Acoustic Guitar:
- Keep your guitar in tune. Keep your strings fresh and buy a tuner and regularly tune your guitar during the song set between songs or when you aren’t playing. I learned this the hard way, but that’s another story for another time.
- Learn different strumming patterns. It’s easy to fall into the trap of getting comfortable with what you’re familiar with. Stretch yourself and challenge yourself to learn knew patterns. Hint: A 3/4 waltz pattern doesn’t really work in a driving 6/8 song.
- Know when to simplify your strumming pattern. Especially if you have a drummer, your strumming pattern should become much simpler as the drummer will carry the intricate rhythmic parts.
- Practice. Practice. Practice.
Electric Guitar:
- Keep your guitar in tune. See above.
- Learn scales. Major, minor, blues, pentatonic, five-note, any kind of scale you can. This will help you more easily create lead lines.
- Play in the cracks. Read yesterday’s post for the piano players on this one.
- Be comfortable with playing a lot less. You’d be surprised how little professional electric guitar players play sometimes. Learn how to use your guitar to color the music, not dominate it.
- Moderate your patches. There is a time for super-overdrive-fuzz in the church, but it’s rare. Very rare. Use discretion and discernment in what sounds you use.
- Listen to recordings and learn the original guitar parts. There are literally thousands of rockin’ lead lines that have already been written by great guitar players that go with many of our worship songs. Train your ear to learn them and then practice them so they become a part of your playing.
- Practice. Practice. Practice.
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