The Power Guitar Chord (Power Chords)

The power guitar chords are very simple guitar chord(power probably refers to the tight powerful sound that can be produced by playing powerchords – characteristic of heavy rock and metal guitar playing). The power chords consist of notes played across just two or three strings and you could argue that the powerchord is not even a real guitar chord(power chords consist of less than 3 notes, so technically cannot be regardeed as a chord).  The power chord consists of a root note and the 5th (an additional root note one octave higher can also be played) and power chords are named accordingly – for example if the root note happens to be an A, then the power chord is called A5 (A for the root note and 5 for perfect 5th note – for more details on the musical theory of intervals, here’s a Wikipedia article that may help).  Power chords are therefore easy to play and are widely adopted by rock guitarists since the finger positions can remain the same and be moved around the neck of the guitar as you’ll see from the chord box examples below.  Note that the powerchords shown below (A5, A, B5, C5, D5, D, E5, E, F5 and G5 powerchords) are one and two-fingered powerchords.  There are three-fingered powerchords as well and I will try to include these soon. 

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Power chords are easy and fun to learn and play and you can put together some excellent combinations with them. You should also remember to combine these with a good understanding of both open chords and barre chords in order to maximise your versatility as a guitar player.