Image Credit: Sebastian.Exploratorium
Guitar Harmonics are cool and can add that sudden zing! to your playing just when people least expect it.
Harmonics can be recognized by the sudden jumps in the pitch of a note. However, when you look at the guitarists hand, he/she may be fretting a 7 fret, but yet it sounds like a 19th fret!
The answer to how this happens lies in the nature of waves.
A vibrating Guitar string is basically a wave, and more notably and standing wave which looks something like the picture on the left. This wave can be then manipulated to achieve a guitar harmonic.
When you do a harmonic, what you are doing is shortening the string by a certain amount, to produce a new note of a certain pitch higher than the fretted note. These are done on various different nodes, and can be actually calculated using various formulas.
Thus, there’s a strict math behind harmonics, and a site like Wikipedia can tell you about that right here.
But that isn’t what I’m going to touch on. I’d rather focus on the practical aspects of harmonics for guitar players.
Note: This is not a discussion on the use of harmonics stylistically, it is just a discussion on how to do harmonics on an acoustic and electric guitar.
Though there are many categories of harmonics, I will categorize them broadly into “Natural Harmonics” and “Artificial Harmonics” and will follow up in two different posts.
Stay tuned.
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