Leading With Guitar
January 10th, 2006 by Travis Swan | Posted in Gear
As I write for rockworship.com I am forced to more deeply examine the things I do as I lead people in worship. Many things are deeply spiritual. Lately I’ve been considering how to enter Christ’s rest and have faith that He will do all the work in the service. Much of what I think about though wouldn’t necessarily be called spiritual. For instance, I do a lot of thinking about my electric guitar, and all the things I can do to make the sound enhance the worship experience.
I’ve never really considered myself a guitar tech guy. I have definite standards for sound though. I started off with an acoustic guitar about 13 years ago. I used to plug it into a karaoke machine in my room in junior high, turn it up all the way for “distortion,” and play. A few years later I got a cheap electric guitar and invested in a solid state Fender 12″ amp. I couldn’t ever figure out how to make it sound right, so I didn’t play it too much. It had two channels, clean, and distorted – I wanted to use the distortion, of course, but it made a lot of noise between notes and didn’t respond the way I heard electric guitars sound on recordings I liked.
In the meantime I began leading worship in junior high for a Young Life group – I was just planning on singing, since that’s what I was into, but the leader practically forced me to bring my acoustic guitar as well and taught me the basic open chords. I would sit and wait for a chord I knew to come along in the song, strum for a bit, then stop and wait for another chord I knew. The next few years were spent playing and singing every week, eventually I was put in charge of the entire thing, and eventually formed a whole band that played each week.
I had an old Gallien-Krueger bass amp that I’d plug my acoustic guitar into – and noticed for some reason it sounded better with the “compressor” button pressed, and something called “chorus” added. But if I added too much chorus, it sounded out of tune. At this point I hadn’t really heard of compression, preamps, noise gates, delays, or reverb. I only knew the sound I liked, and I couldn’t figure out how to create it. The bass amp came as close as I’d ever heard, so I stuck with it for awhile. Later, I met some really good guitarists that introduced me to effects. I also was involved in recording a bunch of albums, and closely followed the engineers around as they set things up and mixed. I took a break from guitar when we started the Rock in Fort Collins, and played bass guitar for three years – then we sent a church plant to Amsterdam, and I ended up back on guitar, leading the band. At this point I bought a whole bunch of guitar gear, and with other guitarist friends (one of which is now a professional sound engineer), I experimented and finally got the sound I’d been hearing for so many years.
So down to the nitty gritty. Leading worship with guitar. I’m going to primarily focus on electric guitar, since that’s the majority of what I play.
The first thing of importance when leading worship with guitar is PRACTICE. Practice a lot. Buy a metronome and set the correct tempo for the song you are rehearsing, and play with the metronome. You won’t believe the difference this will make in your playing! The more you practice, the less you are distracted by the mechanics of what you’re doing. Your band practice time can literally be cut in half if you practice beforehand. You will be much more effective at worshipping while you play because you won’t have to worry about your technique.
Here are things you need when playing electric guitar, which I will dive into with depth in a couple of future articles:
1. A good electric guitar. Don’t skimp in this area – play before you buy, plug it in, see how it feels. Listen for bad intonation, electronics, etc. Plan on spending money here.
2. Good strings. I replace mine every two or three weeks. Some guys I know replace them before every gig they play.
3. A good amp. More on this later.
4. Effects. More on this later as well.
5. A tuner. Preferably a stomp box such as Boss’s TU-2.
Check back again soon for the next article: Leading with guitar – Guitar Amplifiers!
This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 10th, 2006 at 2:52 pm and is filed under Gear. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Good stuff, Travis. Looking forward to this series.