we introduce another harmony line, in red this time.

We use this new red harmony line to fill in some gaps in the space, moving between the yellow and green when there’s a big gap between them, and moving under the yellow melody when it travels up higher. This makes the whole harmony effect much more balanced.

6. Finishing Touches

We’ll create one more harmony line, and after an agonizing choice of color (it’s purple), this line is going to go very quietly at the top of every chord. It will drop out for quicker notes and exist only to bolster the top end of the musical space, above the notes.

Ways to Improve a Harmony

Next, let’s move on to ways to improve harmony in your production focusing on recording through MIDI. Take a listen to the folky tune below. We’ll use this to let you in on some of the best-kept music theory secrets for achieving magical vocal harmony results with Waves' Harmony plugin.

Chord Clusters

The gift and curse of the human voice is that it is raw and natural, but also temperamental and unpredictable - especially when humans are singing together live. There will inevitably be heavenly moments where grace descends, and other slightly less graceful moments of human imperfection. For this reason, if you’re arranging vocal harmonies for a live performance, you’re better off keeping them simple and minimalistic.

However, the beauty of Waves Harmony is that you can achieve a very nuanced human sound, with the absolute perfection of digital technology. This means…that more is more! You can allow yourself to be more daring in the vocal arrangements – to create interesting and unusual harmonies which would be almost impossible to execute in a live performance. This is where chord clusters come in.

Let’s go back to basics for a minute. Does everybody know what a chord is? A chord is a combination of two or more notes played simultaneously. So, when two or more voices sing together with different notes, they are making chords. The best way to understand chords is actually by learning scales. A scale is a series of seven notes played consecutively, and we usually make chords by combining notes from within a scale. Here is an example:

F MAJOR SCALE

From within this scale, we have so many chord possibilities! For example:

F,A,C: F major (the I chord)
Bb,D,F: Bb major (the IV chord)
C,E,G: C major (the V chord)
G,Bb,D: G minor (the ii chord)

These are the main four chords in our song “Halo”. But the magic of the Waves Harmony sound comes from all the additions to the chords which make them fuller, lusher and more nuanced in their emotional content. Chord clusters are exactly what they sound like – lots of notes, very close in proximity to one another, played together. Don’t get too excited, this doesn’t mean you can just squash any notes together and it will sound good. Here are a couple of chord cluster combinations that can work magic with Waves Harmony:

1. add9: In music theory, the 9 is another name for the 2. This chord has a full, colorful, but also relatively neutral sound, which makes it very versatile. Its clusterful beauty comes from the first three notes of the chord which sit directly next to each other. For example, an Fadd9 chord would look like this:

*Important note: don’t be confused by the numbers. F is the fourth degree of the C major scale, but when we talk about an F chord in its own right, the F becomes the one.

Here is an example of when we used an Fadd9 chord in our song “Halo”:

2. add4: This is the chord of ultimate suspense. It is ideally used on the V chord, which inherently creates tension that resolves to the I chord. The top three notes of the chord are squashed together, and their density helps elevate that tension. In the key of F major, the C is the V chord. The Cadd4 chord looks like this:

Here’s a short moment from “Halo” where we used the Cadd4 chord.

3. m7(b13): One of my favorite chords for sorrow and anguish. It is so versatile that you will find it to be emotionally evocative in almost any harmonic context. It has quite a few notes, so it can be tricky to figure out the best way to arrange them. You want the notes close enough together to create the cluster magic, but spread enough apart to still be clear. In the song “Halo” we created a Dm7(b13) chord, with these notes:

Chord Voicing

It’s important not to get so carried away in the harmonies that the melody gets lost. Vocal harmonies are supposed to enhance and elevate the melody, not overtake it.

The surest way to make the melody stand out is to record a separate lead vocal track, in addition to the track with Waves Harmony. This is what we did on the song “Halo”. If you don’t want to add another lead vocal track, you can adjust the volume in the top right corner of Waves Harmony, balancing the source (lead vocal) level against the harmony level.

But to take this one step further, there are some music theory techniques to help you arrange the harmonies so that the melody line is emphasized and supported. This has to do with chord voicings, which is basically the way we arrange the notes within a chord in order to accentuate some and soften others.

Chord voicings are all about using inversions. Every chord has three different positions in which it can be played. For example, in Bb major:

Root position: 1,3,5: Bb,D,F
1st inversion: 3,5,1: D,F,Bb
2nd inversion: 5,3,1: F,D,Bb

For a chord with more notes, there are of course more possibilities. For example, here are some of the ways you could arrange a Gm11(add9) chord:

(From lowest note to highest note:)
- G,D,F,Bb,C,A
- Bb,F,A,C,D,G
- G,F,A,Bb,C,D

When you’re playing the harmonies through the MIDI keyboard, you want to make sure that the melody note is well-positioned in the chord. There are no real rules to this thing, but here are a few insights we had from creating “Halo”:

- Usually, a melody note will sound best with Waves Harmony when it is between the middle and the top of the chord. This is because the melody needs to be placed high enough that it stands out amongst the other notes. Like in this excerpt from “Halo”:

- But if the melody is always the highest note in the chord, then you miss out on the incredible effect of the melody being “hugged” by notes both below and above it.

- Yet, there are definitely instances in which a deep and bassy melody will blend beautifully with a mid-high range chord on Waves Harmony. Like this moment from “Halo”:

Vocal Dynamics

When recording “Halo” we found that Waves Harmony is sensitive to the vocalist’s dynamics. If you’re singing softly then the vocal harmonies will be crisp and gentle; if you’re belting it out then the harmonies will be loud and glorious.

But make sure you watch out for both the extremes. What I mean is, when the melody is too soft, the harmonies can get quite muddy and blurry. When the melody is very loud, the harmonies are clear but can also sound a bit synthy. You want to aim for a Goldilocks dynamic range, of vocals which have enough power so that all the notes are clearly defined, but also enough softness that they sound human and intimate.

Next, here’s an example where the vocals are a little muddy, but not so much that it heavily compromises the clarity of the harmonies:

And here’s another example where the vocals are belted out and strong, so they sound a little more like a synthesizer or vocoder, but still manage to retain the singer’s vibe:

Vocal FX

Waves Harmony is built so that you really don’t need to do much to make it sound amazing. But there are a few simple features that we enjoyed exploring during the making of “Halo”. You can find Spread and Glide in the Global Controls drop-down menu in the top-right corner of the plugin, and Filter on the left panel of the plugin.

a. “Spread”: This determines how widely the panning of the vocal harmonies is spread. Our personal recommendation – always spread wide! Especially when you’re using harmonies with lots of notes. This allows you to create really full and interesting chords without it being too dense or convoluted.

b. “Glide”: If you want to give the vocals an extra synthy touch, the “Glide” feature creates just that, giving all the notes a perfectly synchronized slide up to the selected pitches. Something that a group of human voices could never do the same.

c. “Filter”: Using the low-pass filter gives the harmonies a muffled sound with a hollow sort of resonance. If you want the harmonies to create more of a padding effect, the low-pass filter does a great job of blending the vocals together and creating something less defined but more unified. If you want the plugin to really sound like a group of singers, then this feature probably isn’t right. We used it very gently for “Halo”.

d. Bonus Tip! To make your harmonies sound more like a real group of people, dial the "Correct Formant” knob (in the Global Controls menu) down to around 60-80%.

Now, let’s listen again to the full mix of “Halo” with all our harmonies engaged.

Why Choose Waves for Writing Harmonies?

Waves Harmony is bursting with revolutionary features. There are hundreds of presets for vocal harmony styles, individually designed by musicians and producers from all around the world. The possibilities are endless! In this article we didn’t even touch on the plugin’s function for generating notes and harmonizing your vocals without you having to decide which notes to input. We didn’t use this method in the creation of “Halo”, but we can assure you of its accuracy, its intuitiveness, and its capacity for subtle refinement. So even if you don’t know about chords or harmony, you can create amazing vocal arrangements using the plugin. Let your imagination lead you to the moon!

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Do Harmonies Have to Follow the Main Melody?

Yes and no. Insofar as harmonies should be in key with the main melody (and whole song), they should follow the main melody to the extent that they work with it, but they don’t have to fully match it.

While some harmonies sing the same words as the main melody line, not all are just a duplicate on different notes. Some harmonies create a sustained chord in the background of a song, offer call and response, or doo-wop-style “sha-la-la” vocalizations.

How Many Harmonies Should I Add to a Song?

Any number of harmonies is valid, and you may be surprised how well a song can function with just a single harmony line shadowing the melody. However, a rule of thumb could be to write in two or three harmony lines, to correspond with three-note chords or four-note chords, which listeners are used to interpreting.

Are Harmonies Always Above the Lead Vocal?

No, but they do generally sit above the lead vocal. It’s not uncommon for harmony lines to move in and out of the vocal range, moving below or above it at different times.

Can Instrumental Harmonies Replace Vocal Harmonies?

Yes, a lot of what makes a vocal harmony work would also make an instrumental harmony work. One thing to watch out for is that you don’t mask or cloud the vocal by putting another instrument alongside it in its range. Vocal harmonies can work fine in the same octave as the lead vocal, but you’d be advised to try instrumental harmonies in the octave above the lead vocal.

Can Harmonies Work Without a Strong Lead Vocal?

Yes. Consider a barbershop quartet or a choral part. These use so many inversions for smooth voice leading that one particular ‘root note’ doesn’t usually stand out, and neither does one particular ‘root voice’. You will usually find a strong lead vocal accompanying harmonies, but it’s not the only way to create lines with multiple vocals.

Conclusion

Vocal harmonies come in many flavors. You have different notes, different styles, different rhythms. What should be consistent across all instances of vocal harmonies is that they exist to enhance the lead vocal line using different notes from it.

You may encounter harmonies that act to create chords from the lead vocal line; those that weave around it; or those that do something completely different around it or nearby it. In any case, the harmonies make the vocal experience of the whole track more interesting, and bring an even more human element out to the front of the stage.

When your harmonies are complete, make them sound like a million bucks with our Essential Guide to Producing Backing Vocals, and tighten up your results with our Guide to Synchronizing Backing Vocal Recordings.

Want more on using Waves Harmony? Watch these 5 AMAZING Vocal Harmony Effects You Can Create Right Now.