This is the first section of “Guitar Harmonics – A Short Introduction”
Natural Harmonics are called ‘natural’ mainly because they utilize the natural nodes of an open string.
This means that you can do natural harmonics just by picking and touching the string at certain areas on the string with the fretting hand (usually the left for right handed players).
That may not sound like it makes much sense. It will when you know how to do artificial harmonics, which have to be done not just with the left hand, but also with the right hand. A better description will come with the next article on artificial harmonics.
Alright, now lets explain a little bit of Theory:
The Basic Theory
You can get a great explanation of harmonics on wikipedia on the article on ‘Guitar Harmonics‘. However, as stated before, it can get really technical and thus some distillation of information is required.
Essentially, you really only need to know one thing.
That is that a harmonic is created by sounding the natural overtones of an open string. What you are doing in a natural harmonic, is shortening the string by an integral factor. This means halving the string, cutting the string into 4, 5, or any other integer.
By shortening the string, you essentially get it to vibrate at a higher frequency. By cutting it in half, you cause it to vibrate twice as fast, and thus, the pitch is twice as high.
Now, take a look at the image below:
Taken From the Wikipedia article on "Guitar Harmonics" (Click to view large image)
This image shows us the many many different natural harmonics that can occur on the fretboard.
However, trying to sound all of them will be met with failure, at least in the practical sense.
By trying to ‘cut the string into too many parts’, the volume of the harmonic is essentially made so soft that you can’t hear it.
For practical purposes, the 3 main natural harmonics occur at the 1st (halving the string), 2nd (cutting the string into thirds) and 3rd (cutting into quarters) nodes. These correspond to the 12th fret, 7th fret and 5th fret respectively.
Now that the theory is done with, let’s get on to…
How to Do Harmonics
Admittedly, this is the shortest section.
It is the shortest mainly because natural harmonics are so easy to do!
You do them by lightly touching the area that corresponds to this factor, and then picking with the right hand, while simultaneously letting go of the fretting hand.
Alright, that sounded a little complicated, so let’s break it down into 3 simple steps.
- Depress the string slightly with the left hand so that it just touches the 12th, 7th or 5th fret. Make sure it touches it very lightly.
- Get your right hand into picking position
- Count 1,2,3 and pick with the right hand while releasing the left hand at the same time. You will hear a high pitch sound which should correspond to the note + 1 octave
That’s it! Now all you need to do is to keep practicing them until you can pull them off without thinking.
I must mention that the easiest harmonic to do will be the one on the 12th fret, while the hardest of the 3 will be the one on the 5th fret. By ‘hard’, I mean that the timing of the right hand picking and the left hand release must be better aligned. In a sense, this is sorta because cutting the string into quarters (as is with a 5th fret harmonic) is ‘harder’ than cutting it into half (on a 12th fret harmonic).
So if you haven’t tried harmonics, try them out now and see how you can place them into your playing.
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