Layered vocal harmony parts are some of the coolest, and sometimes difficult, parts of audio production. Although an experienced singer will often come up with their own vocal harmony parts… sometimes it is up to the producer to create harmony parts. Here are some considerations to creating that harmony line.

The first thing that needs to be considered is… what is the expectation. When I was first getting started with vocal harmonizing I was right out of music theory class, and everything had to be perfect 4 part harmony… Then I realized sometimes Pop Punk songs don’t need 4 part harmony;) I is great to know how to make vocoder sounding tracks, 3-4 part harmony tracks, and all kinds of other cool tricks… but the most important thing to know, is what the expectation is. From there, you can now get to work.

Many times the first reaction is to put a plugin on the main vocal line, change the pitch by an interval, and call it a day. Although there are some styles of music where this works… it really doesn’t make for musical harmony parts. With the idea that most of the time we are working to create singable harmony parts, it is important to create harmony lines that are… singable. There are many different programs that will allow you to write in melody lines. I personally have been using Melodyne since around 2007 and I absolutely love it. Although I am not always creating perfect 3-4 part harmonies, I do see the importance of having contrary motion with harmony lines and avoiding parallel 5ths. These are some very usable music theory techniques. If you are writing in harmony parts from a single melody track, it may help you to think outside the parallel lines.

You may also want to consider how much you are harmonizing. You really don’t need every single word to be harmonized. In fact, the harmonies really loose their importance if they are over done. I typically try to find the parts of the song that need emphasis or a difference in vibe for my harmony parts. Again, if you just place a generic plugin that doubles the vocal line at an interval for the entire song… it’s going to get boring.

Finally, when you double the exact same audio part there are other issues besides just pitch. It is really important to pay attention to the phasing issues that happens when you have the exact same audio signal, twice. If you are not familiar with phasing issues with doubled signals, then you have some more to look up. However, to keep in the scope of this short post, it is important to make sure the harmonic structure of the harmonized parts are altered. Without changing the harmonic structure of the harmony the tracks may cancel each other out… this will start to make them sound smaller instead of bigger together.