Week 6 - Harmonizing Riffs

Hey everybody! This is Will Kriski. This is Week 6 of my Lesson a Week series. I had a request from the guy called Closer to Eternity from YouTube asking about harmonizing riffs, how do you that? So that riff you heard was from my tuning from the Week 3 of my Song a Week series called Metal Mayhem. A little bit crazy time signature at the beginning but essentially I wanted to harmonize a riff that I had at the beginning of the tune.

The first thing you want to do is understand what scale you are trying to use. So a lot of times in Metal you are using Minor scale, so let's say you are in the key of A Minor. Your notes are A, B, C, D, E, F, G and back to A again. So essentially what you do is, you go up a third; the easiest way to harmonize a line is to go up a third. That is, from a theory perspective, either a Minor or a Major third. But all you need to really think about is, if you are playing say an A in an A Minor scale, you are going to harmonize up a third, so you are going to go up two notes from that to C. So, if you are playing A, you want to harmonize it with C, and if you are playing a B you want to harmonize it with D and so on. So you can just go up two notes from where you are for each note.

If you know the positions of the scale, all the way up the fret-board, you can take a riff that you have got in one position and you can shift it up two positions and just keep the same pattern that you have done in the lower position but keeping in mind that some of the notes are a little altered when you shift up. Now, I don't totally advocate this idea because I am really thinking about what you are doing as far as the notes that you are playing and things like that. So I prefer that you think about each note what it is in what scale and how to go up a third from that.

In the riff that I did earlier, sometimes I use a bit of a neoclassical type of approach. So instead of going down a whole step between two notes, all I actually go down just a semitone. So it's a bit of a chromatic approach instead of going down technically to the correct note in the scale. So I am going to be putting up the tab right away here on my website, so you can see the riff that I did. Just basically harmonizing in thirds, it's a pretty standard and probably the simplest approach to harmonizing a riff or a scale. You don't have to just use it for Metal, you can use it in lots of different other genres of music.

So have fun with that one and I'll see you next week.


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