Guitar Chord Voicing – Introduction April 23, 2007
Posted by Phillip in Guitar, Guitar Lessons, Music, Music Theory, Worship.trackback
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.
great….looking forward to reading it….do yourself a favor and buy a kyser cut capo…it def. changes the voicing.
with electric I always go back to U2…. they overdubbed like 4 or 5 guitars and yet it doesnt feel crowded
For whatever reason, I’ve never been able to bond with capos. Maybe I’ve just seen too many bad “campfire guitarists” use them as a crutch.
oh yeah for sure…im not a fan of that usage…but listen to say crowder on all creatures or billy foote…guys who use the capo to compliment the sound…and add the cut capo and you have a new dynamic. I have also noticed that using the cut capo makes me think different about melody…its great for writing music with.
I 2nd the cut capo. This past weekend I had 3 guitarists (unusual but fun) and I got the chance to work with many different voicings. 1 stayed open the entire time (never capoing or anything like that), the other one and I capoed yet at different stages, I even pulled out the cut capo a couple times. It was great! Huge sounding!