Grishka - to be completely honest, what I'm after is a way of adding a tolerable basic harmony line to a tune without too much effort (with the option of writing a good harmony later, of course). To put it another way, what I'm after is Teach Yourself Harmonising. I'm feeling my way into writing (and singing) harmonies, from a background of very limited experience of anything polyphonic (I sing solo and play whistle). I'm sure the comments along the lines of "rules are made to be broken" are all valid, but first of all I'd like to know what those rules are! (Neither Derek Bailey nor Wild Man Fischer played conventional guitar music - the difference is that Derek Bailey could have done. I don't really want to be the Wild Man Fischer of harmony.)

One thing that's struck me is that my conception of a harmony line is of a voice higher than the lead (possibly even a fifth higher) - and you see people talking about "high, soaring harmonies" and so on. But when I look at SATB choral arrangements, it generally seems to be the Soprano carrying the melody line with the lower voices supplying harmonies. Is the 'soaring harmony line' a folk thing?