Worship Guitar Class Blog

Christian Guitar Lessons Blog

Easy Christmas Songs

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Christmas is around the corner and I’ve noticed quite a few people downloading the free Christmas lesson from the Christmas Songs and Solos for Guitar course. In addition to that course, I’m currently working on a new one called Easy Christmas Songs For Guitar.

The new course is geared towards singing Christmas songs with not too hard to play guitar accompaniments. At the time of this post the course is not finished, but we’ve already made it available so you can start learning these songs right away since the holidays are quite soon.

As a professional musician, I always loved playing for Christmas parties. The birth of Christ is a wonderful event to celebrate. And although many parties were not Christ-centered it was fun for me to sing these songs knowing the Savior that they referred to. [Read more…]

How Great Thou Art

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“How Great Thou Art” was written as a poem in the late 18oo’s. A young Swedish preacher was inspired as he walked home from church one afternoon.

Carl Boberg was struck by how rapidly a thunderous storm appeared. It rained for just a short time, followed by a breathtaking rainbow.

That night he wrote the words. The original sown was called ‘O Store Gud’ which basically translated to ‘O Great God’ in English.

Through the years, the song, which was sung with the melody of a Swedish folk song, was translated into several languages. In the early 20’s, Mr and Mrs. Stuart Hine were English missionaries that moved to Poland. Stuart heard the song and later translated it into English. This is the version we know as ‘How Great Thou Art.’

Today, there are over 1700 recordings of this song! It’s is said to be the #1 favorite hymn in polls conducted in the US and in Britain. I’m certain that Mr. Boberg would be shocked to find that his inspired poem was translated and loved by so many Christians all over the world!

I’m currently filming a couple arrangements of this beautiful hymn.

Plagal Cadence – Song Endings

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One of the most used way to extend the end of a worship song is with the use of the plagal cadence. In fact, it has been used for years as the ‘A-men’ ending of hymns in traditional church music.

To understand how it works, you should know what the I, IV, and V chords means. This is briefly explained in volume two of the Worship Guitar Class course and fully taught in our Music Theory course for Guitar. You can see a brief teaching on the plagal cadence in the following video. It starts at around the 1/3rd mark, in the video below.

Basically, the I, IV and V chords are chords built on the first, fourth, and fifth notes of any given scale, or key. In the key of ‘A’, the chords are ‘A’, ‘D’, and ‘E’, or ‘E7’. The V chord is often changed to V7.  [Read more…]

How to extend worship songs

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I’m enjoying creating our new Music Theory for Guitar course. One of the musical concepts in the course is called a Deceptive Cadence. Worship leaders use this technique quite often to extend a worship song.

It’s common for a song to end with a chord called the V, or V7,  to a chord called the I. There isn’t space here to talk about the various chord structures and keys, but the I chord is the root chord of a key. For example in the key of ‘G’ the I is the ‘G’ chord. The V in the key of ‘G’  is the chord ‘D.’

A ‘D’ or ‘D7’ chord resolves nicely to the chord ‘G.’ A deceptive cadence is when you change to the VI chord at the end of a song instead of the I.

A good example is the song ‘Lord I Lift Your Name On High.’ I know many of you have our ‘Worship Guitar Class’ course and this song is in the first volume. The chords are predominately ‘G C D C.’ It ends with the chords ‘D,’ ‘Dsus,’ G…..

The deceptive cadence for the key of ‘G’ is the VI chord which is the chord ‘Em.’ Instead of playing ‘D,’ Dsus,’ ‘G’ … you can play ‘D,’ ‘Dsus,’ Em.’ The ‘Em’ is on the last word ‘high.’ Play it for a measure then half a measure on ‘Am’ and ‘D’ ‘Dsus’ for the 2nd half of the measure and ending on G. The ending is below…

|    Em     |  Am              Dsus       D           | G  C | D C | G
… high.             Lord I lift your name on high.

We often repeat the deceptive cadence 2 or 3 times before finally ending on G.

If you’ve ever wanted to learn to read music or to understand music theory, would love to have you join our music theory class. 🙂