Trust in God Guitar Tone on the Line 6 Helix (Elevation Worship)

Start Here: Trust in God in Five Moves

1. Tempo: 74 BPM in 6/8, key of C (MultiTracks, original live master). Eighth note = 405 ms. Felt beat = 1,216 ms.
2. Delay: store the tempo at 74; 1/8 for choruses, 1/4 dotted for verse swells. No dotted eighth.
3. Capo: 5 with G shapes for a second electric, so the ringing strings stay on C and G.
4. Amp: US Double Nrm clean into a 2x12 Double C12N, with a Teemah! for the choruses.
5. Snapshots: Verse, Chorus, Bridge, Instrumental. The song runs 7:26 and returns to each one.

What the Listing Says, and What It Doesn't

Trust in God came out in April 2023 as a single ahead of Elevation Worship's live album Can You Imagine?, credited to Elevation Worship featuring Chris Brown. The writers are Chris Brown, Steven Furtick, Mitch Wong and Brandon Lake, and the song folds in the hymn Blessed Assurance. MultiTracks lists the album master in C at 74 BPM in 6/8, 7:26 long. PraiseCharts carries the original in C or Db and marks it "medium slow." Nothing published says who played guitar on the recording or what they used, so this is a guide to building a Helix tone that suits the song, not a copy of a rig.

Three facts in that listing drive almost every decision below: the 6/8 meter, the key of C, and the length.

Which Beat Is 74?

In 6/8, the beat you sway to is a dotted quarter, three eighth notes long. A 6/8 tempo can count those big beats or pairs of eighth notes, and charts don't all agree. MultiTracks settles it for its own listings: its help center says Playback "calculates 6/8 time signature using the industry standard quarter note BPM," and tells users with a dotted-quarter tempo to multiply it by 3 and divide by 2. So the 74 counts quarter notes, which in 6/8 means pairs of eighths.

That puts Trust in God's eighth note at 30,000 ÷ 74, about 405 ms, and the beat you sway to at about 1,216 ms, just under 50 per minute. A bar lasts about 2.4 seconds. PraiseCharts' "medium slow" agrees. It's a slow, rocking pulse, slower than the number makes it look.

If your team's chart came from somewhere else, check it with the delay before Sunday:

1. Store the preset tempo at the chart's number and set a delay to 1/4 dotted, mix up around 30 percent so you can hear it.
2. Play one muted strum on a downbeat along with the recording.
3. If the echo lands on the next sway, the chart counts quarter notes and the times in this guide apply.
4. If the echo lands well after the next sway, about halfway to the one after it, the chart is counting dotted quarters. Switch the note values: the eighth becomes 1/8 triplet and the felt beat becomes 1/4.

That's the same arithmetic that catches people who tap a 6/8 song's sway into a Helix, which treats each tap as a quarter note. Our Gratitude build has the full tap table; the short version is to store the tempo instead of tapping, or let the click drive it (see our guide to syncing a Helix to MIDI clock from Playback or Ableton).

Delay: Two Times That Sit in the Meter

At the slow reading, two delays sit on the song's grid:

• Straight eighth, 405 ms (1/8), mix about 12 percent, feedback about 25. Every repeat lands where the next note of a 6/8 arpeggio would fall anyway, so it doesn't read as echo. It makes a picked pattern sound wider and a little longer, like it's being played in a room with a high ceiling. This is the chorus setting.
• One felt beat, 1,216 ms (1/4 dotted), mix about 22 percent, feedback about 30. One audible echo per sway. Under a held chord in the opening verses it fills the space between phrases without adding a rhythm.

The dotted eighth, the default worship delay, comes out at 45,000 ÷ 74 = 608 ms. In 4/4 that would interlock with straight eighths. In 6/8 it's one and a half eighth notes, so the repeats fall halfway between the notes of each group of three and the part sounds slightly out of time with the drums. The quarter note at 811 ms is two eighths, which crosses the three-eighth beat; it can work as a deliberate pull against the meter in the instrumental, but not as a default. The delay-time calculator has the 6/8 formulas for other tempos.

On the Helix, the Simple Delay or Transistor Tape both take note values. Set the delay's high cut around 4 kHz on the eighth-note setting so the repeats tuck behind the dry pick attack. If your band uses the radio edit (4:03 in the same key), nothing here changes except the length.

The Capo Choice Is About the Drones

A song in C is easy to play in open position, but if you're the second electric over an acoustic, you want a different voicing from theirs. The real question is what the open strings do. Arpeggiated worship parts lean on two strings ringing above the fretted notes, and those drones stay put while the chords change underneath.

I expected open C shapes to be the obvious choice for a song in C. The interval math says otherwise. Here's what the two most common drones sound like against the four chords C-major worship songs live on (C, F, Am, G; check your chart for the exact progression):

With open shapes, the F chord picks up a 9th and a major 7th at the same time, which is a lovely sound on a solo acoustic and a cloudy one when a piano is playing a plain F. Capo 5 with G shapes keeps at least one drone on a strong chord tone over every chord, and the colors it adds (a 9th on F, a minor 7th on Am, a sus4 on G) are the ones worship arrangements tend to use anyway. Capo 3 with A shapes is the brighter option, an add9 everywhere, and it's a good choice for the instrumental if the keys player isn't already living in that register.

Capo 5 also raises the whole part out of the acoustic's range, which does more for separation than any EQ move.

The Amp, the Drive and the Room

Amp: US Double Nrm (the Helix's Fender Twin normal channel) into a 2x12 Double C12N. Drive about 4, Bass 4, Mid 6, Treble 5.5, Presence 4, Ch Vol to taste. A Twin stays clean longer than the A30-style models, which suits a song that spends long stretches in the verses. Cab low cut near 90 Hz, high cut near 7 kHz.

Comp and drive: a Deluxe Comp first, light (Threshold set so it only catches the pick, Ratio 3:1, Mix about 70 percent). A Teemah! after it for the choruses, Gain about 3, Treble about 5. On a capo-5 part the Teemah! keeps the notes separate where a Tube Screamer's mid hump would push the part forward into the vocal range. Add a Kinky Boost for the final chorus only.

Reverb: at a felt beat of 1,216 ms, a 3.5-second decay covers about 2.9 beats, under a bar and a half. A Plateaux or Dynamic Hall at 3.5 seconds, mix about 25 percent, pre-delay 30 ms and low cut 200 Hz carries the verses. Pull it back to 2.5 seconds for the choruses, when the band fills the space.

Snapshots for a 7:26 Song

MultiTracks' song map for the original master runs Intro, Verse 1, Verse 2, Chorus, Vamp, Verse 3, Verse 4, Chorus, Interlude, Bridge, Chorus, Bridge, Instrumental, Chorus, Ending. That's fifteen sections, and only four kinds of sound:

Set Tempo Select to per-preset so every snapshot shares the stored 74. On an HX Stomp, three snapshots are enough if Bridge and Verse share one and you swell with a volume pedal. On a pedalboard, any delay with a millisecond display takes the two times directly: 405 and 1,216. For a full worship board built around one preset per song, our Sunday-morning snapshots guide walks through the footswitch layout, and the Elevation Worship hub has the rest of the catalog.

What to Try First

Before you build anything, run the four-step echo test against the recording. It takes two minutes, and it settles which set of note values you need. Then put a capo on 5, play the chorus progression with the B and E strings ringing, and listen for whether the drone stays sweet over the F. That one decision makes more difference to how this song sits on a Sunday than any amp choice.