Every electric guitarist needs to firstly learn how to play power chords. Power chords are so widely used in Rock and Metal and are a vital characteristic of the electric guitar sound.
The power chord sounds great, both clean and distorted, and can be used in a wide variety of musical styles. The reason you would want to learn how to play power chords is because this voicing sounds powerful, due to the non-dissonant nature of ‘perfect’ intervals that the power chords are built upon. The perfect intervals are unison, perfect fourth, fifth and the octave.
Ever notice that if you turn up the overdrive and distortion on your electric guitar, and strike a standard chord, it sounds really bad? This is because there are many more notes in a standard chord and playing all the notes with distortion on just makes it sound really messy.
On the other hand, power chords sound just great with loads of overdrive and distortion as they are built only upon two notes.
The main ingredients of a power chord are the root, and the perfect fifth. Therefore a power chord in the key of E would contain the notes, E and B and would be referred to as an E5. The root and fifth can be repeated as many times as desired so if you repeat the root note up the octave that will provide an octave interval and if you place a perfect fifth below the root note that will give you a perfect fourth.
Learn These Power Chord Shapes
How To Play Power Chords
These are the usual open shapes that you can start learning how to play power chords with. The G5 sounds really good and has a classic rock type of sound. Many riffs have been written with these chords. Included here are also the E5 and A5 power chord charts. Most would just play the bottom three notes.
Learning how to play power chords in these open shape positions will allow you access to many of your favorite rock guitar songs, but you’ll need to learn the moveable shapes as well if you want to be able to play in different keys.
Moveable power chords forms
The great thing about the moveable shapes is that the root is on the bottom string, so as long as you learn the note names on the root string, you can play these power chords in all keys. The second and fourth-string shapes are not used as often as the sixth and fifth-string chords, but you should learn them anyway to increase your ‘voicing’ variety.
The chart below are some other shapes that you should also learn fingerings for and practice. If you take a fifth-string root chord and double the fifth as a bass note on the low E string it will sound ‘de-tuned’, giving you a very powerful ‘growling’ effect.
Less used power chords shapes
So time to put what you’ve learned from this ‘how to play power chords article’ and put it into practice! Flip on your overdrive and distortion and let her rip. Play around with the overdrive settings and find a setting that you like or that you’re trying to emulate.
Quick tip: don’t push the overdrive up too much. Sometimes less is more.
Tags: electric guitar, How To Play Power Chords, rock guitar