I have been playing guitar for twenty years. I am not bad. I learned plenty in those two decades. I can play songs. I know my chords. My power chords are tight. I have decent timing and I can hold my own in most situations.
The catch is that I spent those twenty years playing metal and hardcore. Downtuned riffs. Chugging palm mutes. The occasional breakdown where everyone in the room loses their minds. I got very good at a very specific type of guitar playing. The kind where subtlety goes to die and the only dynamic is loud versus louder.
Then I joined the worship team at church, and it turns out none of that transfers.
From drop D to “what key are we in”
Worship music requires a completely different skill set. Dynamics. Swells. Knowing when to play and, more importantly, when to shut up. Reading the room. Building atmosphere. Making space for other instruments instead of steamrolling everything with distortion.
I showed up thinking twenty years of experience would count for something. It counted for knowing how to hold the guitar. That was about it.
First rehearsal, someone says we are playing in the key of A. I nod like I understand. I do not understand. In metal you do not think about keys. You think about which fret to put your finger on. The tab says 5, you play 5. Nobody asks what key Slayer is in. Nobody cares.
Then someone mentions the Nashville number system and I smile politely while internally googling it on my phone under the music stand. Apparently this is how real musicians communicate. They say things like “go to the 4” and everyone just knows what that means. I did not know what that meant. I still have to think about it.
The humbling part
The guitarists on my worship team are incredible. Some of them are ten or fifteen years younger than me. They can hear a song once and nail it. They know when to add a tasteful fill and when to lay back. They do these beautiful volume swells that make the room feel like it is breathing. I did not even know volume swells were a thing until six months ago. In metal, you just hit the strings hard and let the amp do the work.
Watching them play made me realise how narrow my skills actually were. I could djent with the best of them. I could tremolo pick until my forearm cramped. But ask me to play something pretty and restrained? Ask me to follow a chord progression I had not memorised? Ask me to transpose on the fly without reaching for a capo or dialling in a pitch shifter? I was cooked.
The good news is that nobody laughed at me. Worship musicians are aggressively nice. They just helped me learn, which was almost worse because I could not even be defensive about it.
Actually learning after twenty years
Here is the thing. I am not embarrassed. I am excited.
For twenty years I played guitar the same way. I got good enough to enjoy it and then I stopped improving because I had no reason to push further. The bedroom does not demand growth. Metal does not require you to understand chord progressions. You can have a great time forever without learning any of the things I am learning now.
But playing with other people, especially people who are better than you, forces growth. You hear what good sounds like. You cannot fake it when someone counts in and expects you to know where to go.
So I am learning. Properly this time. How keys work. Why certain chords fit together. What progressions are common and how to anticipate them. How to do a volume swell without it sounding like I am having a stroke. The Nashville number system, which honestly makes a lot of sense once you get over the initial panic.
I am in my late thirties and I am finally filling in the gaps that twenty years of self-taught metal left behind. That is a bit funny to admit. It is also genuinely enjoyable. There is so much I do not know, which means there is so much left to discover.
Metal was not wasted
I do not regret my background. Those twenty years gave me a love for the instrument. They gave me calluses and timing and the ability to learn songs quickly, even if my method was just memorising tabs like a caveman. I would not trade that for a more technically correct path that might have killed my interest before it started.
But I am grateful to be pushed. Joining a team of better musicians could have been intimidating enough to make me quit. Instead it reminded me why I picked up a guitar in the first place. I wanted to make music. Real music, with other people. Even if the music is considerably gentler than what teenage me would have approved of.
Twenty years of metal. Now learning to play soft. The timeline is ridiculous but I am here for it.