Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

How does one get those amazing, ringing harmonics from an acoustic guitar? I've been told that striking the strings at the appropriate positions above the twelfth fret will cause the strings to ring out harmonically, but I've never had good results with this. Any hints?

It takes a light touch. find the proper position (should be directly above the fret, not where you normally place your finger), pick the note, then lift your finger off the string (so you don't accidentally deaden it).

You can also find good harmonics at frets 5, 7 and 9 (among others). Some will be stronger sounding than others.

Kris is right, a light touch and immediate release should do it.

Here's a little breakdown of the notes:
fret 12: one octave up
fret 7: one octave + perfect fifth
fret 5: two octaves
fret 9: two octaves + major third

There are some more, but they are faint, and tricky to find. Have fun experimenting and see what others you can discover!

Thanks, Kris and Jason! I'm going to play around with this tonight. Is there any theory to it Jason?

Once you get good at regular harmonics, you can try playing what Steve Goodman used to call "Mouse Music". Back when we used to play Chicago clubs like the Earl of Old Town we used to occasionally con him into doing a late-night song or two and there were a couple lead breaks that he'd play where all the notes were Mouse Music. Essentially, you flat pick and fret the notes like normal, but you choke up on the pick so that just a little bit of the tip is showing. When you pluck a string, you use a combination of the picking and at the same time you damp the string just a tiny bit with the side of your picking thumb. If you do it right, you get the note you're fretting, but quieter and what seems like about two octaves higher than it's supposed to be. It works on both acoustics and electrics and works best on positions between about the seventh and the twelfth fret. It takes a lot of practice to do it well, but it's kind of fun.

Check out the intro to "Horizons" by Genesis (Foxtrot, 1972). It's actually a Steve Hackett acoustic guitar solo. The intro and outro are all harmonics.

If anyone is feeling daring and would like to figure it out, here's a hint: low E and A strings are touched at the 7th fret, while the D, G, and B strings are touched at the 12th fret. Figuring out which strings to pluck when, well that's up to you!

The physics behind harmonics eludes me, but no the math. I'd bet dollars to donuts you could google it and find lots of stuff. What I do know is there are natural harmonics in any tone (except a pure sine wave). The "harmonic series" is a set of mathematical ratios that kind of serve as the basis of our Western 12-tone system. So when you hear an instrument play a note, you are actually hearing lots of notes at once. Playing "guitar harmonics" brings out these tones individually. It is the presence/absence and loudness of these harmonics that helps us distinguish one instrument from another.

For example, a flute is close to a pure sine wave so you have little to no harmonics. A clarinet has a very strong "fifth" somewhere in there (so if you hear a clarinet play C you are hearing a C and a faint G).

Ever heard of A440? It's the A somewhere near the left-to-middle of the piano, and a common tuning standard. It is a sound wave vibrating at 440 Hz, or cycles per second. Speed the wave up to 880 Hz and you have the note A, one octave above. Conversely, 220 is the A below A440.

So when you touch that 12 fret, you're cutting the length of the string in half (which is why a proper setup is so important) and doubling the frequency of the pitch. Voila, one octave above.

It gets more complicated and interesting from there, since you have things like 3:2 and 5:4 that fill in all the notes between the octaves. The 12 tones we use in western music are equally spaced in the MULTIPLICATIVE sense. Starting at any given note, each half step up is about a 5.9% increase in frequency from the previous note.

Other systems of music divide the octave differently. IIRC, the pelog scale (used in Indonesian gamelan music) divides the octave into five similar parts. So you end up with notes that aren't quite G, aren't quite G#, etc.

Is your head spinning yet? I know I need some coffee now.

There are more harmonics at the 4th fret & 3rd fret a 1/3rd along & 9th just for starters!

12, 7, 5, 4 & 3 & 1/3 sounds good in sequence

Not on an acoustic guitar, but check out Pastorius' bass harmonics in the Weather Report tune "Birdland"...as his left hand's moving, the spot where the harmonic is produced is moving as well, so he's having to move his right hand placement back and forth continually...and changing strings...and not using a pick...

What a scary freakazoid...

Jason, that is a really cool post. Even though I was aware of overtones and harmonics and such, I'd never really thought of individual notes that way (i.e. as a complex mass of individual frequencies). It makes me want to go exploring. I began to get some interesting results last night, and I think I'm going to add a pick-up to my acoustic so that I can bring them out more.

Thanks to Todd and John, too. I'm going to try some "mouse music" and the harmonics in and around the third and fourth frets tonight after work. Maybe I'll try some alternate tunings as well.

I call "mouse music" "squeakers" and they are a staple in heavy metal guitar leads.

For those of us who remember and played around with analog synthesizers a square wave is composed of a series of sine waves of various frequencies and amplitudes. The fundamental frequency is the highest amplitude and the other frequencies are all variously lower in amplitude. In fact, any waveform shape can be described mathematically as a series of sine waves all added together; square, sawtooth, triangle.

See "Fourier Transform" for more information.

Jeff Ament plays a fretless on the entire first Pearl Jam album; the harmonic work on "Evenflow" requires one to both finger the harmonic location on the neck AND pluck it with the right hand and then move one's left hand up the neck as the string continues to vibrate.

Wacky!

"Check out the intro to "Horizons" by Genesis"

Hmm, I just got done playing it! I first learned it in '75

Me too, Jeffrey...it's a great piece.

Makes you want to go straight into "Supper's Ready", doesn't it?

I've always liked that album side. Two songs: one is under two minutes, the other about twenty-five. First short song in G, then you have Supper's Ready starting on Am6 (or vii halfdim7 in key of G) which transitions us into B major via E major. Brilliant!

Walking across the...

It's been a long, long time...

...hasn't it?