Guitar Power Chords
In this Lagniappe Lesson, Mr. John will show you how to play power chords on the guitar.
Guitar Power Chords
- contributed by John C.
Hello folks. My name is John. I teach here at the Louisiana Academy of Performing Arts. Today I'm going to be discussing power chords on the guitar. Um, power chords are fairly simple. Uh, what they involve is, uh, two notes sounding at the same time. What you can do is, uh, you can come to, for example, a, you have to find your bass note. In this case it's gonna be a, and then what you do is you would go two frets over one, two, and then down one string, and you play those at the same time, and you have yourself a power chord. Power chords are, uh, the, the basic function of most pop and rock music. If you can learn how to play a power chord, there's a lot you can do. Um, I'm gonna give you an example of how I could exchange a power chord from a regular chord. Okay? Here is a regular "G". This is just a plain G open chord. I'm gonna turn that into a power chord, and now I'm going to do the same four C. Here's C, here's my base for C. I'm gonna go to over and change that into a power chord.
And then I'm gonna do the same four D. Here's D open chord. And now I'm gonna find my base for D, which is right here. Go over two strings, I'm sorry, two frets and down one string. And there's a power chord. It's hard to play those together, but sound like this. So I just transferred a regular chord progression into more of a rock pop sound chord progression. Here's how it would sound originally. And here is the rock progression with the power chord. And if you wanna learn how to find those base chords and where they are, just enroll with me and I can teach you the rest!