Role of Electric Guitars in Worship

Electric guitars play a major role in contemporary worship music. Most of our favorite worship band's musical style is electric guitar driven or centric. The electric guitar can be either a lead or rhythm instrument. In most praise and worships there are two electric guitars one for lead and the other for rhythm. In our case we have one electric guitar player that alternates between the two styles. The lead electric guitar normally plays melodic lines, intro/outro riffs, finger picks, and solos. The lead guitar normally tends to play chord inversions or voice/play chords on higher strings to differentiate themselves from the rhythm electric guitar. The rhythm electric normally plays full six string chords or power chords and sometimes plays harmonic lines with the lead guitar. The main purpose of the rhythm electric is offer support to the whole band by focusing on the chords, while the lead guitars adds extra texture on top of the rhythm guitar's chord foundation. A quick disclaimer, every electric guitar player is unique and they have their own style and play their own unique roles, so take our opinion with a grain of salt.

Electric guitar players and drummers probably have the most gear or equipment in a worship band. A typical set up for a electric guitar player in a worship band is a electric guitar, numerous effect pedals, accessories to connect and power everything, and a tube amplifier. Another common setup is having a electric guitar play through a multi-effects pedal that digitally simulates different effects and amps (line 6 HD series, Boss GT series, etc). Many believe that to that best tone is had using a tube amplifier and separate effects pedals. We believe that the electric guitar setup should match the situation. Friday's for youth service we use the tube amp and pedal board because we normally play at higher volumes and in the context this setup works. Sundays for regular service we normally use our volume friendly Line6 Pod HD 500. It takes a considerably longer time to set up a tube amp pedalboard rig in comparison to the plug and play nature of multi-effect pedals.

The two most commonly used effects by electric guitar players in contemporary worship are overdrives and delays (Guitar-effects-amp). The main type of delay used is digital with time subdivision that are dotted eighth and or quarter note. So in general electric guitars in worship band produce a distorted sound that is trailed by echo from the delay. If you heard any Hillsong United songs you have heard this sound. A rhythm electric guitar player doesn't use delay often, but mostly uses overdrives. Some times even turning on multiple overdrive effect pedals to increase the gain or distortion. These two effects together produce a basic worship electric guitar sound. There a lot more effects you can then add to build upon this foundation, such as chorus, reverb, flanger, compressor, distortion, etc.-Sergiu