“Worship guitarists only play in the keys of G and E, for everything else, they capo.” 

Worship guitarists are a very secretive bunch.  If you listen to a recording, you may hear these really cool chord voicings, which may lead you to question: “How’d they do that?”  It’s as if there is this really cool, obscure way of playing chords that makes a worship guitarist sound like they’re the second coming of Eric Clapton. 

Well, I’m about to expose a huge secret, those cool sounding chords are not as difficult as you may think.  The reality is that many worship rhythm guitarists are pretty simple…  if you throw around terms like an inverted triad with a flatted seventh, many of us will look at you with a blank stare.  In fact, among my worship leading friends, we have an inside joke that one of the biggest worship leaders of our time has only one song, with about two dozen different lyrics.

So what is this secret to understanding these simple guitar chords?  Well I’m going to reveal it in the next few weeks as we take a practical look at keys and chord voicings.  To start though, you may want to review the lessons on the Nashville Number System and the CAGED chords, because it will really help you understand all of this.

CAGED Chords:
Ok, to do a quick CAGED recap, when a guitar is in standard tuning, (E-A-D-G-B-E), there are five common “open chord” positions that guitarists typically use, they are of course the keys of C, A, G, E, D (or CAGED.)  If a guitar player wants to play in some other key like C#, they can either play a barre chord, (with a variation of one of these five positions,) or capo and use one of these positions. The awesome thing about these chords, is they each have a unique “voicing” or sound in relation to the other positions in standard tuning.  And those different voicings can be really useful, to dictate the overall feel and flow of a song.  There are times you may want to use one chord “voicing” over another.  (For instance if your playing in the key of A, when you might want to put a capo on the second fret and play G position chords instead of open A chords.)  So starting next week, we’re going to look at the key of G, and the unique characteristics that many worship leaders find in it.

———————–

Nashville Number System Review
Before we jump into the keys, let’s look back at the Nashville Number System for a minute.  If you remember from the lesson, there are seven notes in the Western concert major scale.  For instance, in the key of C, those notes are C, D, E, F, G, A, and B.  For each note, we can assign a number thus, 1=C, 2=D, 3=E, 4=F, 5=G, 6=A, and 7=B.

So why is this discussion important to choosing different chord voicings?  Well the reason it’s great to know is each of these seven notes are commonly used in chord structures by many worship music writers.  To illustrate, here’s a list of chords/inversions in the key of C that are really popular among worship writers:

1	2	3	4	5	6	7
C	D   or Dm	C/E	F	G	Am	G/B

 So, taking this and applying it to each of the CAGED chords, our chart would look like:

1	2	3	4	5	6	7
C	D or Dm	C/E	F	G	Am	G/B
A	B or Bm	A/C#	D	E	F#m	E/G#
G	A or Am	G/B	C	D	Em	D/F#
E	F# or F#m	E/G#	A	B	C#m	B/D#
D	E or Em	D/F#	G	A	Bm	A/C#

In our look at each of these keys, we’ll look at ways to fret each of these chords, often in ways that are simple, yet unique for that key’s voicing.

---

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• Zorro Was Here: Slash Chords
• NHL
• Its a boy for Matthew McConaughey and Camilla Alves
• Jessica Simpson gets booed at her first country music concert

Your response: