Does anyone know how to record guitar harmonies like Syn?

[Alex Haysom]

Hey guys, this is a question for all the audio engineers. Does anyone know how to record guitar harmonies like syn does? Something like when the whole band kicks in at the start of Buried alive Does he play 5ths or 7ths but pan one left and one right? Or is it More than 2 harmonies recorded?

 

[Alex Haysom]

And pretty please keep it on the basic haha I’m Not very educated with keys and scales, although I’m working on it

 

[João Jófili]

Hey, man! I am a pretty amateur when it comes to theory. Still, I have a lot of experience with mixing, not as good as Syn, of course, but enough to do some covers of my own. Regarding your question, I see that Syn do record two guitars to harmonize, and in Buried Alive, he does record both guitars and pan them to, I think, 75-85%, one to the left channel (generally the main part) and one to the right (generally the harmony part.) Hope it helps!

 

[Alex Haysom]

Thanks João!
It does help! I’ve been recording them panned 99% but it doesn’t sound as good. I’ll give 75-85% a go later on! So are the panned equally or is one guitar dominating the other?

 

[Ryan Athey]

It’s kind of a complicated answer.. the best solution is to play around with it but as a rule: write a melody ( say, bat country harmonized bit) and harmonize a 3rd above that melody.
Take into account what key you are in and try your best to compliment what chords you’re playing over ( that is where it gets tricky )
A good exercise: over whatever chord you want ( say D major for this example ) play the scale of the chord ( D major scale ) starting on the tonic ( D )
After tracking that, do the exact same thing except start a third higher ( the previous note is D, so a third would be F#, or F if in minor ) play the scale starting from that F# and you will have a harmonized melody

 

[Filip Tomiša]

If you have 2 guitars you can record both of them and pan one on the left channel and the other one on the right because then the sound “picture” changes and it sounds more interesting. In studios it’s common to use 2 different guitars or same guitar but different amp, or same guitar and amp but different mic and it just sounds better.

 

[Cedric L]

Ryan is right. You can look at the tabs and try to understand it. https://www.songsterr.com/a/wsa/avenged-sevenfold-buried-alive-tab-s61130t4?c=52999
When the beat kicks in (at 0:51) the first note is A (Zackys tabs) so Syn is playing a C
Because: C D E F G A B C (Scale)
. .
You start at the A and you take the third note from the A. Thats a C.
The second note he plays is a B so the third would be a D. And this is what Syn is playing.
Sry for my bad english. Hope you understand it.

 

[Andrew Fernandes]

Synyster Gates told me when we had the skype call. How he harmonises Here is the video.

 

[idssdi]

Effectively Harmonies tend to be just notes harmonically sound great together (there is some theory behind this but I will leave that out for now). As you can hear from the video Andrew shared Syn doesn’t really like Thirds and fifths so you if you wanna write Harmonies like Syn you can leave those out.