Sometimes during worship you want to move from one element to the next quickly. But other times in worship, you just want to “stay in the moment,” in that place where people are meeting the risen Jesus. Hopefully you’ve had those moments when it would just feel wrong to put the end cap on the song by playing final downbeat of the final chord of the song. A great place to go is the Four Chord (IV or 4).
The Four Chord (IV or 4) is simply that: the chord built on the 4th interval of the key. F is the IV chord of the key of C:
C (Dm Em) F
I (ii iii) IV
As much as the V chord (especially V7) wants to move back to the root, the IV chord doesn’t seem to have that much desire to go anywhere.
Let’s look at Tim Hughes’ “Here I Am to Worship” (in the key of E). This song is a classic example of the “Lingering Four Chord.” The last chord of the last lines of both the chorus and the bridge is A (or A2). By landing on that very stable, but very “not final” chord, Hughes was able to build in what worshipers want: a moment just to “be”—to linger in the presence of God.
And we can just hang at the end of those lines, stop the rhythm, just let the guitar or piano lightly play that A2 and be in the moment. No one needs leadsheets or video screens at that moment. I’m not sure if Tim Hughes was deliberate about the chords in those two lines, but he dropped a gift on worshipers with that song.
But what about songs that don’t have that built-in "linger-factor"? Most of the time, a song can be ended with the 4 chord instead of the 1 chord.
Here is Crown Him With Many Crowns ending on the 1:
Now play and sing it with it ending on the 4:
There’s a place to hang out, isn’t there?
After you’ve hung out, you can...
1) end on the 1 chord,
2) simply let the 4 chord fade away, or
3) use the 4 chord as the beginning of a transition to another song. Check back at some of the transitions we already talked about. You’ll begin to see ways that you can marry a lot of these segues together.
1) end on the 1 chord,
2) simply let the 4 chord fade away, or
3) use the 4 chord as the beginning of a transition to another song. Check back at some of the transitions we already talked about. You’ll begin to see ways that you can marry a lot of these segues together.
It took us awhile to get through the first 8 of 28 Segues. But now we move from musical segues to non-musical segues and planned transitions between other elements of the service. These next twenty will go a little quicker. See you then.
