Worship Guitar Class Blog

Christian Guitar Lessons Blog

Guitar Care & Changing Strings

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The best way to clean your fretboard is to loosen all the strings & pull them off the fretboard, to either side of the nut. Then use the finest steel wool, grade 0000, to wipe away the oil, grit & dirt that accumulates on the fingerboard and around the frets.

This and other tips on maintaining your guitar is in a new video at the web site.
It’s called ‘Nylon String Guitar Care’ by Ron Fernandez. Ron is a guitar maker and knows how to keep guitars in great condition.

Also new is a DVD I made called ‘How to String & Tune a Guitar.’ To keep the strings from slipping, you need to secure both ends of a nylon-string guitar with the weight of the string on itself. For steel strings, you need to make sure the end that goes in by the peg is bent so the ball is not at the bottom of the peg. Otherwise, the peg can come out. How to string a guitar and how to use a guitar tuner are covered in the DVD. Ron also talks about changing nylon string guitars in his video, but not steel string instruments.

Both are found at – worshipguitarclass.com/Products-accessories.html

Left-hand Exercise

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Here’s an excellent exercise for your left-hand. It’s one I used a lot with my students. This is a perfect exercise to use as a ‘warm-up’ before you play songs on the guitar. Just click the image below and that will open up a new URL which contains the video.

[S3VIDEO file=’jw/12344321videoSm_Prog001.flv’ width=’240′ height=’180′]


6 Picking Patterns + Writing Songs

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I often get emails from guitarists that are stuck in a rut using the same strumming pattern for every song. Here are 6 finger-picking patterns that you can use with 4/4 time songs. I wanted to teach them to you with a song, but I can’t use popular worship songs because most are copyrighted.

You can learn with popular worship songs in my Worship Guitar Class series. All the copyrights have been paid for in this series. The copyrights cost more than duplicating the DVD’s. That’s probably why most guitar instructional DVD’s don’t use copyrighted songs. (Worship Guitar Class Lessons)

As a teacher, I know you learn a new skill better if you can apply it. I was trying to figure out a way to teach you these patterns using a song or songs without worrying about the copyrights. It occurred to me that I could just write a simple song and that it might even be a springboard to help you write songs too!

Opening up the Bible, my eyes caught Psalm 56:3,4. A melody popped in my head and in minutes the song was ready. It’s my hearts desire that this blog entry may encourage you to write songs too. God loves new songs and it encourages our own hearts to be reminded of His Promises.

You can find the music under the video. Download and print that off first, then watch the video. If you’re newer to playing the guitar, I suggest you listen to the entire video, but only work on one finger-picking pattern at a time. The easiest is the first one.

Click the image below to view the 9 minute Video

[S3VIDEO file=’jw/6strums-movieSm_Prog001.flv’]

Click here to download the music

Welcome to the Worship Guitar Class Blog

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Welcome to the First Edition of the Worship Guitar Class Blog! This offers
an easy format for getting web pages up plus an opportunity for you to respond…
including to other guitar students. For those unfamiliar with a ‘Blog,’
after
each entry you can click the ‘comments’ button at the end of the article to
write
a response to either the article itself, or to one of the responses from others.

The first entry here is a song I recently wrote. First, I hope you enjoy the
song and second maybe you can help me pick a name for it. This new song is
one I’d like to include in Volume Four and
I just
couldn’t decide what to call it. First I was thinking ‘Lord use my
voice’ and then thought of ‘Instrument of Praise.’

Well, take a listen and let me know what you think.

[S3AUDIO file=’jw/mp3/voice.mp3′]

You can add you suggestions using the ‘comments’ below.

There’s info on the
other Worship Guitar Class volumes at my main site worshipguitarclass.com.
Guitar lessons for kids age 5 – 9 are here KidsGuitarLessons.com.
Info for playing the piano by ear with hynms, praise & worship choruses
and gospel music is here
Play piano by ear – worshipguitarclass.com/piano.html.