29 Worship Tools for Under $29, Part 12
By Jon Nicol
The acoustic guitar reigned king of the worship team for the better part of two decades.
It was a great time for us acoustic wood-choppers, amen?
But in many modern worship albums, you now have to strain to hear the guitar on anything but the slow ballads. The electric guitar has taken control of the bus.
So what if you want to create a modern sound in worship and all you have are a bunch of wood-chopping acoustic players. Two things:
First – understand that the acoustic guitar and electric guitar are two different instruments. Even though frets and strings are identical, each required a different approach.
Second – they’ll need to learn something more than open position chords and basic barre chords. Playing electric guitar for modern worship music goes so far beyond the standard Mel Bay Chord Book chords.
Here are two tools for under (or close enough to) $29 that can give to your strummers to help them make the leap to the solid body.
The first one is my training DVD, Lead: Step One.
A ton of electric guitar playing is based on scales and other single line riffs. Lead: Step One will help you know the scales up and down the neck. It will also teach you how to improvise.
The video is split up into short, easy-to-digest lessons. Each lesson is easy to access as chapter of the DVD. If you want to download Lead: Step One, each part is in a separate video file, so you can access only the parts you want to learn. In fact, you can just buy the parts you want a la carte. You don’t need to buy the whole thing.
One last thing about the Lead Step One video. If you’d like to share it with several players on your team, you can buy the Church Copy License for only $10. This license allows you to give as many copies to players on your team as you would like.
Watch a bit...
Tool #21: LeadWorship's Electric Guitar (Paul Baloche & Ben Gowell)
Now, if you don’t like me, here’s another guitar video to check out. Ben Gowell is an amazing guitarist who plays with this little-known worship artist named Paul Baloche.
Ben and Paul teamed up to create an electric guitar video. Where my video focuses mostly on scales and some improve techniques, the Gowell/Baloche project deals with other electric guitar issues, including tone, equipment and effects, etc. Currently, on Paul's site, this video will run you 50 cents over our $29 cut-off. But it's good, so I don't think you'll mind.
Between these two resources, you could transform at least one your 1990s wood-choppers into a modern sounding electric guitarist.
July 17, 2012
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