Electric Guitar: Staying Fresh and Challenged

Just before last weekend’s morning service at my home church, I had a moment of confusion – I convinced myself I’d left my capo at home. As I was playing electric it wasn’t the biggest problem, but it did mean that I needed to adapt what I was going to do for some of the songs.

A couple of weeks ago, I came across quite a nice “feel” I could create on the electric (behind a single acoustic guitar & vocal, no band) with a high capo position (7th-9th fret on my Strat), some reverb, delay, and, crucially, no pick. My fingerpicking is certainly not classical, but I get by, and it really alters the tone. It feels someway warmer, and gives you an opportunity to create really nice melodic patterns – especially if you play around with inversions and chord structure (9ths, maj7s, 6ths & so on). It was my intention to recreate that, and maybe even build on it, though clearly that wasn’t going to be possible.

What I ended up doing was a little of everything. We started with a new song – “This is Amazing Grace” from the new Bethel For the Sake of the World album – for which I played an overdriven riff with lots of delay, quite high up the neck. I cleaned up the tone for a couple of Hillsong anthems – “Cornerstone” & “The Stand”, and did some ethereal lead for “God of the Redeemed”. Finally, I dropped all the delay and ethereal reverb out and just played a clean yet bluesy tone in open E for “Thank You for Saving Me”. All in all, a bit of a change.

What both of these situations did most of all was to challenge me and keep me thinking about what I was playing. Playing nearly a whole set without a pick when you’ve been used to using one for years changes the way you think. Furthermore, playing in a different style when you’ve come in with an agenda presents further fresh thinking and challenges. It is my belief that the more we are challenged, the more we need to think about what we are doing; and the more we think about something, the more scope we have for making it better.

In worship, when we get comfortable, or even stuck in a rut, it is easy to get complacent and lose focus. I love Bethel Church, Redding’s outlook of “excellence in all we do”. Paul writes to the Colossians “whatever You do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord” (Col. 3:23). I’ll take some of that.

(By the way, to prove the Lord has a sense of humor, I found my capo at the end of the service under a pile of chord charts….)