Power Chords and Beyond
Distortion is one of you most powerful weapons in your arsenal as an electric guitar player: it actually defines the sound of the instrument and makes it the one we all love. One the other hand, distortion brings to the table a series of problems that acoustic guitar players never had. One of them is that the chords that are used in acoustic playing do not work well with distortion: they give a muddied sound due to the fact that there are too many notes in them. The art of playing with distortion is the art of choosing only few notes of the ones in the “6-strings chords”. Electric guitarists from the 60’s onwards have solved this problem largely using the so-called power chords. Let’s see what they are, and after that we’ll see how to build other chords that still sounds fine when distorted.
Power Chords Revisited
The idea behind power chords is very simple: a triad (as we have seen in one of our previous lessons on triads) is made by 3 notes. For instance, and A major triad is made by the notes A, C#, E; while an A minor triad is made by A, C, E. As you can see, the only difference between a major and a minor triad is the middle note. If we take the middle note out, we are left with an “incomplete triad” made only by two notes (in our case A, E). We will call that a “power chord”. The two notes in a power chord will be at the interval of a perfect fifth. We have accomplished two things this way:
- The power chord will sound good with distortion: not only we have less notes, but the interval of a perfect fifth works well with the distortion
- The power chord “fits” both a major and a minor triad. We don’t need to know if the chord is major or minor.
Let’s see various possible shapes for an A power chord using 3 strings. We are using only two notes in the following tab: A and E; if it appears that we are using three notes is because we are playing either A or E in different octaves (a procedure known as “doubling up” notes). For instance, in the fist position we are playing E both on the sixth and fourth strings.
Some of these chord positions are very famous and used, but the others sound good too!
More than Power Chords
Power chords are a good, nice, and simple solution, but they get old after a while. The very fact that they fit both major and minor chords is both an advantage (since we have to think less while playing) and a disadvantage (since the chords themselves have a poor harmonic content). We’d like to have other options to break out of the power chord monotony.
The solution is actually simple. Since 3-notes triads do not work well with distortion, we just eliminate one note from the triad. If we omit the middle note, we obtain the power chords again. But if we take out the first or last note, then we have something different. For A major (A, C#, E) we can eliminate E and keep A and C#, or we can eliminate A, keeping C# and E.
A word of caution here: if you remove the root (A) then you will need to have another instrument (typically the bass guitar) playing that note, otherwise the chord will not sound “right”.
These “chords” (technically we call them “dyads” since they have only two notes) have less ‘clarity’ with distortion than the power chords, but more than full triads. Let’s see some shapes for A and Am using only strings 5 and 6 on your guitar.
Some Worked Examples
Let’s now see a couple of practical examples of how to use this material. We will use the following chord progression: Am F C G.
In the first example the aim is to find the closest possible positions for the different chords, i.e. to move as little as possible. This gives a greater sense of cohesion to the song. Listen to this tab by clicking HERE.
On the next example, on the other hand, our aim is to use more than one chord shape to break the monotony of long-held chords. Again it’s a good idea not to jump too much around and stay in the same general zone of the fretboard. Listen to this tab HERE.
Take these shapes and apply them to your songs or to make a creative cover. And especially, have fun with them! And after that, you want to see how you can have even more fun by writing creativeguitar rhythm parts with them. Great rock and Metal players go well beyond the basics when using power chords, and you can learn to do the same here:
