Here are some concrete ways you can improve your harmony singing for worship whether you are a beginner or experienced singer.
1. Practice singing a major scale on numbers.
My favorite way to do this is to start on middle “C” on the piano and assign it the number “1”. Then, go up in the scale by playing every subsequent white key until you arrive back at “C” an octave higher. You will assign every white key in the scale a number 1 through 8. And then practice singing up and down this major scale on numbers. You can even come up with your own melodies and exercises to sing on numbers as well. Check out this free Harmony Challenge to see some of my favorite ways to practice singing on numbers. This will train your ear to get used to hearing every note in the scale as a certain scale degree. This will help a lot to give you a context when finding harmony parts later.
2. Know the melody perfectly
Before you can accurately harmonize to a song, it is important to know the melody to that song perfectly. And I really recommend learning to sing the melody on numbers as well. Sometimes as harmony singers, we want to jump right to figuring out the harmony part. And that is possible… and sometimes you may even succeed at it. But, you still will not be as successful as if you were to take a little extra time to sing the melody, learn it first, and then dive into figuring out the harmony part. The harmony needs to follow (“harmonize”) the melody after all. And you may end up singing an awkward harmony part if you don’t first analyze how exactly the melody goes. And by learning the melody on numbers this will give you a much better context as to which numbers your harmony part should be utilizing. All in all, don’t under estimate knowing the melody super well!
3. Learn the harmony part like it’s own melody
In some way, this is a short cut to getting good at harmonizing. You can often find harmony parts to worship songs that other people have already taken the time to figure out. Then all you need to do is learn that harmony part as if it were an alternate melody (basically memorize it). And then you will just need to stick to that part while singing with the melody. This may sound easy… but it is harder than you think. It’s a great way to train your ear to get used to hearing the harmony part, though. And over time you will start to be able to find the harmony part on your own much easier because your ear has been trained to sing other harmony parts. We have many harmony tutorials which go through the specific upper and lower harmony parts. You can find them all in one place here.
4. Sing duets
Another way to practice harmonizing is to learn duets. A duet is simply a song that is meant to be sung by two people, and it usually involves harmonizing at least at some points in the song. The great thing about this approach is that you can more easily hear both of the singers in the duet because the song is intended to be sung by two people. Many worship songs have harmonies in the original recordings, but they are sung by background vocalist and they can be buried in the song and hard to pick out (until you’ve had more practice training your ear to hear them). So, sing some duets and get used to hearing that second part!
5. Sing rounds / canons (even by yourself!)
A round (or a canon) is a type of song in which usually two or more people sing the same melody at different times. The song is structured in such a way that when the song is sung at different times, it will create harmonies. This is a great way to get used to singing one melody while you are hearing something else happening at the same time. After all, that’s what harmonizing is! It’s singing a different part from what your ear is hearing and being comfortable and confide in sticking with your own part. In the Harmony Challenge I show you how you can use your phone to sing a canon with yourself! It’s a lot of fun…
6. Train your ear to hear 3rds
When it comes down to it, lots of harmonies are sung in the interval of a 3rd. What is an interval? An interval is simply the distance between two notes. We could have a large interval like a 7th or a small interval like a 2nd. Once creates the interval of a 3rd by skipping over one of the notes in the scale. For example, if the melody were on the 1 note, a 3rd above that would be the 3 note. In the key of C, this would be the equivalent of singing C and E. If the melody were on 2 then a 3rd above would be 4. If the melody were on a 7 the 3rd below would be a 5. You can create a 3rd above the melody or below the melody. Watch the video at 4:16 for some demonstrations. Training your ear to hear 3rds is a great place to start when it comes to finding your own harmony parts. You will simply find a 3rd above or below the melody and then try to follow the melody staying a 3rd apart from it. This method can work on parts of the melody, but sometimes it may clash with the chords and you may need to sing the interval of a 4th at those points.
7. Learn all intervals
I advise that you drill all of the intervals up to an octave so that you are familiar with how each one sounds. There are many ways you can practice getting these into your ear. You can check out my favorite way over in the Harmony Challenge. If you want to take your harmony singing to the next level, it is very important to know all of the intervals so that when they show up in songs you can pick them out quickly.
8. Try it out! (Experiment)
After you’ve drilled at least a few of these methods, just start trying it out! Sing all sorts of songs and try to find the harmony part. You may notice that some segments of a certain song are easier to harmonize than others. And then on other segments of the song you may get lost and end up defaulting to the melody. That is ok! Keep trying to find that harmony part and as you do it more and experiment more, you will get better at it!
9. Music Theory
If you want to take your harmony singing even further, you can’t only rely on your ear all of the time. You need to understand how the music theory works to be able to figure out the harmony part as well. Specifically, it’s important to learn how chords work and which notes are in each chord. This will greatly help to inform you when choosing which note to sing as a harmony part (hint: it needs to fit in with the chords that are being played in addition to following the melody). This is how I come up with all of the harmony parts for our singers at church. I use my ears to find the harmony, but I also refer to which chords are being played and use my knowledge of music theory to quickly find the right harmony part. This skill is even more important when you are singing in 3 part harmony (melody and two harmony parts). When you are singing 3 part harmonies, you are basically creating a chord on every vocal note, and it needs to sound good with the accompanying chords in the instrumentation.
10. Practice!
Now finally, practice as much as you can! This is the only way you will improve. Join a choir. Join your worship team. Keep trying to find harmony parts to songs as you sing in the car. Do these ear training exercises. Learn harmony parts to songs. Take the free Harmony Challenge! You get the idea… just practice, practice, practice!
I hope you can pick at least one or two of these bits of advice and start implementing them right away!
If you’d like some more tips on improving your harmony singing, you might like this article.
