A Quote by Brian May

I had this big thing about guitar harmonies. I wanted to be the first to put proper three-part harmonies onto a record. That was an achievement. — © Brian May
I had this big thing about guitar harmonies. I wanted to be the first to put proper three-part harmonies onto a record. That was an achievement.
I tend to like the traditional sound: three-part harmonies, guitar, and piano. I mean, a well-played guitar is a joy forever... or something.
Harmonies come really naturally to me. I don't have to labor too hard over them. I'll sing a lead vocal, and then I will immediately have all of these other ideas for vocal harmonies. I think that some of the most fun parts of recording, for me, are the vocal harmonies.
I sing both in my shower and in my car, mostly in my car, because I have this weird thing - whenever I'm singing to the radio - my friends kind of hate it - but I pick out the harmonies in my head, and I'm singing the harmonies to the tracks and I'm jamming it out.
I was three or four, and my mother would have a Bing Crosby record playing through the house. It was my introduction to jazz, harmonies, melodies, musicianship, and emotion.
My vocation is more in composition really than anything else - building up harmonies using the guitar, orchestrating the guitar like an army, a guitar army.
La solitude re tablit aussi bien les harmonies du corps que celles de l'a" me. Solitude restores the harmonies of the body no less than those of the soul.
I got this Christmas gift with the entire Beatles catalog. I had fun trying to duplicate what I was hearing on these records, only using the instruments I had at hand - an acoustic guitar, and that's all. It was endlessly amusing to me to try to imitate John Lennon and Paul McCartney's harmonies using the guitar.
I do some three-part harmonies on 'Throes of Rejection' and 'Hard Lines, Sunken Cheeks,' but I didn't go overboard with it.
The first thing people look at with Four Seasons records is the vocals. But for me, the drum fills and rhythms are as much a part of it as anything. They're the base on which the harmonies were built.
Our music is an answer to the early Seventies when artsy people with big egos would do vocal harmonies and play long guitar solos and get called geniuses.
The bass line is the anchor for me. I started with the bass, and either doubled that and then added the harmonies, or sometimes added my own harmonies that I've always wanted to sing on the song. And then it just went on from there - singing violin parts and trumpet parts and just trying to emulate the sounds of the instruments.
If it has to be put in a box, it's a country record. But it's hard to do that, because it is inspired and influenced by the history of music in two different people's backgrounds. I think the focal point for many is the harmonies, and I think that is what is special and unique about it.
I used to write three- and four-part harmonies for my YWCA club in high school. We used to win all the song contests. But people would say, 'Look who her father is. He probably did the whole thing.'
The inspiration for our vocal harmonies was sort of Appalachian. It's sort of at weird intervals, and it almost has an Appalachian kind of feel to it. The harmonies were really spontaneous. And the way we jammed, we would just get into a trance.
I would say 'Bye Bye Love' is one of my favorite influential songs to this day, and ironically, they were so in sync with their harmonies that they sounded like one person. That approach to hearing and formulating harmonies stuck in my head, so when I joined the Eagles, my ear was trained to be able to hear a vocal that way.
I pay such close attention of the record making process that most people would assume are very little and wouldn't be that big of a deal; the packaging, the title, and the harmonies, I think, are arguably as important as the lead vocals.
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