Cheap Guitar Trick #1: Capo.

(Image from www.musiciansfriend.com)

Git'choself wunna these. The capo is the hack guitarist's best friend. It effectively shortens the guitar's neck - it means that when you play a chord it will sound higher. So what's it good for?

If you're like me, you'll love the cheap tricks on guitar - hammer on or pull off to add a 2 or a 'sus', and people think you're a whole lot more skilled than you really are.

But for hacks like you and me, we have a problem when it comes to playing in the church band. All old hymns and many contemporary-ish congregational songs (e.g. many Emu Music songs) are written by pianists. This means that when you look at the chart, you're seeing a whole lot of B-flat and E-flat: not the hack guitarist's best friend. Definitely not the acoustic guitarist's best friend.

This means the songs are harder to play, and generally sound rubbish because you are using a lot of barre chords rather than open chords. You won't be able to really let chords ring or to use many of your hard-earned tricky hammering skills you earned playing all that Ben Harper.

But do not fear! My very rudimentary knowledge of musicology is here! Most pop music uses a very limited range of chords. For example, if a song is in the key of C, the melody of that song will be based on the notes in the key of C (C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C). Most music which isn't jazz or classical will mostly use chords built on the 1st, 4th and 5th notes of that scale (i.e. C major, F major and G major). You're also likely to see what's called the relative minor - a minor chord built on the note which is 3 semitones (i.e. 3 guitar frets) below the root note of the scale (the note which the scale is named after - in this case C). So the relative minor chord in the key of C is the A-minor chord. To recap - if a song is in the key of C we're likely to see a lot of C, F, G and Am chords.

But if a song is in the key of E-flat, we'll see a lot of E-flat, A-flat, B-flat, and C-minor. None of this is too friendly for guitar. But whack a capo on the 3rd fret, and hey presto! Now you can play the song in the key of C (with lots of nice, friendly open chords) and have it sound like it's in E-flat. This means that you don't have to transpose the whole song into a different key (which is hard if you don't know what you're doing and can potentially make the song unsingable), and makes things much easier for you. It should also open your possibilities for hammer-ons and pull-offs etc. right up.

So what this means is that, no matter how nasty the key of the song, you should be able to deploy a capo and, with a tiny bit of thought, instantly find yourself in a nice guitar-friendly key like C, A, G or D. Because of the aforementioned limited chordal patterns, if you play around with capo position and try the keys you're comfortable with, you should be able to find a sweet spot where it both sounds right and is easy to play.

Pick one up - best $40 you'll ever spend.

Church Music and Church Planting

(Image from tinyfarmblog.com)

At the moment in my church scene there's a big emphasis on church planting, and I'm excited to see a bit of it starting to happen.

But in a church plant (especially if you begin with a really small house-church-sized congregation) the statistical chances of having talented musos (see previous post) really start to work against you. If you have a core team of 20, the chances that one of them is a previously undiscovered Jonny Greenwood are pretty low. Even if you consciously pick your core team so that you have a few musos, chances are you're running a bit of a skeleton outfit at least at the beginning.

With this sort of thing in mind, I thought I'd try to offer a few tips about doing music well when you don't have many resources. Since I'm a guitar player, these tips will mostly revolve around using guitar for singing in church.

Now, trying for the stadium-sized Hills-style 'worship experience' when you're short on resources is:

1. Going to fall flat without the professional musicians, mega-lighting rig, etc.

2. Going to feel pretty inappropriate for the 9 of you singing in Mike's loungeroom.

But, provided you steer well clear of the dreaded 'Kum-ba-ya' aesthetic, I reckon a single acoustic guitar (and small bands based around one acoustic guitar) can do a lot for a small church plant starting out (or for established churches with very few musicians). It helps if the player has some ability, but hopefully these hints will be helpful even for people who haven't been playing for that long (since I'm a hack myself, don't expect rocket science).

So stay tuned for a few low-key church music suggestions.

Rule #4: Choose wisely.

There has been some discussion at St. Dorcas' about how to improve the general standard of the music during church.

Sometimes the size and make-up of the church is a bit of a barrier to this. There are only so many talented musicians out there, and the smaller the congregation, the lower the chance of hitting more than one or two (if that). One of the reasons that churches like Mars Hill in Seattle can do music so well is their sheer size - with thousands of church members, they will get quite a few talented musos just by force of statistics.

The culture that church members are primarily drawn from is another big factor. At St. Dorcas', like at most Anglican churches, people come from a pretty upper-middle-class sort of background. This means that most Anglican churches will be able to field several pianists (with training in classical piano), a smattering of flute/trumpet/etc., and a guitarist or two, but will struggle for bass players and especially drummers. The uni students generally study very sensible degrees which will lead to real jobs at the end rather than no-good arts degrees which leave plenty of time for growing long hair and messing around in bands.

This can't be easily changed - but I think there is an easy way to improve the standard of your church music regardless of what kind of musos are currently serving in your church. I think that song selection can really help. Things like choosing songs that suit your musicians' instruments and your church's culture, ditching songs that are past their use-by date, playing fewer songs overall and introducing some new material can get you streets ahead for a relatively small amount of effort. The sorts of factors involved in song selection will be addressed in more detail in future posts - but for now, why not have a little scan through your song list and see if all of those songs are pulling their weight. Could some be ditched and replaced with others which will better serve your purpose?

Choose wisely...

Starting a virtual church is easy.

(image from flickr)

I have a bit of a bugbear about people who are dead keen to call their children Bible names, but are only happy for ones that are pretty normal (e.g. Joshua), or fashionably edgy (e.g. Ezekiel), and are unprepared to go the whole hog and let their little Oholibamah or Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz stand as a testimony to their slightly Old-Testamenty faith.

But whilst blogland is the perfect place to rage about such things, I don't have the courage of my convictions to saddle one of my own little ones with such an epithet just to make a point.

So I instead I'm making the point where the stakes are slightly lower - naming my pretend church.

Now I think pretty much all church music is bad - I don't like to single particular offenders out. But because the scene I'm from is so small, I think any criticisms voiced here might potentially be traced back to their source and become a discouragement (this isn't what I'm going for!).

So I thought that rather than naming names, to protect the innocent and the guilty alike (and to give a leg-up to a somewhat neglected Bible name), henceforth all my church music experiences have occurred or will occur at St. Dorcas'.

Rule #3: Double claps are never OK.

(Image from www.nicholasjdanton.supanet.com)

‘Blessing and honour (clap clap!), glory and power (clap clap!), be unto the Ancient of Days!’

No.

1. Lame.

2. Completely alienating for visitors.

Imagine you turn up somewhere, everyone is singing (weird enough), and then they bust out into choreographed clapping. They all seem to know what to do and when to do it, but you have no idea. Feel comfortable?

This has to stop.

If you are a double clapper, just cut it out. Clap on the beat if you want, but if you think it’s a good idea to bust out a double clap at the end of the line, or the double-time clap in the bridge (who does that!?), then your hands should be gaffa-taped to your sides until you learn your lesson.

(In extremely serious cases, perhaps hardened repeat offenders might be encouraged to follow the advice of Matthew 5:30 and discover the sound of one hand clapping. Hey, I'm just throwing it out there...)

But maybe you’re innocent in all this – maybe you’re just an unassuming band member and the congregation is going for it without any provocation. How can you shut it down? Any thoughts? 

On the remote possibility that anyone reads this, I'd like to hear your ideas – how can we stamp this abomination out?

Rule #2: Wear pants when you go outside. Nice ones, if you can.

(image from www.kuklaskorner.com)

So the way I see it we are dealing with two issues here.

The first one is the what and why? of church music - the timeless biblical truths regarding singing as God's people - what does God have to say in his word about what church music is and what it's for? (I should hasten to say here that this blog has no interest whatsoever in Christian music in general - only the music we sing together when we meet together as God's people. I'm not CCM-inclined myself, but what people do in the privacy of their own car stereos is none of my concern.)

The second is the how? of church music. This involves pragmatic issues. Did God really set his divine imprimatur on the musical style of sixteenth century, to be continually imitated in perpetuity? Or should there be some kind of engagement with the style of contemporary music of the time? How far does this go - if crunk (or even worse, Michael Buble) is topping the charts, should the style of our church music reflect that?

If you don't get the theology right, your church music will still suck, no matter how slick your sound is. The question of how? comes second to the questions of what and why? This means that if you're going to get just one of these two right, then listen to what God says in his word about music in church.

But if you want to do it well, then you need to get both right. We need to know exactly what we are doing when we sing in church and why we are doing it, and we also need to have thought hard about how we do it.

(As an aside, when church music sucks I think that the how? is often the presenting problem. It's easy to spot musical atrocities like singers out of tune, a soprano sax used anywhere at any time, etc. But the what and why? can be all out of place and be covered over by a skillful guitarist. This isn't a good thing - it means that the music will still suck (i.e. it will be off the mark in terms of what it ought to be doing for God's people), it will just sound ok while it does it and therefore be harder to diagnose)

When you leave the house, the most important thing is to have enough clothes on that you don't get arrested. But this is setting the bar pretty low, right?

The guy at the top of the page isn't going to get arrested, but he's still not likely to make many friends until he rethinks that jacket.

So make sure you fulfil the minimum requirement, but aim higher too!

Rule #1: Figure out what the deal is.

As far as I can tell, nobody quite knows what the deal is with music in church. At least, nobody I know knows what the deal is. Perhaps once upon a time somebody knew, or at least someone knew someone who knew, but now nobody knows.

We do know that church music isn't really something you can not do. We've always done it! Which, of course, is all the reason we need to keep doing it ad infinitum (ahem.).

Not to mention the fact that it seems to be in the Bible. Where I come from, we believe in reading the Bible and doing what it says. All jokes aside - this is the right way to be. Humans have no idea who God is or how to get right with him - sin has ruined us way too much for there to be any chance of that. But God, in his mercy, reveals himself to us - he tells us about himself, about us, and about how to get right with him (through the cross of his Son, Jesus). When God speaks he knows what he's talking about, and we have to listen.

But I digress.

Anyways, singing is in the Bible. Moses and Miriam do it (Exodus 15). David does it (Psalms). Paul commands it (Ephesians 5:19-20). Lots of it seems to happen in heaven (Revelation 5).

So we figure we should probably do it.

So we do it.

But we don't know why.

Which means we don't know how.

When we do music it feels weird and out of place. It's good for breaking up the service - making sure we get a chance to stand up and sit down between the sermon and the prayers. But I wonder if that's not exactly what the deal is supposed to be with church music, and that's why it doesn't really seem to be working.

So here is your rule: before you do it (or perhaps I should say, before you do too much more of it), figure out what the deal is with it.

Do you know what you're doing when you're doing music in church?

Do you know what it is and what it's for?

Here are The Rules.

Of course, opinions should be offered gently, respectfully and with humility. But to save us all from drowning in caveats, quibbles and qualifications (and of course, to save myself the effort of false humility), I thought it might be better just to set my opinions out the way they sound in my head: as undeniable, inalienable truths - the rules.

So this blog is about music in church - why it sucks and how to fix it.

If you do exactly as I say, we should all get along just fine.