I'm joining the guitar choir at church!

congratulations on your first gig...

Thanks for sharing the story, it sounds like your doing quite well for seven months, I can only imagine how much this will help speed up your learning and playing. You have a great support group, I imagine what your doing is as good as taking private lessons.

Did you say if you were playing acoustic or electric, just curious?

keep up the good work, were waiting to hear about that first solo :D

Nice motivational story indeed. Well done lad.

Did you say if you were playing acoustic or electric, just curious?

We're playing acoustic/electric, except for the bass player who has an electric. With me it's five guitars and the bass and how many ever gals show up for vocals.

Well, I just finished my first Sunday service (second gig- the first was Thanksgivivg Day). Boy, it sure was a different experience for me. I think the excitement of the first day wore off and I got a bit nervous, so I don't think I played as well as the first day. I guess playing music is just like anything else- you have up days and down days. Nobody said anything, though, so I probably didn't do all that bad. Again, I just don't play the parts when I don't think I can do them. For instance, the recessional song yesterday I didn't play at all. I had the chords and practice it ahead of time, but when we got together and practiced it as a group (which we do on Sunday morning before the service), they were playing at a much faster tempo and I couldn't really make the adjustment in that one practice, so I just didn't play it rather than to try it and mess up and make the group sound bad. Also, in my nervousness, I forgot to put the capo on, and when I played the first few chords I could tell I sounded off and then realized- so I stopped. Luckily it was a very short piece.

I did get one break- during Advent (i.e., up until Christmas) we don't do the "Gloria", which is the most challenging piece. I get a good bit of time to work on that one before we have to do it again- which will be Christmas Day.

Thanks all for the encouraging replies. I'm glad this can be an inspiration to other beginners.

Ooh, Christmas music. I love doing Christmas music, it's so fun. My own church choir is working on Christmas stuff now, although we just sing, except for our pianist, bassist, floutist, and whatever else is added included for the Christmas service. Anyway, I'm glad you're having fun with the choir, and I hope your Christmas music is as fun as ours is. It's great to combine music with worship.

Thanks for sharing your story. I am a newbie to playing and would like to eventually play at church as well. Thanks for the motivation!!!!

Out of curiosity, how long have you been playing, guitargirl? Do you have a goal for by when you'd like to join the group?

Mike -

Mike - Within your guitar choir does the music you play just use chord charts or do you also do some fingerstyle playing? Just curious as I'm not sure what I should be learning.

Laurie

Hi Laurie-

To answer your question, we pretty much stick to strumming chords. One or two of the guys throw some single notes in here and there but that's about the extent of it. One goal of mine is to eventually learn fingerpicking well enough to use some of that with the chior, but my learning plan hasn't quite taken me there, yet. Maybe in a year or so.

We do use barre chords quite a lot, particularly the Am, E, and Em forms along with variations of these to produce major and minor sevenths. I am glad I spent most of last summer working on barre chords- and I'm not 100% on them yet.

This week, in fact, there is one song we will be doing that has a lot of F#, F#m and Bm back and forth. I get tired after practicing that for a while, and I have trouble getting all of the strings to ring out properly on a consistent basis. I'll probably fget it by Sunday to where it's passable. It helps in my case in that there are always 3 to 5 guitarists, including myself, so I don't really have to shine. I can omit parts I can't play real well and it still sounds fine. I just need to blend in with the other guitars, which I have learned how to do pretty well (except for the time I forgot to use my capo on one of the short passages!)

Sounds like it won't be long for yo though. You would definitely have to learn some strumming pattterns, and as for the barre chords- one of our guys doesn't do them. He figures out other voicings that don't use all of the strings so he doesn't have to barre. I wanted to learn barre chords, though, so that's what I do.

Good luck- keep me posted with your progress. if you already have a musical background I don't think your learning curve should be as steep as mine.

After all, I'm still kind of fumbling around. Our leader didn't have any problem just throwing me to the wolves and see how I turn out. I'm getting some scratches, believe me, but I believe I'll make it.

Well, I just got through the second Sunday. Much better than the first Sunday. I wasn't as nervous; I'm beginning now to really feel part of the group, like I'm really accepted. In fact, the leader. Dave, works in the DA's office and invited us all to their Christmas party. (Now that's the 5th or 6th party we've been invited to; people down here in Soutwestern Louisiana do like to party, I'll say that).

Well, anyhow, things are coming together. I still need more practice on the songs; I still make mistakes, but they don't make things sound too awful, and I am improving.

This week coming up there's a song with a fairly challenging passage- I think it goes like G/D > Dsus4 > D > Bm >Asus4 > A > Bm and that's just the first part of it. More work to do.

Well, as things are beginning to settle in I don't need to post what happens every Sunday, but maybe once or twice a month I might post my developments. Thanks for listening.

I am glad to hear that some folks got some inspiration from my story. I do feel quite good about being able to do this after only seven months playing. The only downside to all of this is I've not been able to focus as much time on working on the DVD lessons, but that's okay because I'm learning other things.

Take care.