by Elena Corey

Reproduced with permission in slightly abridged form from the California Bluegrass Association’s newspaper Bluegrass Breakdown. Vol. 21 No. 12, April 1996.

Your first instinct may be to sing higher to compensate. Your vocal range may enable you to jump on up to the next higher harmony note, but wait:- If you’re the tenor and being bumped from your note by the melody singer you might take the next higher harmony note, but if you do you’ll probably be stepping onto the part of the high-baritone singer. Even if your group’s baritone singer doesn’t sing higher than the melody, you still are not free to grab that next ascending harmony note if doing so lands you doubling the baritone an octave apart. Rather than double another singer, it probably causes less ruckus all round if you merely take the melody singer’s note(s), instead of literally rising to the occasion. Melody singers may need that little extra ‘headroom’ that allows them to follow with their voices where their spirits lead them. Squashing their spark of emotive expression will, in the long run, backfire on harmony singers. If the harmony singers are sticklers for accuracy and insist that the lead singer ‘sing by the book’, the lead singer may get a sudden hankering to sing solos or find alternative folks with whom to harmonise. Harmony singers need to assume extra vocal flexibility, responsive acuity and ultra-sensitive communication styles in order to be extra supportive to lead singers, to keep the music flowing. It’s worth it.

Another, related, question is ‘How can I find my harmony note?’ The answer to this question can lead a novice harmomiser on a most interesting and exciting learning adventure.

Singing harmony is a creative, circular skill-developing process that starts with a strong desire to sing harmony. The first step is to be able to “match” or sing the melody note, at any point in the song and with confidence. Identifying that note and playing the chord in which it is subsumed will highlight other basic harmonising notes for, e.g., the tenor, baritone or tonic bass. (Bass, frequently relegated to the root note of the chord, is the only part usually allowed to duplicate another harmony part an octave away).

After you’ve identified and can hit the basic “Do, Mi, Sol” chord off the melody note, and assigned them appropriately (i.e. the tenor is often a third higher, and the high-baritone a fifth higher, than the melody) then you’re ready to see if any more notes in the scale might also be appropriate in the type of music you’re singing. For instance, when singing bluesey songs like In The Pines, someone is bound to be leaning from their assigned note into the flattened 7th of the chord. If that person is not you then you might need to be aware whether or not the note being abandoned needs to be sung more than the note you were planning to sing; if so you might shift notes. A prominent example of this phenomenon can be found in the Nashville Bluegrass Band’s cover of the Everly Brothers’ hit, I’ll Be A long Time Gone.

You can have a lot of fun, sitting with your instrument, vocally holding the lead note, and locating all other notes which could sound good with that note. Besides having fun, you’ll probably sound good when you join other people to try your fledgling skills. Beyond those basic tips your next step, if you want more advanced theory or more intensive practice in this, is to attend a good harmony workshop. There you can meet and get in some practice with other folks of a similar mind.

I am often asked about voice conditioning - “How can I reach that harmony note?” To answer that I consulted my old friend and basic college textbook-author on voice, Clippinger. Briefly, the concept is: We train our voices much the same way that we train other physical muscles. If we over-exert or over-extend, we will pull or strain a muscle and be uncomfortable for a while. To prevent such occurrences a certain amount of vocal stretching and conditioning exercise is recommended daily, for both building and maintenance modes. When we’re in building mode (i.e. more intensive training trying to reach the next level up) we will be giving more time to overall practice, but regardless of how much time we allot for vocal work we must always start with warm-ups and gentle stretches of the vocal chords.

Many bluegrass singers find that even referring to themselves as “vocalists” seems unnatural and pretentious. Visualising themselves training to become better singers may not suit the image they’d like to retain of themselves. That image is often as easy-going, laid-back folks who can just reach out effortlessly and scoop up the most thrilling notes and soul-stirring tones, never having to work at it and not bothering themselves much with the concept of self-improvement. To those folks, this entire 3rd question may seem irrelevant, but not so to those of us who take singing every bit as seriously as playing any other instrument. Most of us don’t expect to be able to advance in anything without time, attention and a little effort, so more power to you as you gently warm-up your voice to increasingly greater control, flexibility and, yes, an even wider frequency range!

Happy Picking, Elena Corey, Sacramento, CA, USA

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Updated 1st March 1999