The 7 Levels Of Vocal Harmony (feat. A Capella Science)

We really don't talk enough about harmony vocals.

Background vocals are such an important part of modern arranging, but most of the time we just stick with the same approach, which is a shame 'cause there's some really interesting things you can do with a background singer if you're just willing to think outside the box. That's why I wanted to put together some of my favorite approaches to background vocal writing, and I've brought in Tim Blais from A Capella Science to help bring them to life. Maybe you're already using some of these techniques, but hopefully you'll find something new to try out next time you're writing a background part!

Huge thanks to our Elephant of the Month Club members:

Susan Jones
Jill Jones
Duck
Howard Levine
Ron Jones
Brian Etheredge
Khristofor Saraga
Elaine Pratt
Ken Arnold
Len Lanphar
Paul Ward
Benjamin DeLillo
William (Bill) Boston
Anton Smyk
Chris Prentice
Jack Carlson
Dov Zazkis
Christopher Lucas
Hendrik Payer
Andrew Beals
Thomas Morley
Jacob Helwig
Duncan Dempsey
David Rapoport
Tyler Leite
Alex Knauth
Noah Gray
Braum Meakes
Darius Rudominer
Hendrik Stüwe
Dan Bonelli

And thanks as well to Henry Reich, Gabi Ghita, Owen Campbell-Moore, Gene Lushtak, Eugene Bulkin, Logan Jones, James Treacy Bagshaw, Abram Thiessen, Anna Work, Oliver, Adam Neely, nico, Rick Lees, Dave Mayer, Davis Sprague, Paul Quine, rhandhom1, CodenaCrow, Nikolay Semyonov, Arnas, Sarah Spath, Skylar J Eckdahl, Caroline Simpson, Harold Gonzales, Michael Alan Dorman, Chris Borland, Blake Boyd, Trevor, Michael McCormick, Dmitry Jemerov, Ian Seymour, Charles Gaskell, Luke Rihn, Elliot Jay O'Neill, Tom Evans, Daniel Gilchrist, Elliot Burke, Alex Atanasyan, Elliot Winkler, Tim S., Elias Simon, Max Wanderman, Jerry D. Brown, Ohad Lutzky, JH, James A. Thornton, Benjamin Cooper, David Conrad, Ken Bauso, Brian Dinger, Paul Grieselhuber, Jake Lizzio, Stefan Strohmaier, Chris Chapin, Adam Wurstmann, Kelsey Freese, Shadow Kat, Adam Kent, Lee Rennie, Richard T. Anderson, Angela Flierman, Mark Feaver, Kevin Johnson, Brian McCue, Stephan Broek, ml cohen, Darzzr, Roger Grosse, Rodrigo Roman, Francois LaPlante, Jeremy Zolner, Britt Ratliff, Eddie O'Rourke, Ryan, John July, Volker Wegert, Danny, Matthew Kallend, Patrick Callier, Joshua Gleitze, Emilio Assteves, Alex Keeny, Alexey Fedotov, John Bejarano, Charles Hill, Valentin Lupachev, Joshua La Macchia, Todd Davidson, David Christensen, DSM, Lamadesbois, Paul Guziewski, Gary Butterfield, Niko Albertus, Luke Wever, Greg Hodgdon, Elizabeth von Teig, Steve Brand, Rene Miklas, Connor Shannon, max thomas, Jamie Price, Kennedy Morrison, Red Uncle, Peter Leventis, Doug Nottingham, Blake White, Phillip N, Aaron Epstein, Chris Connett, Scott Frazer, Scott Howarth, Ben Phillips, Kevin Boyce, Douglas Anderson, h2g2guy, Kenneth Kousen, James, W. Dennis Sorrell, Mordredd, ZagOnEm, Robert Beach, Melvin Martis, veleum, Professor Elliot, Jozef Paffen, Aaron Zhu Freedman, Hexa Midine, Tuna, Mathew Wolak, Killian Hackenschmidt, Carsten Lechte, Roming 22, T, Lincoln Mendell, Vincent Engler, Luke, Doug Lantz, Sam Rezek, Lucas Augusto, Matt McKegg, Dominic, Marcus Doyle, Beth Martyn, Caitlin Olsen, Adam Granger, Andrew Engel, salman karout, NoticeMK, Hubert Ulber, Hikaru Katayamma, Sarah Sutton, Evan Satinsky, Anna, James Little, RaptorCat, leftaroundabout, Jigglypuffer, Jens Schäfer, Mikely Whiplash, room34, Austin Amberg, Peter Brinkman, Thomas McCarthy-Ward, Robert Whittington, Jasmine Fellows, Francisco Rodrigues, Elizabeth, Dennis Fahlesson, Patrick Aupperle, Carter Stoddard, David Van der Linden, Brandon Legawiec, Carolyn Priest-Dorman, Brx, Robert McIntosh, Alex Mole, Naomi Ostriker, James A McCormick, Mark Lauer, Evgeni Kunev, Jim Hayes, Özgür Kesim, Rob Hardy, Gabe H, Alon Kellner, James, Max Cohen, John, Kaisai Morihito, Valmiki Rao, David Haughn, Gordon Dell, Patrick Chieppe, Jon Prudhomme, RavaTroll, and Eric Stark! Your support helps make 12tone even better!

Also, thanks to Jareth Arnold for proofreading the script to make sure this all makes sense hopefully!

[tone]

Some additional thoughts/corrections:

1) I should not that, obviously, this list isn't and could not possibly be exhaustive. Or, I mean, it kinda can be because most things could technically fall into one of the last three categories, but only trivially: I'm sure there's some radically different approaches that I either haven't heard of or didn't think of. Such is life, y'know?

2) On that note, I'd say the main thing that separates these levels is less technique and more philosophy. The guiding principles that would lead you to, say, an emphatic approach are different from the ones that would result in an oblique one. These are 7 (well, 9) ways of thinking about background vocals, and as I demonstrated a couple times, you can also combine those philosophies to make lines that serve multiple goals. It's up to you what you think works.

3) I considered including Jacob Collier's microtonal voice-leading thing, but ultimately I decided that fell under fancy notes, not fancy arranging. If you think I should've mentioned it... sorry. I'm doing it here instead, hope that's alright.

[breearbor]

"in my experience, background singers tend to be twice the musician their lead is anyways" shots FIRED

[mikieswart]

“as a metal singer myself”

a surprise to be sure, but a welcome one

[Nate_Makes_Noise]

"Ah Greensleeves, it's so ... public domain."
The state of music theory YouTube be like

[daanwilmer]

One person at Universal Music Group was disappointed they couldn't monetize this video.

[nuynobi]

1:34 Main Melody (unharmonized)
1:49 Level 0 - Background Lines
3:11 Level 1a - Unison Doubling
3:28 Level 1b - Octave Doubling
4:17 Level 2a - Tight Harmony (chord tones only)
5:13 Level 2b - Tight Harmony (colour notes added)
5:49 Level 3a - Oblique Harmony (chord tones only)
6:23 Level 3b - Pedal
6:49 Level 4a - Emphatic Harmony (syntactic accents)
7:06 Level 4b - Emphatic Harmony (metric accents)
7:53 Level 5 - Heterophony
8:53 Level 6 - Counterpoint
(9:26 counterpoint harmony line isolated)
11:26 Level 7a - Complete Independence (filling gaps in main melody)
12:04 Level 7b - Complete Independence (combined with emphatic harmony)
12:17 Level 7c - Complete Independence (first few words stretched out)
13:37 Bonus Level - Second Line (layered with Scarborough Fair)

[purplealice]

I grew up singing alto, and now I can fake a basic harmony part to almost any simple melody. (And doing so is fun.)

[yvancluet]

you've mentionned too many times how you're a metal vocalist so at this point you just gotta show it

[heggy_]

Man I have almost no musical theory knowledge but I like to imagine watching this stuff makes something sink in

[guillezav]

"As a metal singer myself"

Who wants to hear some tunes boys??

[loganstrong]

As someone who does all my own backing vocals to all my songs, I'm so happy to see that I've done all of these at one point or another. My absolute favorite is to do full chords, one above and one below the melody, and pan them in opposite ears.

[NeilABliss]

Loved this one.

My theory prof ( a tenor) always described 4 part choral writing as such .. 1 Give melody to the Sopranos, as divas they won't work hard enough to learn more than that. 2 Give the Basses a slow moving root function, they're not to bright... so keep it simple. 3 God didn't give tenors brains, he gave them resonating space, write a part with little motion as possible and with out complex rhythm. 4 Give all the hard stuff and the weird notes to the Altos .... they're the only ones who have brains and practice.

After watching your video I took your ideas and his, I wound up with very satisfying 4 part.

[AvenMcM]

TIm's singing is so pretty... I know that's not substantive intellectual commentary, but it's true. :)

[patrickhodson]

The first example of doubling I remember really noticing is in Pink's "just give me a reason" where the male and female parts that had been going back and forth and harmonizing for most of the song suddenly sing the same notes for the whole chorus, and with no accompaniment besides percussion. It's POWERFUL! You're expecting a dramatic hit or maybe even more harmony, but instead we have both voices on one melody line, and the percussion sticks around so we don't get lost. It really fits the narrative of the song well, as the two are deciding that, while things aren't perfect and they're struggling, they know they'll get through it and they can stay together

[boazcohen]

One thing to acknoladge:

In modern music, all of those techniches could be enchanced and maginfied usin mixing and producing tricks - for example, you can pan differently the two lines permenently or have the lead staying panned on 0 and the background's pan automated over time. Another thing to consider is having a certain tone (compressed, chimy/reverbish, super bright or warm ect.) could help the listener tell which is the lead and wich is the background in the more advanced levels.
I'm not that great of a producer, but I can tell these are powerful tools to concider when writing or arranging a vocal part.

[Oswald]

I have a music degree, and that is by far the best explanation I have ever been given for parallel fifths/octaves. I was always taught "bad thing don't do" and then "old rule feel free to bend" without any good reason WHY it was a "rule" beyond convention/tradition.

[petersilktube]

This was interesting. As a composer who doesn't write a lot of vocal lines but does write a lot of quite lyrical melodies and has a very layered-melody approach to composition and voice-leading I found that a lot of these things come quite naturally to me, all these techniques are very ingrained in to my approach to part writing. As I watched I started to think about what it was that I would have been listening to as a child that made me think of harmony writing in this way, and two things occured to me:

1) video game music on old hardware. When your hardware can only manage 4 or 5 simultaneous tracks, you end up writing a lot of countermelodies and using these kinds of tricks to imply more complex harmonies than the system is perhaps capable of producing with chord voicings.

2) I listened to a LOT of Beatles and as I watched found that they use pretty much every single one of the techniques and sub-techniques that you mention a some point in their output.

So I guess it's no real surprise that when I write parts those are the techniques I reach for too.

[sommeone]

I really like trying to improvise harmony with any songs I'm listening to (particularly simple songs that I really like... And boring songs...) and I oblique harmony for that, it can be so simple to do and it sounds good!!!

[owencurtiscluff]

At 13:30 the lines blended in a very interesting way: "are you going to do me wrong" If you are going to write a second lead, you probably want to avoid that, unless you don't.

[pamspray]

Can I just take a moment to thank you for making these videos? They're a constant reminder to keep practicing and working on my own music pieces. I have a tendency to fall into the pit of the unmotivated when I can't think of what I want to do and having someone talk [to me] about music theory kick starts my mind and gives me the drive to think about one of the many things I have a passion for. It's... really helpful. And this particular video has given me a couple ideas for a particular vocal piece that's been troubling me the past couple of weeks. So, thanks!
Let's see what happens.