Artificial harmonics are one of the most beautiful and criminally underused colours available on the guitar — they can make a single-note line shimmer like a harp or add an almost orchestral shimmer to your playing. Gretchen Menn, a player celebrated for her originality and technique, takes you on a structured deep dive into what harmonics are, why you’d want them, and exactly how to get them.
What you’ll get out of this lesson: By the end of this session you’ll understand the physics behind harmonics, know how to produce clean artificial harmonics at multiple divisions of the string, and have a set of step-by-step exercises — available in the downloadable Dropbox folder — to take these techniques into your own writing and playing.
Download The Exercises and Slides Here
Watch Gretchen’s full performance of Venice below
What Harmonics Actually Are
Every note you play on a guitar is already a mixture of a fundamental pitch and a series of overtones — these are the natural harmonics that live inside every vibrating string. When you lightly touch a string at certain nodal points (dividing it in half, thirds, quarters and so on) without pressing it down to the fret, you silence the fundamental and let only the higher overtones speak. Pythagoras mapped these relationships and they’re the mathematical backbone of all Western tuning. You don’t need to go deep into the maths, but knowing that the harmonic at the halfway point (the 12th fret position) is an octave above the open string, and the one at the third (7th fret) is an octave plus a fifth, gives you a framework you can actually use on the fretboard.
Artificial vs Natural Harmonics
A natural harmonic uses an open string as the starting point. An artificial harmonic — also called a harp harmonic — lets you use any fretted note as the “open string,” then lightly touch the string twelve frets above that fretted pitch with the right-hand index finger while plucking with the right-hand ring finger (or thumb). This means you can produce harmonics on any pitch, in any key, anywhere on the neck. That’s the game-changer. Gretchen notes that the sound she demonstrated at the start — those bell-like, harp-esque tones — was entirely without a backing track, and even without heavy delay (though delay is “very magical” with harmonics).
Mechanics: How to Get a Clean Harmonic
The right-hand touch has to be light and precise — think of it as a gentle graze at exactly the right point, not a press. If you push down, you deaden the string; if you’re even slightly off position, the harmonic won’t speak cleanly. Gretchen walks through the mechanics step by step in the video, and her keynote slides (available in the Dropbox folder) lay out the nodal positions you need to target. The key practice principle she emphasises is going back to fundamentals even if you’ve used harmonics before: a fresh look at the basics almost always reveals something deeper.
Working Through the Exercises
The session is built around a series of graded exercises — from getting your first clean artificial harmonic to moving them melodically and eventually incorporating them into your own compositions. Gretchen encourages noodling along on your guitar as she talks through the material; this isn’t a lecture to sit back and absorb, it’s a workshop you should engage with actively. The Dropbox folder includes the full keynote as both a Keynote file and a PDF, plus all the musical examples as separate documents and a few bonus exercises for those who want to go deeper.
My goal today is to give you guys encouragement to go down a rabbit hole that I’ve found to be very rewarding.
Taking it further: Once you can reliably produce artificial harmonics on single notes, explore using them in melodic lines — moving the harmonic touch point as you move the fretted note. Adding even a touch of reverb or delay opens up textures that are genuinely orchestral. Gretchen also mentions using them in writing: these are compositional colours as much as techniques, and they work beautifully in acoustic fingerpicking contexts as well as electric.
Your homework: Download the Dropbox folder and work through Exercise 1 this week. Get one clean, clear artificial harmonic on a single fretted note before you try to move it. Once it rings clearly, try moving it up and down one string step by step, maintaining the twelve-fret gap between your fretting finger and the touch point. Aim for five minutes of focused practice daily.