Learn to hear and sing HARMONY (and teach your vocalists)!

  Sing the songs on numbers.

That gives each note a really specific anchor point in your mind.

If you’re actually assigning it a number, like how great

is our God, upper harmony, right?

One, three, one, four, three, five, four, four, three, three.

It’s a number.

Then when you go sing the words, you’re not just guessing like, Oh,

I think it sounded like that.

I’m just imagining somebody getting caught up in it and actually

singing that on stage. On a Sunday.

One, three, one, four, three.

Welcome to the Worship Ministry Training podcast, a monthly a podcast

for worship leaders who are serious about growing in their craft and calling.

My name is Alex, fellow worship leader.

Super stoked you’re here.

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All right, let’s get into today’s episode.

Worship leaders, hopefully, are not leading and singing all of the songs.

Maybe you are, but maybe one day you’ll have other singers who can

sing well enough to lead songs. That’s the hope.

The problem is if you’re not leading a song and you can’t sing harmony, then you

just stand there useless like a deadfish.

You contribute nothing to the song because you don’t know how to sing harmony.

So if you’re a worship leader who doesn’t know how to sing harmony,

we want to teach you how to sing harmony.

Or if you are a worship leader who does sing harmony, but you have

people on your team who don’t sing harmony, then it’s the same problem.

On the songs that they’re not leading, they’re just standing there useless

or they’re doubling the melody, which can be problem if you’re

in the same frequency range and then it’s just muddying things up.

You want all of your singers, ideally, to be able to sing harmony and melody

and be able to switch depending on if they’re leading a song or not.

So that’s what we’re going to be covering in this training session.

And this training session is hopefully something that you can take and send to

other singers on your team or people who want to join your team

who don’t sing harmony.

Because I’ve personally had a lot of singers come to me over the years

and say, I’d love to be on the worship team, and they actually do a nice

tone, they have good pitch, but they don’t know how to sing harmony.

I’ve never had a really good resource to send them.

That’s what this training is going to be, is we’re going to try to create

that resource for you to be able to send to these people.

Hopefully, this link gets shared a lot.

We’re going to try to cover all the bases.

I am here with my new friend, Nate Brown, and I’ll introduce you more in a second.

But hello, Nate. Hello.

Glad you’re here.

The way that we’re going to structure this training is we’re going

to teach you the basics of harmony.

Then we’re going to give advice to worship leaders directly on what you

need to do to learn how to sing harmony, because I know some of you don’t.

And then we’re going to give you an action plan that you can give to singers

who come to you who don’t sing harmony.

So let me introduce this wonderful man here that I met recently.

His name is Nate Brown.

First of all, he’s a worship leader.

He’s a music teacher, but he also runs this awesome YouTube channel,

and they sell courses as well for teaching singers how to sing harmony

or how to sing using the number system.

And you graduated from Biola University with a degree in worship?

Yep. But vocal performance emphasis, yeah?

Yeah. And you sing opera.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

He’s crazy good singer. I’m excited.

We’re going to be doing a bit of singing in this training as well.

Probably not opera, though. Yeah, not opera.

He’ll save that for the offline performance.

He has a website, refocustworship.

Com, and you can look at his courses and his subscription programme there as well.

Is there anything I missed? No.

Our website is Worship Refocused.

So there’s a swapthose two words. Okay, I’m sorry.

That’s basically it. Yes, Worship Refocus.

You’ll find it. I’m very sorry about that.

Worshiprefocus. Com.

What is harmony?

Let’s just start with the bare bones, and we’re going to just

build upon that because we want this to be a really robust training.

What is harmony?

Basically, harmony is two or more notes happening at the same time

that will create harmony.

You can have harmony that sounds more pleasing and some other harmonies

that sound more dissonant or add the tension into the music.

Really, with harmony, we’re trying to play around with different tonal colours

and sounds so that we can create a musical journey as we go through a song

and creating that tension and the release that’s created through harmony.

There’s the primary melody in a song.

The melody that we all know that we hear on the radio, it’s the most forward notes

in the song of the vocalist.

But then there’s these other voices that can stack on top of that melody,

which they sing different notes that complement the melody and also work with

the cords underneath the chord changes.

So that’s what harmony is.

It’s all created out of different intervals that you’re singing and

creating along with the melody, right?

And that will create cords.

You’re basically singing a chord.

Just like on a guitar, you have to play three notes

or four notes to make a chord. Same on piano.

The harmony is just making cords with voices.

And obviously, as worship leaders, we want to add and subtract the harmonies

one at a time, one layer at a time to add dynamic and create nuance

and make the song progress.

But just from a bare framework, you’re just singing cords.

You’re singing three notes or two notes that make a chord that work together

to create a pleasing sound.

The way that you think of it is you have the melody, and the melody usually

hits upon notes within the cords, not Not always, though.

Sometimes the melody goes with a note that’s not in the actual cords going on.

But your harmony notes, you’re going to have a harmony usually above

the melody, following the melody at a third or a fourth interval.

Then you’ll have another harmony below the melody, following at a third or a fourth.

Depending on how you stack it, lots of my tutorials have upper

harmony, lower harmony.

It all depends on what range the melody is in.

I’m a tenor, so oftentimes I’m singing the tenor range in the melody.

We’ll have an alto singer sing the upper harmony and another male singer

sing the lower harmony.

But oftentimes you’ll see Sat harmonizations where you

have Soprano, alto, tenor.

Oftentimes, those are written where you have the Soprano, oftentimes written as

the top note will be the melody.

Then you’ll have the third or the fourth below that being the alto,

and then the third or the fourth below that being the tenor.

It’s just the same thing.

You have these three harmonies just depending on how you structure them.

You can build the song and add interest by swapping these harmonies up

or down an octave.

That works really nice, too. That’s the idea.

That’s a great point.

Just in my own ministry, if I’m leading a song, I typically,

and you guys know this, I try to pitch my songs down a little bit

lower than my comfortable range so that it’s better for the church to sing

because I found more engagement that way.

If I’m singing low as a man, then usually if I have three other

singers, I’m going to have someone above me on the third, and then someone above

that on the fourth, and then someone above that on a melody

octave above me when we’re full on singing.

But what Nate is saying is if you have a female singer, then maybe the third

or the fourth is below the female.

It’s a man singing a harmony below it.

You just take it from up here way higher and you bring below.

That’s a really good point that you can structure.

I found that the terminology can be a little bit odd.

Sometimes you’ll see upper harmony, lower harmony.

Sometimes you’ll see alto harmony, tenor harmony.

But basically, it’s pretty much all the same thing.

If your melody were on a C major cord and your melody is on an E, then

your lower harmony would be C, and your upper harmony would be G,

creating a C major chord.

But you could have it the same way where you have the upper harmony on G and

have the lower harmony up an octave on C.

You can arrange it however you like.

I’d love to actually give some examples.

We haven’t practised at all, so we’ll see how this goes.

But I want you guys to hear how the melody is going to stay the same,

and I’ll try to sing harmony to him.

I don’t even know what song we’re going to do yet.

But then what I want to do is I actually want to change the cords

underneath the melody, and then you’ll hear how my harmony also has to change.

Because the harmony isn’t just following the it’s also following

the cords underneath the melody, and it has to match those as well as the melody.

Let’s do gratitude because I think there’s some cords we could swap

out there because I want them to hear how when you change the cords of the song,

the harmony is also going to change.

I throw up my hands and praise you again

and again ’cause all that I have

is a holly That’s it.

I mean, the second half is pretty much the same.

Yeah. So can we maybe show them on the keyboard?

I have a different camera angle.

Can we show them the melody and the harmony working together?

The melody is, So I throw up my hands, which I like to talk on things

in numbers, so I’m just going to start out with that.

The way the numbers work is that we assign a number to every single scale degree

in the major scale.

We’re in the key of B major right now.

I’ll switch to C.

Okay, this is going to be much better.

So I throw up my hands.

We’re going to go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 8 and 1

are the same, so we can do one.

The melody on number, so you guys can see it, is, So I throw up my hands.

1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3.

In a C major chord, we have a C major chord, we’re on the one of that.

What Alex was singing is he was singing the lower harmony,

and he was starting on a G below, and he was going, So I throw up my hands.

And so what’s happening there is we’re starting out on that.

So he’s singing a fourth below me in this case.

And then we’re going, So I throw up my hands.

So I was starting on a one, one, and he’s starting on a five.

If we had an upper harmony, we’d have them start on the three

and go, So I throw up my hands, and we’d have a full on three-part chord.

Yeah, you guys sing it at home. That’d be awesome.

Yeah.

There’s a tutorial that I have for this one that has all the parts.

You can always try it.

Do you want to try the harmony change? Yeah.

I want to show you guys now if we change the cords, my notes now

have to change, and he can also demonstrate that on the keys.

Because we want your singers to understand as you send this video to them is that

they’re not just following your melody.

Because one of the problems that we hear as worship leaders, and we’re going

to do a demonstration with how great is our God, a lot of the singers, they’ll

find this interval and they’ll think that they just keep following that interval.

But actually, on certain cords, you actually have to change the

separation of the notes of the interval.

We’ll demonstrate that with how great is our God in just a second.

Let’s do different cords for gratitude, and you’ll see how

my harmony has to change. I’ve never done this before.

I’m actually really curious if you’re going to find it.

This is a tricky one.

So I throw up my hands

and praise you again and again.

Because all that I have is a Hallelujah.

Hallelujah.

Sorry, I did the ending. No, it’s good.

That was good.

I think I missed one or two.

But you can hear how he didn’t change his melody at all.

But because he was playing different cords, my harmony had to change.

That’s a really important distinction on…

Nice. Yeah,.

So hopefully that helps you guys understand how harmonies

work with melody.

Now, I would like to cover some of the mistakes that people

make in singing harmony.

The first one that I want to cover, and then I want to hear a few of others,

is a lot of times when I’m teaching singers harmony,

I told you, they get comfortable with the interval

changes, and they think that if they always follow those separation

of notes, for example, like…

Thirds, the whole way.

Yeah, they think, If I just stay two notes separated from the melody,

I’ll always be on the harmony. But that’s not true.

You have to adjust on some of the cords.

I know it’s maybe if you don’t know music theory, and if you don’t, check out the

musical excellence course in the academy because it talks about some of this.

But if you don’t know musical theory, the five chord of the scale,

sometimes you have to change the interval that you’re singing.

So let’s do how great is our God, and I will purposefully

try to sing it wrong, the harmony.

And then I will show you what you’re supposed to do.

Because when I audition people, a lot of times I know they’re new

to singing harmony because they make this one mistake on the five chord.

And this happens not just How Great is Our God, but any song that when you add

the five chord, if they don’t change the interval,

the amount of notes between the melody and their harmony,

you can tell that they’re not totally sure how harmony works.

So let’s go ahead and do How Great is Our God.

Okay, here we go.

How great is Our God,

sing with me, How great is our God?

And all will see how great,

how great is our God.

So the harmony is, How great is our God? Sing with me, How great is our God?

And all we’ll see, How great, how great The harmony is, How great is our God?

Sing with me, How great is our God?

All will see, How great, how great is our God?

That’s correct.

But now I’ll try to show you where people mess up.

Do you maybe want to demonstrate that a little bit on the piano?

Melody is 5, 1, 5, 2, 1.

And so upper harmony, which Alex was singing is, 1, 3, 1, 4, 3, 5,

4, 4, 3, 3, 1, 4, 3, 1, 5, 4, 4, 3, 4.

And then this is where he wanted to go wrong.

One, four.

That would have created, if you sing the four again on top of the five cord,

it creates what we call a dominant seven, which is you’re making the G,

a G7 chord, which in worship music doesn’t sound so pleasing.

In that case, you want to make sure you’re going all the way

up to the five in this case.

Two, five, one, one, three, how great is our God.

Yeah.

Again, you can hopefully get the idea that Harmonies follow melody plus quartal

structure underneath, and you need to not just get comfortable with the interval.

Now, I’m going to jump ahead for a second because it is important

to say that learning how to hear harmony is like learning a language.

You start to listen and get familiar with patterns, and you start

to recognise those patterns across multiple songs, and you realise,

oh, it always does the same thing.

Just like learning a language is hard, eventually you become fluent

in that language because you start to really understand how the patterns

work, and you are able to apply those patterns in different contexts.

That’s exactly how it is to learn harmony.

Let’s go back now and talk about the mistakes that people

make in singing harmony.

Besides the one that I shared about the five-chord, Are there other mistakes

that you hear singers make?

Yeah.

The basic one is just knowing your starting pitch.

Oftentimes, they’ll have a challenge with finding their first note.

That can be hard when you’re in a new section

to know what your starting pitch is.

That’s one mistake that is common.

The way to fix that, I think, is to know what note you’re starting in the chord,

have that locked in your mind, and know what number the note

is that you’re starting on so that you can have a good frame of reference.

The other thing is when you’re jumping between sections

of a song, if you’re going from maybe a pre-chorus to a chorus or whatever,

that transition can be hard to find oftentimes because sometimes the harmony

will end on one note and then you have to hop to another note.

That transition is hard.

Usually, you really have to drill and practise those transition points

to know what you’re doing so that you’re not just guessing things

and and you know how to handle it. Yeah.

Then how do they figure out where the notes start?

What advice do you have?

Obviously, it’s helpful to know what harmony you’re going for.

If you’re going to go in for the upper harmony, the lower harmony,

to map it out in your mind.

But then to know what chord is happening at that time and to know

which number you are starting on.

I always work on the scale degrees.

If you’re on that one chord and how great, 5, 1, you know that

your upper harmony is 1, 3. You know that you need to start on a 1.

Here’s your string, How, how, how, how. You’re trying to hear that first note.

Yeah, and you almost want to hear it in your head before you open your mouth.

Oh, yeah, definitely. That’s super important.

So much of music, guys, is visualising in advance.

I mean, that’s what great athletes do is they visualise.

I actually was just training a percussionist on my team, and I

threw him into the pre-service rehearsal, and he had never played with the band

or the click or the ears or anything.

He was feeling a bit overwhelmed, and he was forgetting what he was supposed

to do in which section of the song.

I told him afterwards, I said, Hey, the most important thing you can do

is not just do what you’re supposed to do right now, but think to the next section

of the song, what you’re supposed to do.

While you’re performing what you’re currently supposed to be doing,

think ahead to the next section of the song and think about what

you’re supposed to be doing then.

And then when you get to that section, think about what you’re supposed

to be doing then as well.

So the same thing can be true for harmony, which is to think ahead.

You’re singing your current note, you’re locked into that

and you feel comfortable, but now start thinking about the chorus

and think, what’s my first note? What’s my first note?

And this can all feel overwhelming at first, but eventually with time,

that’s why we tell all of our worship band members to practise, practise, practise,

practise, so that it becomes muscle memory so that you’re not on stage trying

to worship God, trying to lead the church, and trying to remember your note.

And of course, sometimes you have to do all that.

But the more you practise, the more natural it becomes.

It’s muscle memory.

So thinking ahead is important.

Is there any other advice voice for how to know which note to sing?

You talked about in the verse, you’re going to end on this note,

and then you’re going to jump to a different over the course.

How can you know where you’re supposed to be?

It comes down to really the muscle memory as well.

You have to practise that transition and practise how the note finishes

and then practise how it’s going to go next and get that in your voice

and do it multiple times.

The transitions are really where you need to practise more

than oftentimes the rest of it because in a course, you’re just locked in.

But you need to work on those transitions and really spend some time there,

get your voice, get those muscle memory, and then you just

are thinking ahead and know what to do. You have it planned out.

And oftentimes, you can use certain cues.

You can use maybe if the melody is doing something or if you can find things that

other people are doing that can help you.

But then you never know If they don’t sing it right, you might be stuck.

So you can’t be completely relied on other people.

So I think it’s really helpful to just have your note locked into the chord.

And so you know the harmony is going to hopefully play right unless somehow

the band plays the wrong chord.

But you know what note you’re inside the chord, so you just go for it.

Yeah.

Let’s talk about stacking multiple harmonies.

Obviously, songs have at least two harmonies,

and then sometimes the octave melody.

We don’t need to talk about the octave melody because that’s pretty easy.

And by the way, guys, in the Musical Excellence course,

there is a whole lesson about how to arrange your vocals for worship.

So when to bring in the first harmony, when to bring in the second harmony,

when to add that top melody.

And so check out the lesson in the Musical Excellence course

about arranging vocals for worship.

But let’s just talk about the technicality thealities of finding the notes.

We’ve talked about how to find the first two most natural notes because the way

that I think about it is there’s the melody, and then there’s the harmony

that’s closest to it, and then there’s the harmony

that’s technically further away.

You call it the third and the fourth.

Well, no, you’d be on the third, and then if you’re going up, it’d be a fifth.

Fifth, okay. The third or the fourth is depending on…

This is actually important.

The closest harmony is going to always be at an interval of a third

or a fourth, depending on the chord.

Because if the A third is a C major chord, and we got a C and then an E.

But let’s say we’re an F chord.

If the chord is an F chord, you’re not going to be singing a third above, you’re

going to be singing a fourth above.

Then your next harmony is a sixth above.

But if you think of it stacking this way, like melody, tenor, alto, or something

like this, then you’re going up.

But you can also think of a fourth above.

In this case, instead of six above, you can also think of third below.

It’s always thirds or fourths away from the melody in that sense, up or down.

That makes a lot of sense.

What Nate’s saying is you have the melody, and then the first harmony

above that melody is always going to be a third above or a fourth

above in terms of the scale.

Depending on the melody, depending on the chords.

Exactly.

Okay, so that’s what you meant by third and fourth.

Okay, so with that said, there’s the melody, then there’s the third

or the fourth above note, and then there’s the fifth or the sixth

above note, which is furthest away from the melody in terms of the scale.

Now, one thing that I like to tell

the vocalists on my team is, if I’m going to stack the melody

in the harmonies, I want to start the melody,

and I want to add the harmony that’s closer to the melody,

and then I want to add the furthest away harmony, because it just sounds really

weird when there’s this huge separation between the melody and the furthest away

harmony, unless Unless you drop that harmony below the melody, then

it’s actually the closest to the melody.

I’m going to disagree with you a little bit.

Go ahead. Don’t disagree.

I think that that works well.

But sometimes I would actually purposefully have a further away harmony

If you want to build the song a little more, let’s say, the song wants to get

more energy and that person singing close to you, it’s not energetic enough,

or if the ranges are too low.

If you’re a guy singing down here, if you’re singing a third away from me,

If we sing all in this range, it sometimes sounds too muddy,

and I don’t like that sound.

I’m going to have you sing.

That’s one consideration.

The ranges you’re singing in and what energy you want

to build in the song, sometimes, the further away harmonies work.

Then the other thing is, if the harmony closest is mainly going in fourths

intervals because of the chords, it sometimes doesn’t sound so good to have

a harmony that’s moving in fourths a lot.

It sounds better to have a harmony that’s moving in sixths more.

For example, actually, we can look at I surrender all, if that’s okay.

Sure. All to Jesus, I surrender.

That’s our melody.

Of the closest harmony above, the melody is on a three,

the closest above would be a five.

It’d be, All to Jesus, I surrender. Lovely.

So that actually sounds really nice with Alex, you’re singing, and you were

singing the further away one, right?

You were going, All to Jesus, I All to Jesus, I surrender.

And now sing All to Jesus. Sing that one.

All to Jesus, I surrender. Right.

And so then we might decide that you and I are too close there, and we sound

a little too it’s like muddy down there.

So we might do the larger octave.

And then this is a really good example of when you use thirds and fourths,

we just say, Do a third or a fourth.

And it’s hard to see sometimes.

I’m going to play the melody and sing the harmony so we can hear both.

I will ever love.

There, we’re going to do a fourth with the melody because it’s a G-cord.

It wouldn’t sound so good.

I will ever love.

Now we’re getting that dominant seven.

Are we on the five-cord for that? We’re on the five-cord.

That’s exactly what I’m talking about, guys.

That five-cord in the scale, if you don’t keep your harmony

where it is, if you keep following your interval, it just sounds funky.

Here’s a little caveat because depending on the range you’re singing in,

it can’t sound okay with just two parts.

But when you add the third part is when it really starts getting dicey

because look, if we get the third part in there, I will ever love.

If you sing that, then you get a full-on diminished cord, and that’s

what really doesn’t sound good is when we get a diminished chord.

I think that avoiding the dominant seven can’t if it’s just two parts

because it’s not such a terrible thing.

If you hear It’s okay. It works.

But if you hear…

That’s what we don’t like.

When it’s three parts, it really sounds bad.

Sometimes that’s where you have to modify.

Then, instead of going, I will ever love…

That’s our bad note.

We go, I will ever love and trust him.

You keep it where it was.

It makes the harmony boring because it’s not following the melody

the same because your ear wants to always follow the melody.

You have to go, I will ever love and trust him.

Harmonies just one note while the melody is going to love and trust him.

You’re feeling like, I’m missing out.

I’m not singing with the melody more, but that’s the better option.

That’s why you would sing a fourth over a third because you’re matching that chord.

The melody is moving, but your harmony is staying still.

For those who are listening to the podcast, I wish you would just hop

over to the YouTube channel because you can see how I’m showing it with my hands.

But yeah, so sometimes the harmony is actually going to just keep one

note, even though the melody is jumping across multiple notes

because that harmony single note matches the cords underneath it better.

This is really good.

Now with the three parts, the question was, how do we work with three parts?

You have the three parts, you’re going to be creating

a full on triad, a full-on chord on every single syllabus that you sing.

You’re going to have what’s called passing notes that are going

to be on different cords.

In this sense, our first All to Jesus is going to be a regular C

chord, and that’ll work out great.

But on the syllabus G, we’re going to have to, with a three-part chord,

everyone’s going to be moving up to all to Jesus, and then All to Jesus.

We’re going to be going on a C chord, and then for a second,

we’re going to a D minor chord, and then coming back to a C, right?

That’s part of what’s going on.

With three-part harmony, like I said, with harmonising,

you’re creating these colours.

Your job is to try to figure out what chord is going to sound the best there.

It might be… You don’t want to do something like that.

That doesn’t sound so nice.

I will ever instead of I will ever.

What I like to do when you’re in three-part harmony to figure

what passing notes to sing on, because as a singer, you’re singing

through these passing notes.

My advice is that you should always, when you’re doing passing notes, try to

avoidd