Posts Tagged Electric Guitar
How to Become Your Worship Leader’s Favorite Musician
Posted by Jed in Uncategorized on April 3rd, 2009
Have you ever thought about what it would take to be your worship leader’s favorite musician? Unfortunately, many guitarists never do, but it can be a great mental exercise for us as guitar players and servants. When we do, we start thinking outside ourselves. When we start thinking outside ourselves we encounter paradigm shifts. When we have paradigm shifts, we start to grow. Here are some pointers to help get you started.
1. Always be on time. It communicates that you take the worship ministry seriously. If you take it seriously, your worship leader will take you seriously.
2. Ask yourself the question: “How can I make the ministry better in my worship leader’s eyes.” This will mean you will have to pay attention to your worship leader’s vision for the ministry, both in musical style and in worship expression. Sometimes we can think that by latching on to someone else’s vision we forfeit our own ideas. That is completely wrong. By latching on to our worship leader’s vision we give our own ideas more credibility.
3. Always tune up.
4. Come to rehearsal knowing your parts. Don’t treat rehearsal time as a time to learn your parts. Know them already. Your worship leader will love you for it.
5. Play for the song. Don’t play for a friend. Honestly look at what makes the song work and what it needs rather than what would impress someone you know in the audience.
6. Have good-sounding gear. Gear matters. I cringe whenever I hear someone refer to a well known player like John Mayer and attribute all of his good sounds to his hands. People completely look over the fact that he plays a $10,000 amp. Tone is in the hands, but it is certainly not all of it. If you don’t think your “hands sound good” than give yourself an advantage by surrounding yourself with high quality gear. If you have “good-sounding hands” then just think how much better you will sound when you have a good amp, instrument and pedals.
7. It is worth repeating: Always tune up. Have a quick, convenient way to tune (in other words, buy a pedal tuner) so you can easily tune during a song without interrupting the flow of the song.
8. Don’t just play the song, lead worship. You are not just a guitar player. You have a part in leading worship. Your role is beyond just playing a song like on the CD; your role is to inspire your congregation to worship. You can’t lead where you don’t go. Are you yourself worshiping? If you are not and simply settling for providing a live backing track then you are not doing everything you can do to serve your church well. In addition, you are missing what God has in store for you during worship.
The goal is to be the person your worship leader never has to worry about. When your worship leader sees you on the list of musicians playing this week he or she should feel a little better knowing you are on the team. That is the secret to becoming your worship leader’s favorite musician.
Oh, and one more thing: sound good.
-Jed
How to Program Your Fingers into Greatness
Posted by Jed in Uncategorized on March 17th, 2009
Do you remember the scene in The Matrix when Neo is “training?” Morpheus looks over at Neo strapped to a chair with a jack in his head and Neo says with tired surprise in his voice, “I know Kung Fu.”
Neo had Kung Fu programmed into his mind like a computer program. What may surprise you is that your fingers are not so dissimilar. In order for our fingers to learn they have to be programmed.
Unfortunately for us we can’t just plug a jack into our fingers and use binary code to program them. The way we program our fingers is by repetition. Remember the Law of Guitar Playing: the way we do things once is most likely how we will do it again.
This brings up an interesting dynamic to playing guitar: if you play it badly once you are more likely going to play it badly again. Before you get depressed you need to know the exception to this rule: just because you play something slow doesn’t mean you can’t play it fast next time and vice versa.
The question is how can we use repetition to “program” our fingers to do what we want them to do? Here’s how.
• Play it slow and perfect. To play an unfamiliar passage “perfectly” you have to play it slowly.
• Use a metronome. Unlike us metronomes are perfect. To program our fingers perfectly we need to play to something that is perfect.
• Don’t attempt to play it fast until you are satisfied with how you play it slow.
• Relax man. Muscle tension is like a computer virus. Debug your muscles by practicing as relaxed as possible.
Programming your fingers can take longer than it took Tank to program Neo’s mind, but the effects are just as significant. Start the process now and you will be a Guitar Fu master sooner than you think.
You can sound good.
-Jed
3 Vital R’s to Reach Guitar Perfection (1 of 4)
Posted by Jed in Uncategorized on March 2nd, 2009
Practice makes perfect, right? For some of us this mantra has become like a thorn in our flesh. We practice until our calluses hurt and our wrists are sore and we don’t seem to be anywhere closer to perfect than when we started. So what do we do? Give up our dreams of playing the way we want to or burn out and give up playing all together.
Well…“perfect” players do practice… a lot, but so do we. We have seen people who hardly practice yet they seem to find that mysterious destination called “amazing.” Not right away, but gradually, little by little they get closer and closer to that goal of being God’s guitar hero of the Sunday Morning Service. Why? Because practice makes perfect. Right? Sort of.
Our practice decides our performance. How we play in our practices will be how we play in a performance. Perhaps it is more accurate to say “perfect practice makes perfect playing.” So we must change our mentality for our practices. Often times we think of practices as a time to just play guitar without really paying attention to how we are playing. Practice is the time to make mistakes, but if we practice with the three “R’s” we can make sure it doesn’t happen outside of our private practice sessions.
1. Relaxation. Muscle tension is the number one inhibiter keeping most guitarists from excellence. If excellence was Batman, tension is the Joker with a backyard pool of that laughing gas poison stuff he has. If you’re Superman, tension is Kryptonite. It is evil. Especially when you practice. Muscle tension will keep you fingers and hands from moving smoothly and quickly. When you pick up the guitar, concentrate on your muscles and check to see if any of them are tight. When practicing a riff, progression or solo you want only the necessary muscles to be taut, everything else should be as loose as possible. When are you too relaxed? When you fall over and don’t even put you hands out to catch yourself…that’s when.
2. Repetition. How you do something is most likely how you will do it again. Our fingers and hands are like pets. They won’t start off doing what you want but if you take time to train them they will become blue ribbon pedigrees wanting nothing more than to obey your every command. The way to teach your fingers in training is to run through things slowly and perfectly. Every time you do, it “teaches” your fingers the motion you want them to take. With every run-through your fingers start to get it more and more. The more they get it the less you have to think about playing it and you can play it at full-speed smoothly. The more intentional you are while playing slowly the less you have to be when you play fast.
3. Reward. If you don’t enjoy your practice sessions are you really going to want to practice again? Great guitar players become great players because they love the process of getting better. Make your practices enjoyable. It doesn’t always have to be rudiments and metronomes. Playing the guitar has to be just that: playing. The first step of greatness is loving the road that leads us there. WOW THAT’s DEEP. That was worth the whole blog right there.
Just more ways to sound good.
-Jed