Learning Worship Guitar

As worship leaders we are always trying to better ourselves and learn our art and our instruments better each and every day. While there are many resources that are well prepared, and very effective towards this end, I find they tend to fall into two categories:

The first are resources that are aimed at people who are literally just starting out. These resources tend to be very basic and very easy to understand and are necessary for any worship leader who literally just walked onto the scene.

The second group is those resources that deal with intense, and complicated licks, rifts, and tricks, based off of music theory, and a solid understanding of the guitar. Since many resources fall in these two groups, its important to make mention when a resource for the people trapped in the middle is discovered.

With that in mind, I would like to introduce to you a product produced by a company called “Musicademy” found at www.musicademy.com. The DVD is called “The Intermediate Acoustic Worship Guitar Course.” This DVD is over 7 hours long, and consists of three DVDs. Hence this post will only talk about Disc one.

I think the first thing to make notice of about disc one is the massive amount of content available. The whole disc is a little over two hours long and focuses mostly on strumming and strumming patterns for guitar. To present this information the viewer will find an incredible amount of sample strums taught through out the disc, along with techniques that will teach different ways to play the strums, and different tricks to embellish the strums and make them sound fuller, sadder, happier, or more interesting. To build off this information, the DVD backs it up with a large number of visual stimuli, which draw out each strum, and draw out the chords you are playing. The end result is you get to reinforce your learning by seeing the strums, hearing the host play the strum multiple times, and doing the strum all at the same time. In addition, all this information is backed up and reinforced by interview segments with familiar Christian worship leaders such as David Crowder, and Brenton Brown.

While the content by itself is expansive, the usefulness of everything they teach cannot be underestimated. For example, Everyone had to learn their “first strum,” and I strongly suspect that many of us learned the strum of 3 down strokes followed by one up stroke, which while it was a nice and easy strum that worked, it did not sound particularly “interesting” or exciting. The strums taught in this first disc are strums that, once you master them, sound really good and can be catered towards playing a song on your own or with a band. Another aspect that really puts these Musicademy lessons apart from others is that when they teach you how to strum, how hard to hold the pick, or how to manipulate a strum, the disc goes the extra step after teaching you the strum, or the chord trick and explains why that particular strum works in a particular scenario, or if they tell you to hold the pick a certain way they explain why you are doing this. In short their explanations make figuring out how to apply what they teach you to other songs significantly easier.

If you came to this disc and needed to learn everything that was taught on the disc, then disc one alone could easily provide two to three months worth of instruction for a guitarist to master. I have added a video below from the disc provided by Musicademy to help demonstrate just what I have been talking about. This video is the finale of disc one, it covers just about everything they teach you in the first disc. Look for the next post where I’ll talk about disc two.

Sample lesson – Tricks in G – taken from Musicademy Intermediate Acoustic Worship Guitar DVDs from Musicademy on Vimeo.

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