An acoustic guitar resting in soft golden light in a quiet room that feels a little like a chapel

For Dave Churchill

News · Fret Religion · By the one who kept the tapes · July 10, 2026 · 5 min read

The Gospel of Dave

Every chord you can hear played on this website is one man, on one guitar. His name is Dave. This is the story of how that happened, and why it took twenty years and two hemispheres to say it out loud.

Long before GuitarAnon was a website, it was a DVD. Back when a DVD was the newest thing going. The idea was simple, and it turns out it was about twenty years ahead of its time: put a chord chart on the screen, and when you pick a chord, you hear it played. My friend Dave and I made it. We even recorded a forty-five minute beginner lesson with Dave as the teacher. Patient, funny, and good at it. That disc was the whole company before there was a company.

"The idea was twenty years early. The friendship was right on time."

Who Dave is

Dave Churchill is the guitar player. I am not. I can bang out a couple of power chords on a good day, and that is about where it ends. That is the strange truth under this whole thing: the guy who built a guitar company can barely play, and he just believed in the friend who really could, and kept his playing alive. Dave is also an attorney and a producer, which is a wonderful set of things for one person to be. The name of this whole thing came from him, or really from his family. GuitarAnon is short for Guitar Licks Anonymous, a wink at the twelve-step rooms. If that kind of joke feels baked into everything here, it is because it runs in his blood. His mom ran a bar in Anaheim called Group Therapy, so a husband could tell his wife he was headed to group therapy and be home a little later. That is the family we are dealing with. The apple did not fall far.

"His mom named her bar Group Therapy. The apple did not fall far."

The files that would not die

A route across seven stops from California to Uruguay, crossing the equator, showing Dave's chord files carried around the world for over twenty years without losing a note.

Life happened, the way it does. But I never let go of the files. Dave's recordings and his charts rode with me on hard drive after hard drive, for over twenty years, from California to Maui to Tennessee to Colorado to Oahu to Washington, and now to Uruguay, where I am typing this. Two continents. Two hemispheres. And not one of Dave's chords ever lost a note. A guitar he strummed in Southern California is, right now, sitting below the equator, still perfectly in tune.

"Two continents, two hemispheres, two decades, and not one chord ever lost a note."

His hands are all over this place

From cardboard to code: Dave's cardboard accompaniment wheel becoming the site's interactive Chord Wheel.

Here is what most people who use this site do not know. Dave is not one feature here. He is nearly all of them.

The chord charts were his. I photoshopped every single one of them by hand, and years later those were the source I used to bring them up to modern resolution. The Chord Wheel that spins to show you the chords that belong together started as a piece of cardboard in Dave's hands, an accompaniment tool you could turn with your fingers. The Tuner that listens to your guitar through the microphone began as six crude strings drawn on that DVD screen. And the sound. Every chord you hear played on this site is Dave, strumming. His hands, recorded once, playing for strangers every single day, and he has no idea.

"He is not one feature on this site. He is nearly all of them."

David and the harp

Strings don't change. From David's harp to Dave's guitar, the note holds.

I grew up reading the Bible, and somehow I never put this together until recently. In the first book of Samuel there is a king named Saul who is tormented, and they send for a young musician to play for him. The musician takes up a harp, and he plays, and the darkness lifts off the king. That musician's name is David. He is the reason music as medicine has a name at all. And here is Dave, a David of his own, whose playing has been quietly lifting the mood of everyone who lands on this site ever since.

The instrument changed. The string did not. A vibrating string made a note three thousand years ago and it makes the same note tonight. Everything in this story moved. The people, the drives, the countries, the decades. The one thing that never changed is the string.

"Strings don't change. From David's harp to Dave's guitar, the note holds."

The door is open

So we are giving Dave his name back, out loud, on the thing he started. The chord player where you hear him strum is becoming Churchill's Chapel, the little room on the hill where the strings ring. This story is the first stone of it.

He did not build a company. He left a seed on a DVD, and I have spent two decades carrying it around the planet so that it could finally grow into something. If you are reading this and you know Dave Churchill, tell him the idea worked. And if you are Dave: the door is open, the seat is warm, and the strings are exactly where you left them.

"He didn't leave a company. He left a seed."

Pick up the guitar, Dave. We have been waiting a long time.