Music
Guitar Lesson 7: Harmonics
Before we begin, I want to start with a word of warning. This is probably the lengthiest, wordiest guitar lesson I’ll ever write. And don’t think that just because you know about harmonics or how to play them, you won’t get anything out of this lesson. I promise you, you will.
Thank you. Please pass “Go” and collect $200.
For some reason, learning harmonics doesn’t seem to be a priority for many guitar players. In fact, I’ve talked to a lot of guitarists who never use them, or they don’t know how to play them! The first couple of times I heard that there are people out there who can’t play harmonics, I was stunned. Now that I’ve grown accustomed to the idea, it’s.. well, it’s still stunning.
I love the guitar because you can do so much stuff with it. You can plug it into an amp, add a million effects, or play it unplugged. It’s one of the few instruments you can take with you on a camping trip and have a whole group of people sing along with you. It’s portable, versatile, and is the driving force for most modern music. The use of harmonics is highly underrated and I’m here this month to show you why you should learn about them and how you can explore new tonal qualities of your instrument. Playing harmonics will only make your music more interesting and pleasing to the ear.
Some people don’t know this, but harmonics are not relegated solely to the guitar. Harmonics can be played on any stringed instrument—even the piano! There’s a whole lot of math behind where harmonics occur on strings and why, but we’re not going to get into the nitty gritty of it all. However, I do request that you oblige me for a little while as I go into a simple explanation.
There are many definitions of the word “harmonic,” but I’ll list only the ones relevant to this lesson:
- An overtone accompanying a fundamental tone at a fixed interval, produced by vibration of a string, column of air, etc., in an exact fraction of its length.
- A note produced on a musical instrument as an overtone, e.g., by lightly touching a string while sounding it.
- A component frequency of an oscillation or wave.
In the words of Magnum P.I.: “I know what you’re thinking….” You weren’t thinking we were going to get into physics and math, were you? Mwahaha. I control the horizontal. I control the vertical. Well… I control this guitar lesson. You can skip over whatever you want. No one is making you read this.
Really.
I didn’t know this until I worked for Steve Vai and I had to set up the intonation on his guitars: the 12th fret on the guitar splits the string in half. In other words, there is just as much distance from the nut to the 12th fret as there is from the bridge to the 12th fret. When your intonation is off, that means that the string isn’t being equally divided at the 12th fret, so you need to adjust the distance between the bridge and the 12th fret in order to compensate and make the guitar sound more “in tune” as you play different notes all over the fretboard. Why is this important? Because the 12th fret is the easiest place to play a harmonic.
The 12th fret harmonic is the easiest natural harmonic to play because the 12th fret is directly in between the nut and the bridge. This position allows the string to have as much mass on each half of itself to vibrate and produce the harmonic. Am I getting too technical here? In other words, if you want to split a sandwich with someone, you (usually) want both of you to have an equal share. It would be most “harmonious” for both of you to have as much sandwich as the other. The same thing applies to the 12th fret harmonic.
Here’s a simpler explanation from Wikipedia:
In musical terms, harmonics are component pitches of a harmonic tone which sound at whole number multiples above, or “within”, the named note being played on a musical instrument. Non-integer multiples are called partials or inharmonic overtones. It is the amplitude and placement of harmonics and partials which give different instruments different timbre (despite not usually being detected separately by the untrained human ear), and the separate trajectories of the overtones of two instruments playing in unison is what allows one to perceive them as separate. Bells have more clearly perceptible partials than most instruments.
See? Piece of pie! It’s that easy.
That might not have made sense, but if you really want to know more about harmonics, you can read more about them at Wikipedia. What that crazy definition above is saying is that harmonics occur at certain places on the string according to mathematical fractions. We’ve already discussed that the 12th fret divides the string into two equal pieces (in other words, there’s a 1:2 ratio). Well, the other harmonics divide the string into parts with integers on both sides of the fraction, like 1/4 and 1/8. If you were playing a fretless instrument and you had a ruler, you could figure out where the harmonics are for that instrument if you did some simple calculations.
I don’t know about you, but I think all that is pretty dang cool.
Where was I? Oh yes! You probably want to get to the GUITAR part of this lesson!
There are technically two different types of harmonics you can play on the guitar and we’ll get to both of them in this lesson. The first kind is called a “natural harmonic” and the other is called, you guessed it, an “artificial harmonic,” sometimes referred to as a “pinch harmonic” depending on how the artificial harmonic is played. Let’s talk about natural harmonics.
Natural Harmonics
Technically, you can play harmonics all over the guitar at all sorts of different places on the fretboard, but here are the easier places to play harmonics:
- 12th fret: 1 octave higher
- 7th fret: 1 octave + 5th higher
- 5th fret: 2 octaves higher
- 4th fret: 2 octaves + Major 3rd higher (You can get these same harmonics at the 9th fret)
- 3.2th fret (not a typo): 3 octaves higher
That last harmonic at the “3.2th fret” is actually played just past the 3rd fret, between the 3rd and 4th vertical pieces of metal inlaid in the guitar neck. Before we delve any further, one last math thing, I promise:
For every octave higher you play with a harmonic, that’s how many times you’re dividing the string by two. It’s like folding a towel (you’ve always got to know where your towel is). Fold the string in half at the 12th fret and get a harmonic one octave higher than the open tone of the string, then you fold it again at the 5th fret (the 5th fret is halfway between the nut and the 12th fret) and get an octave higher than the harmonic at the 12th fret, then fold it again at the 3.2th fret (the 3.2th fret is halfway between the nut and the 5th fret) and you’ll get an octave higher than that! I’m sorry I’m so gushy over this stuff. With really thick strings that have a lot of potential energy (that means they have the capacity to vibrate a lot), you can get lots of cool harmonics. I think it’s really cool!
In order to play a harmonic, you lightly press your finger against a string, pluck the string, and release your finger from the string to allow it to vibrate. Hopefully, you get the idea.
Notice in the list above that the note possibilities are octaves, major thirds, and fifths. That means that there’s a lot of potential for writing melodies based purely on harmonics! Keep in mind, though, that the guitar is an imperfectly designed instrument and the accuracy of the harmonic notes may vary. Sometimes they’ll be in tune, sometimes they won’t. It really depends on the design of your neck and the quality of your instrument. At this point, I bet you head no idea there was so much to harmonics!
When I was younger, my father tried teaching me how to play “Horizons” by Steve Hackett. It’s a song off of the album Foxtrot by Genesis, back when Peter Gabriel was the lead singer. “Horizons” is a solo acoustic guitar piece that starts out with a nice rhythmic melody played solely with harmonics. Here’s the tablature and video:
Harmonics are usually notated with brackets
For the sake of space here, I will not put brackets
around each note. I'll put asterisks above the notes.
* * * * * * * *
|-----------------------|
|---------12------------|
4 |------12------12----12-|
4 |---12------------12----|
|------------7----------|
|-7---------------------|
Video:
That’s pretty simple and straightforward. The video goes over it slowly and then at full tempo, with a little more of the song so you get a feel for where it ends up going.
Another song using harmonics is Victor Wooten’s arrangement of “Amazing Grace.” This song will give you a good idea of how you can incorporate melodies into your playing. Since the lowest four strings on a standard six-string guitar are tuned the same as a bass, you’ll see that the tab is limited to those four strings. I apologize for the lack of proper spacing to imply note length. For the purposes of this lesson, the harmonics are the most important, not so much the music.
Harmonic notes are in parentheses for this Play this freely, without sticking to a solid tempo |----------|-------------------|------------|-- |----------|-------------------|------------|-- |----(5)---|-(4)-----(5)-(4)---|------(5)---|-- |-(5)------|----(3.2)----------|-(3.2)------|-- |----------|-------------------|----------3-|-- |--------3-|-----------------3-|------------|-- |-----------|----------|-------------------|-- |-----------|----------|-------------------|-- |-----------|----(5)---|-(4)-----(5)-(4)---|-- |------(5)--|-(5)------|----(3.2)----------|-- |-(3.2)-----|----------|-------------------|-- |---------3-|--------3-|-----------------5-|-- |-------------|-------|-------------|-- |-------------|-------|-------------|-- |------(3.2)--|-------|-(4)-(3.2)---|-- |-(3.2)-------|-------|-------------|-- |-----------5-|-7/8/9-|-------------|-- |-------------|-------|-----------3-|-- |-------------------|------------|-----------|-- |-------------------|------------|-----------|-- |-(4)-----(5)-(4)---|------(5)---|-----------|-- |----(3.2)----------|-(3.2)------|------(5)--|-- |-------------------|----------3-|-(3.2)-----|-- |-----------------3-|------------|---------3-|-- |---------|-----------------|-------|-0-|---| |---------|-----------------|-------|-1-|---| |----(5)--|-(4)-----(5)-(4)-|-------|-0-|-0-| |-(5)-----|----(3.2)--------|-(3.2)-|-2-|-0-| |---------|----------6---5--|---4---|-3-|-2-| |-------0-|-----------------|-------|---|-3-|
Here is a terrible version of me playing this. I haven’t even recorded the video as of this writing and I know for a fact that it’s going to be terrible.
You can also play an E minor pentatonic scale using solely harmonics like this:
|----------------------------------(12)-| Play |---------------------------(12)--------| this |-----0--------------(12)-------(7)-----| measure |-------------(12)-------(7)------------| backwards |------(12)-------(7)-------------------| and |-(12)-----(7)--------------------------| forwards
To make up for my butchering of Vic’s beautiful arrangement, here’s a wonderful video of Tommy Emmanuel playing harmonics from the intro to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” available on his soon-to-be-not-his-newest album, “Endless Road.”
That video leads us into our next topic: articifial harmonics. In fact, if you watch that second video of Tommy, you don’t have to read any more of this lesson because: a) I’ll never be as good as Tommy Emmanuel, b) he’s much more fun to listen to, and c) he covers a lot of what I want to get into.
Artificial and “Pinch” Harmonics
Artificial harmonics, as Tommy mentioned, aren’t actually artificial. They’re real harmonics, but artificial is the term used for a lack of a better word. I guess a better word might be “displaced” harmonics or something to that effect. What you’re actually doing when you’re playing an artificial harmonic is playing a natural harmonic by changing the length of the string. For those of you who aren’t math-y/science-y people, whenever you fret a note, all you’re doing is changing the length of the string. That’s why frets are on the guitar and they’re placed where they’re placed.
What we’re going to do here is hold the pick with our middle finger and thumb, and let our index finger hang out in the the air. Now wave it around like you just don’t care. ...sorry. Put your right index finger lightly on the 12th fret and use the pick to pluck the string so it makes the harmonic sound.
The next step isn’t really tricky, it’s just hard to explain. If you fret the second fret with your left hand (that’d be an F# on the E string), then pluck the harmonic on the 14th fret, you’ll get the harmonic that’s an octave higher than the fretted note (F#, remember?). Why does that work? Because you’re using your fretting hand to change the length of the string and 12 frets ahead of any other fret splits the length of the string in half. Crazy, huh?
Remember what I was yapping about at the top of this lesson? The 12th fret divides an open string in half between the nut and the bridge. Well, if you had the ability to break the nut into six movable nuts and play harmonics that were 12 frets higher than the nut’s position, you’d be playing harmonics that sound 1 octave higher than the note of the open string. Well, think about your fingers as those nuts and you’re doing the same thing.
If you’re playing a note on the Xth fret, then the X+12th fret is where the one-octave harmonic is. Guess what? The X+5th fret is where the two-octave harmonic is. And the X+3.2th fret is where the three-octact harmonic is! Fascinating!
What we’re going to do for the next exercise is play an E Major scale (that’s E F# G# A B C# D# E) with artificial harmonics. This is pretty simple if you got the technique I talked about earlier using your right index finger to fret the harmonic and your middle finger and thumb to use the pick.
For the following tablature, I’m going to tab out the frets you’ll be playing with your left hand and you’ll be using your right hand to fret the harmonic note 12 frets higher. Make sense?
Okay, now that we’ve done that, let’s take a look at “pinch” harmonics. I think they’re called pinch harmonics because you hold the pick at an awkward angle and pinch the string between your thumb and pick, only for an instant so as to create a harmonic.
Doing pinch harmonics is basically the same as what we did in the last exercise, except we’re going to use the thumb instead of the index finger AND we’re going to be doing the harmonics 24 frets higher than the note instead of 12 frets. It might make more sense after you watch the video:
For exercise 6, I’m going to illustrate that you can play all sorts of pinch harmonics while fretting a single note with the left hand. In this example, I’m fretting the G string at the 12th fret and illustrating a variety of pinch harmonic tones. The harmonics illustrated are the equivalents to 12th, 7th, 5th, 4th, and 3.2th (if I remember correctly), but played going the opposite direction down the string. This might make sense after you experiment a bit with the technique and physically understand why the string makes the harmonics it does.
Exercise 7 illustrates what I’m talking about in the last example with the translations of the 12th, 7th, 5th, 4th, and 3.2th harmonics but in the opposite directions on the string. These harmonics aren’t equidistant from the 12th fret, but proportionally equidistant. Again, this will make sense when you physically play.
Exercise 8 is something I made up called “altered” harmonics. What I do is play harmonics on the 12th fret with my right hand, then I play them again while fretting different harmonics on the left hand. The effect is strange and you can get a different variety of notes than the open, natural harmonics. Give it a shot!
The last few examples blew by because I can’t think about this lesson any more. It’s been a rough draft for over a week, which is just ridiculously long to me. I’m too lazy to write more detail. Oh well. I hope you get something out of this leson. Let me know via the e-mail link at the top of the page.