Originally Posted by: JeffS65

One guy played saxaphone and would make changes exactly where it was noted on the tablature (tab). The pastor would provide the songs lyrics and chords from Ultimate Guitar and their format basically shows a chord above a lyrical word. The saxaphonist literally changed exactly at that word and even down to the syllable. The problem was, he did not listen to anyone else playing much less fall in to the groove the rest the band played. I called him a musical literalist.

To make matters worse, he would only play the root note chord and and he sounded like a ship's blowhorn. He was constatly out of key and it was misarable.

Another person joined the band as a singer. We were lucky that this church had a few pretty skilled musicians and really blessed with singers (my wife included...love her voice). One of the congregants wanted to sing too (though nervous) having sung in a choir...though I question that. Her approach to singing is to just power through the words. No breaks between verse or chrous sections. So while everyone was waiting for the groove between sections, she would just sing. Not aware or not caring that others weren't singing. In a way, I think she thought she was right.

In both of these instances, these folks were not paying attention to the feel or the groove of the song. They were mechanical. Sure, guitar playing has mechanics but it is also about the feel and once you get the mechanics down, your next step is to get the feel. Hear where those changes are. What appears on a sheet of paper and what is played aren't always an exact match. That was the issue for my above examples.

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So if you look at the song that I provided--it's actually a church song too--what my friend was saying afterwards was that I have to make the change at the exact time where the change is on guitar tab--so in the first line, on "know" right as it begins and the same with "baby". And then "someday" and then "water."

But he does have a much better ear--whereas my ear is not very good. I think the issue basically is that I was strumming and changing chords kind of just around where the mark was but my friends were singing it exactly based on the mark--and to make matters worse I didn't even know the melody, never heard of the song before. Also, he said that my strumming pattern which was the classic D-DU-UDU, was too much for this song and maybe that was part of the problem. He strums by just doing four downstrokes and occasionally an upstroke. Does that make sense?

[quote=JeffS65]

Example two:

A few things I needed to do in short order; transpose to a better key than Ultimate Guitar as the key was so low that Barry White would struggle. I also needed to 'correct' some incorrect chords in the version Ultimate Guitar had. It was clearly wrong in some sections. After these 'fixes', we had to practice. Honestly, we practiced the song about five or six times and rolled with it.

That definitely makes sense; I've been told that Ultimate Guitar is wrong a lot--but how do you tell which key is the right key?--I really don't have a very good ear, so it's mainly based on the notes I want. Like if I put my capo on the second fret and play the 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6 chord, it sounds a lot different than with no capo. But is it not supposed to be so arbitrary--like for example should the capo be based more on the vocal range if that is the only instrument?

Also, thank you so much for taking your time to answer my question!