Forum - Banjo Ben Clark

Looking at playing some worship music

#1

I reached out to my church’s contemporary music leader about getting some of the chart they play. Our band is guitars/bass/keyboard/drums. My plan is to play along on youtube replays with my mandolin to learn songs played at church. Anyway, I got a couple of songs from him and it looks like they are playing “2nd chords” several times on both songs. The songs were in A Major and several times they are transitioning from A to A2 and D to D2.

I’m just curious if 2nd chords are played an little more with guitar. I’m used to mostly seeing 7th chords. One day I would like to try joining our contemporary band but this is my step one, playing with them on youtube.

Thanks y’all.

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#2

That’s great that you’re getting yourself set up to be able to play with the church group!
You can do it :+1::slightly_smiling_face:!
I’ve no idea how/if/when they use the 2nd chords w guitar…

Yall’s band appears to be more ‘sophisticated’ than ours was when we played in church! (We weren’t playing Contemporary…)
If it were me, I’d try playing along with the YouTube vids and just using the regular old Amaj or Dmaj (you may have to toy around with different chord voicings/different locations on the neck to get the sound you want) and see how that fits it. It might be fine. If it doesn’t sound right, then I’d try swapping from those various chord voicings of the A & D to the appropriate A2 or D2 when it was called for and see how that sounded and compare it to what you did before. Maybe even record it and then compare the recordings and see what you think.

My understanding is to do A2, you would basically be taking the 3rd chord tone out of the chord and substituting a 2 tone. Like for A it wouldn’t be the standard A, C#, E (1,3,5) - instead you’d use something like A, B, E (1,2,5). Depending on where you play your A, your frets will differ. For me, I often play the 2245 (or just 224X) for an A chord - to switch to the A2 from there would be easy, bar the 2 fret across 3 strings for a 222O - notes would = A,E,B,E (actually, don’t even have to play that open string, can do 222X). Same thought process for the D2.

Not sure if that helped any, as I didn’t answer your original question, haha! Best to you on your project!!

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#3

Thanks @Simone for the advice. It’s going to be a long range project but something to work toward.

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#4

@Stuart.Gamble, yeah, the “2nd chords” make it really nice! You can just experiment and find out when it would be more appropriate. It will help transition nicely. I’m familiar with both A2 and D2, where you would leave out the 2nd string and 1st string open respectively of the open major chords. It is easy though.

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#5

Personally I would probably leave those chord voicings mainly to the guitar, especially if chopping. But definitely experiment and see what sounds good in your songs!

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#6

I am a veteran church guitarist… my advice would be NOT to chop unless the bluegrass sound is desired. If I were a worship leader, I would love to have a mando on the team, but I would ask them to focus on “broken chord” playing… I.e. play arpeggios or do some cross-picking. And I would take advantage of those “color” tones - like a B within an A chord 9 to give us the A2 sound. In a bluegrass band, the chop is so important because there are no drums so the mando is a HUGE part of the time-keeping process. But in a worship band there will be drums, so that aspect of playing mando isn’t as necessary.

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#7

Yes! This!

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#8

Thanks for all the advice. I’m going to spend some time playing with youtube this weekend. I guess that’s the beauty of youtube playbacks, I can learn and try different styles.

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#9

I’ve really enjoyed hearing the sound open D2 and G2 (I really could never hear myself saying anything like about 5 years ago). Still working on barring 3 pairs of strings for the A2. So far my wife is not gotten tired for hearing me play D-to-D2-back-to-D on repeat.

Thanks again to everyone on this advice!

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#10

I play with the contemporary team at my church. We have several musicians so the band changes every week. I’m the only one on mandolin and I play about once every 5 weeks. If the song is fast, I’ll strum chords. If the song is slow or key makes strumming to hard to sound good, I’ll either pick or tremolo notes in the chord and try to make an ascending or descending run. I hope this helps you. Just be creative, go with what sounds good to you and soon you’ll be in the band too!

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#11

Thanks for the advice @taweber. I kind of got off track working on strumming along to the youtube videos this summer, maybe this reminder will get me back on the learning track!

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