Harmony and tuning, Harmony – TC-Helicon Quintet Manual User Manual

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HARMONY AND TUNING

Chord (Chordal) Mode
Chordal harmonies take your chord information
to create intelligent, diatonic harmonies based
on your voice. To make “Chordal” harmonies,
you need to input in real time the chords of the
song. This must be done via MIDI. Chord infor-
mation consists of the chord root and type,
which define the 3 or 4 notes in a given chord.
In Chordal mode the Quintet will only create
harmony voices that fall on the notes of the
chord. Chordal harmonies are “intelligent”
because they decipher the chord you’re play-
ing and the note you’re singing to produce
musically pleasing harmonies. When the
ABOVE voice key is enabled on the Quintet,
the next note from the chord above the input
note is output for that harmony voice.
The subsequent illustration shows the harmo-
ny notes for the C major scale with just the
ABOVE voice key selected.

Root: C, Chord Type: Maj, ABOVE voice key

Black = Lead; Grey = Harmony

You might have noticed that each harmony
note can cover more than one input note, or
that each input note doesn’t necessarily have
a unique harmony note. For instance, C and D
both have E as the 3rd above, E and F share
G, and so on. This gives a more stepped
sound to the harmony as the changes are both
greater in magnitude and less frequent than
when using other harmony methods (shift
mode for example). The benefit of this method
is that it is very easy to integrate vocal har-
monies into your songs if you already know
their chord progressions! The following lists the
chords available with respect to the root of “C”:

Harmony

Here's where we can go into a little more
depth about harmonies. We've tried to keep it
practical, focusing on what Quintet can do for
you.

Harmony Modes
Quintet has five different harmony modes,
which give five unique methods of creating
harmony. Once we get into describing the
more complex harmony modes, we’ll be show-
ing you examples based on the C major scale.
If you are unfamiliar with this scale we’ve
shown C major here.

Notes Mode
In this Mode, you provide the Quintet with spe-
cific MIDI note information to determine the
pitch of the harmony voices. Quintet has two
“Manual/Notes” harmony modes, single and 4
channel. The Quintet may be set to Notes 4
Channel mode through MIDI CC#74 (see the
MIDI implementation section of the manual).
Notes 4 Channel mode allows you to send 4
channels of MIDI information, one for each
individual harmony voice. This is the most
direct and flexible way of creating harmonies,
allowing you to weave complex melodies and
counter harmonies irrespective of your lead
vocal.

Shift Mode
Also known as “Fixed Interval”, this takes the
pitch of your lead voice and creates harmonies
a set number of semitones away, based on
that pitch. The method of creating harmonies,
using a fixed number of semitones relative to
an input note or pitch, is called chromatic har-
mony, the theory of which we'll go into later.
We consider this type of harmonizing to be
non-intelligent because Quintet is not set to
any particular key or scale. These are pure,
parallel harmonies. The VOICE keys in the
Quintet are set to the most common shift har-
mony voices which are the 5th (7 semitones)
and octave (12 semitones), ranging from two
octaves below the input to one octave above
the input pitch.

Maj

Maj6

Maj7

Maj7sus4

Min

Min6

Min7

C Eb G

Min7b5

Dim