Guitar Chords for Praise and Worship

You were just handed a sheet of paper covered with your favorite worship lyrics and a bunch of single letters in bold type. You're expected to be able to play this on your guitar, but what you see looks like a muddled mess of confusing letters. How are you going to get a praise and worship song out of that?

Take a step back for a second and look carefully at the single, bold letters. These are guitar chords. Do you see the "C" over the first word? That means you'll play a C chord. Then, you can see an "Am". Switch your fingers to play an A minor chord. Follow this with the F chord, finishing with a G chord. Guess what? You just played a basic chord progression used for a number of worship songs! By learning guitar chords for praise and worship songs, you can easily start to play many familiar tunes on guitar.

And so it goes. Most worship music is written in this manner-words scrawled or typed across a page with bold chords written above the lyrics. If you're lucky, the chords will have been placed above the words they are supposed to be played on. If you pick up a good majority of worship chord sheets, you'll have to figure out the chord placement yourself. When this happens, don't panic. Listen to the song carefully, and see if you can hear where the chords should sit. With a little practice, you can get this easily.

Don't be afraid to branch into different chord "genres". Praise and worship music tends to be limited to a few basic chords, but there is a whole world of other chords and progressions available to musicians. Learn all of the keys and every chord that belongs to each key. Combine the chords in different patterns, play them using new strumming techniques, and learn how to transpose into various keys.

For beginners, it's helpful to get a copy of a guitar chord sheet which shows all of the chords and their finger placements. Very often, you can get these guitar chord charts available online for free. There are several websites such as 8notes which provide quality chord charts for references. For others who like a hard copy of guitar chord charts, you can opt to purchase a guitar chord book at music stores.  To put simply, the more chords you memorize, the more praise and worship songs you can play! Grab your guitar and start strumming to your favorite tunes now.