Leading Worship Well | Worship Leading Tips

View Original

3 Quick Tips For Leading Worship With Two Acoustic Guitars

Last week we took a look at "3 Tips For Leading Worship With Just An Acoustic Guitar.” What can you do if you have TWO acoustic guitars? This is a common instrumentation set up in churches. When done right, it can sound great!

Here are 3 quick tips for leading worship with two acoustic guitars:

1 | Play different chord voicings

One of the easiest ways to make two acoustics sound better together is to have them play different chord voicings. When guitarists play the same voicings together it quickly becomes muddy. Both guitars are filling up the same frequencies and inconsistencies between players are more noticeable. To fix that problem, you've got to create some distance sonically between the two guitars.

A great place to start to learn how to play different chord voicings is to check out my New Chord Wednesday posts. Every Wednesday I share a new chord voicing that you can use in conjunction with someone else playing standard chords.

Another easy way to play different chord voicings is to add a capo and play different chord shapes. For example, if a song is in the key of G, you can have one guitarist play standard G chords and the other guitarist play E shapes with their capo on the third fret.

2 | Play different parts (rhythm/lead)

Apart from playing different chord voicings - you can have both guitarists play different parts - namely rhythm and lead. Have one guitarist play the standard rhythm guitar part - this is typically the part you'd play if you were only playing by yourself. The other guitarist can fill in space by playing lead parts. To figure out what lead parts to play: listen to a song's original recording. Note any lead parts you hear - regardless of the instrument playing them. Then, learn them on your guitar.

3 | Don't play all the time

When you're playing by yourself, there is only so much you can do dynamically. But, when you have two guitars, you can do a lot more dynamically. The problem is: most beginners just play the whole way through the song. Try having each guitar come in at different parts of the song and see what energy it creates.


Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.