WorshipGuitarist

Well, my day off yesterday didn’t quite work out. I showed up at church at 9:00 (our first service is at 9:30) and the lead guitarist for the day hadn’t shown up yet. Our worship guy frantically asked me if I could step in at the last minute. Fortunately, I keep my amp and pedals at church, but I had not guitar. I borrowed a tele from our rhythm guy, so we were good to go. I have never really spent much time with a tele, but it was nice (’06 American Deluxe, I think).

Overall, things went okay (considering that fact that I didn’t go to rehearsal or sound check, we did a song that I have never played before, and I was playing an unfamiliar guitar strung with .009s). It could have been worse, but it could have been a lot better.

Our worship pastor recently scheduled me to have this coming Sunday off. I haven’t been given a day off in over a year. It’s strange to be in the congregation during worship. I always feel like I should be doing something.

In this installment I want to focus on the ‘C’ shape.

There are a couple of issues with this shape that make it undesirable in its present form.

One problem is that the fingering is somewhat awkward and doesn’t really lend itself to quick finger placement. The other problem is that it can sound muddy on the bottom if you’re playing with overdrive or distortion.

Here are a few variations on the theme:

These variations are all obviously much more manageable. So far, there’s not much to all this - the cool stuff happens when you see how these shapes fit together. The next lesson will deal with the ‘E’ shape and how it interacts with the ‘C’ shape.

See you next time.

Who else is ready for the return of Heroes tonight? It should be pretty good.

Every voicing that I use (excluding jazz harmony) is derived from one of the 5 basic open chords. These chords are the basis for the CAGED guitar system (ig is doing a series on these chords right now). In case you don’t know or forgot what the CAGED thing is, here’s a brief reminder. Please forgive my questionable graphics.

Along the same lines, we can move these chords up the neck to create the following barre chords. [The labels above each chord represent each chord shape. They do not reflect the names of each chord. I hope that makes sense.]

Obviously, several of these chords are impractical. The point of this exercise is not to play the entire chord; that would defeat the purpose. After all, we’re trying to limit the number of notes that we’re playing.

Now that we’ve established the material that we’ll be working with, we’re ready to start looking at some of the possibilities.

I’d like to address something that is often overlooked in the electric guitar playing community: music theory. Specifically, I want to talk about chord voicing. These lessons will be applicable to all types of music, but I’m going to focus my language to the specifics of playing in a “Praise & Worship” setting.

In my experience playing in P&W bands, most of the music is written in a lead sheet format. This means that the lyrics are printed (sometimes the melody line is provided in standard notation) with the chord symbols above the text. If you’ve got at least 2 guitars playing the same open position chords, it gets crowded really quickly. You can get away with this (to a degree) if you’re playing acoustic, but I’ve found that when playing electric: less is more.

Over the next few posts, I want to share some of my techniques for voicing common chord progressions. I will talk about voice leading, chord inversions, playing without a capo, and I will probably address some other topics that I can’t think of at the moment.

If there are any specific issues that you’d like me to address, feel free to comment and leave a suggestion.

We had rehearsal last night, and I’m proud to say that my student played really well. We met for about 30 minutes before practice and went over the songs that he didn’t really know and he pretty much nailed everything. I hope he gets to play with us on a regular basis.

Check it out

It should be pretty sweet, although the CGI on Venom looks a little cheesy.

This Sunday, one of my guitar students will join us on stage for worship.

He’s been studying with me for about a year and he’s made a lot of progress. He’s very competent, if a little hesitant at times. He’s been playing with the student band, but this will be his first time with the Sunday morning band.

I’m excited for him, but I can’t help but be a little nervous. After all, I’m the one who convinced the worship pastor that he’s ready.

Majestic (Brewster)

Indescribable (Story)

Hallelujah (Our God Reigns) (Hillsong)

Made To Worship (Tomlin)

Majesty (Here I Am) (Garrard/Smith)

Majestic (Closing Song)