The Music Theory of POWER CHORDS

there's a lot more to power chords than just Green Day and Nirvana songs in fact if you start applying some of the music theory you know to the power chord concept you'll find that writing with power chords is actually a very rich and fertile ground to be writing in there's a lot of options a lot of cool things we can do that we can't do when we're working with full chords so in this video really what I want to do is tackle the music theory of power chords what are they what are the variations that we see how can we use them and how can we write with them so let's get started here all you have to do is pick a root I'm gonna pick the note G and if you go up five notes of your major scale one two three four five that gives us a fifth that's the note D so a root and a fifth that is what a power chord is if you play a root and a fifth at the same time you have a power chord now to me that's kind of underwhelming when I first heard the word power chord I expected something like you know epic and massive and glorious and then I got this and that really didn't sound too power infused for the word power chord but really all you got to do is just throw some distortion on that if you play a distorted power chord something magical happens if that sound right there glorious and really the foundation of rock and roll is if we double that let's have another guitar play a G power chord and let's have a bass play a low G note at the same time as a kick drum hitting on a drumset with a crash cymbal and you'll get this awesome which is the greatest thing ever that's the foundation of like every rock and roll song right there just this giant wall of noise and that's what comes out of just playing a G power chord now here's the thing a G power chord is not a chord that name is deceptive chords need three notes and we're only playing two notes we're playing G and D if we look at a G major chord well that has a G identity in it but it also has a B in it and we're not playing a B if we look at a G minor chord a G minor also has a G and a demon but it has a B flat as well so when you see G and D you're playing two thirds of a major chord or two thirds of a minor chord but we don't know which one it is so this could substitute as a G major this Consultative as a tamiya really if another instrument is playing one of those other notes one of those thirds the B or the B flat then this will transform into sounding like one of those chords so listen here's a G power chord but imma have another guitar play the note B and you'll hear that sounds like a major chord now same thing again play the G power chord but have another guitar play the note B flat and you'll hear this is functioning as a minor chord so it's really important to remember that power chords are not major chords or minor chords but they could be either depending on how you treat them they're very transformative like that so this is the first way I would recommend you use power chords use them as substitutes for major chords or minor chords nothing else not diminished not augmented just major or minor you can sub in a power chord instead so take a chord progression you already know turn it into power chords and now you've got like a punk rock version of that song or like a metal version of that song for example Hotel California classic chord progression all major chords and minor chords nothing too fancy in there so we should be able to take those same chords and transform them into power chords and give it after your grittier versions with those exact same words right and if you wanted to make like a Metallica version of this all you got to do is just play some pom units on it and do your best James Hatfield impersonation [Music] [Music] so in addition to just using power chords as chord substitutes I like to think of power chords as just big fat notes just giant notes so think don't stop thinking about Keys and chords just think about if you've got a sequence of notes you like so let's just do okay so I'm basically doing like Inspector Gadget all right I like that sequence of notes which I just stole from Inspector Gadget but if I wanted to turn it into power chords let's just literally take every note and add the v to it and you can hear that's very indicative of the stuff that you hear and you know Megadeth Iron Maiden Metallica we hear this kind of stuff all the time we have a cool line of notes and then it just becomes a series of power chords instead think of the song Iron Man the main riff there is just these slid power chords but this is the melody of the song later on we hear it just as single notes so it's like a smaller version of the power chord version so pretty simple stuff just take a simple sequence that you already like and just turn every note into its own power chord by adding a fifth on top of it the next thing you'll see a lot with power chords is to invert them we know a power chord is just a root and a fifth but if you play the fifth on the bass instead then you get a really cool sound you get this nice inverted power chord effect so let's take a look at our G power chord we were playing this before it's a G and indeed right but what if I play the D right here I'll keep the D there but I'll play the G above it instead and I get this and this is the kind of thing we hear a lot in like I think of ZZ Top music I think of smoke on the water smooth on the water is all inverted power chords if you look at this first sequence it's just a zero and a zero right and that's just a G powerful so a G power chord and to this this has been inverted so here's the original power cord version of smoke on the water if I invert every one of those power cords I get that grungy ZZ Top cool flavor to it I hope you hear the difference there there's a lot more grit in an inverted power cord than there is in first position power cord also a cool thing about inverted power cords is that you can access like lower tones that are even legal on your guitar for example like my guitars in standard tuning right now so if I wanted to play something like AC power cord I can't do that there's no Losey the the lowest C I can find it here but if I play an invert do this which actually with the help of the bass player your bass player can thump away at a really low C you can do this and it's a good substitute for a really low gentie C power chord even though you don't have access to a low C so by understanding that you can just you know use these low strings in a different function that you normally do you can actually like right in riffs lower than you're supposed to in standard and still it'll still feel like a power chord as long as you know your bass player can assist you by filling in that low bass note now before I go any further I just want to present two little shapes here for you we're gonna call this a diminished power chord and we're gonna call this a stretched out power chord and explain what those mean here in just a minute but I want to introduce that first off those aren't official names that's just what I'm going to call them but they're gonna kind of come in handy for the next section here so a very similar concept of what we were just doing with these big notes is to take the scales you've already learned and just take every note and turn it into its own power chord so you can write in that scale just using power chords so like I really like Phrygian dominant right and I just take every one of those notes and turn it into a power cord I have a really nice sequence of notes to compose with and I'm really not even thinking about cords I'm not thinking major minor I'm just thinking is this note in the scale yes okay let's turn it into a power chord and you can get some cool results out of that now here's what the theory helps out let's say we're composing an a minor I can take any note in my a minor scale and I can build a power chord off of it and the fifth that I end up playing will always be in the scale look when I play an a power chord my fifth is an E and using the key of a minor when I play a de power chord I fit this an a and obviously a is in the key of a minor so this applies everywhere except the second note if I try playing a power chord off the second degree which is B then my ring finger v ends up playing an F sharp and F sharp is not in the a minor scale so this entire video I've just been saying ignore it just play power chords wherever you want they're big notes and that's true but you do want to keep in mind that in a minor we have a B diminished chord and that's where this little diminished power chord is gonna help us out there's no such thing as a diminished power chord but that's what I call it any guitar player will know what you're talking about it's just a tritone you've got a root and a tritone and that's going to imply a diminished two board which is totally different than just playing a power chord on my second degree and actually I think there's a lot of really cool options here because I love diminished chords especially in that to position back to the one so hopefully you hear that this is a lot more flavorful it's a lot more mystery behind this then there is just playing right that's big that's huge that's rock and metal this might be a little more neoclassical a little more dramatic a little bit more melody going on by using the student this also applies in major right if I was an a major the seventh note is supposed to get a diminished chord and if I try playing a power chord from my seventh note in major then all of a sudden my ring finger is playing a D sharp and that's not allowed in the key of a major there is no D sharp in the key of a major so if I play a diminished power chord instead starting on that seventh note it can help resolve me to my comment now in my experience this is kind of rare to see I don't see a lot of seven to one progressions what I do see a lot in punk rock is the stretched out power chord so here's my a power chord right but if I just took my first finger and stretched it out to hit that a flat or that g sharp here what I get I get this really nice little movement of my leading tone coming back up to my tonic and you'll see this a lot in metal you'll see this a lot in Punk and I need you to know that when you see a stretched-out power chord like this the important thing to remember is to look at the note the look at the highest note right now my pinky's playing it that note is the actually the root of this chord this is actually a major chord substitute anytime you see something like this my pinky's playing an E my first finger is playing a G sharp those are two notes of an E major chord and that's usually what this shape is doing when you see it when you see a stretched-out power chord look at the pinky note and ask yourself what note is that and chances are you're probably playing that major chord so here was an a power chord right and then if I stretch it out this is not an a power chord this is most likely an E major chord and it could help me go down to f-sharp and into a real so I could do something like a he over G sharp F sharp pretty cool stuff now let's go back to the minor scale here for a little bit because if you know about minor Keys you know that that fifth chord is naturally supposed to be a minor chord but we often make it a major chord because it's the dominant chord and it helps to miss back to the top so we could imply this major five chord we can apply this dominant chord by doing our stretched out power chord even in minor keys so here's an a minor or here's an a power chord we're thinking of it is implying a minor and then we can think of this as an E major being the dominant chord of a minor this is the same thing I just did right and now I'm calling it minor but remember we don't have contacts there's nothing else playing those extra notes in the background so we can make this we could make this sound like major just by adding in the right notes in the background adding in C sharps you know she does sharks other notes of a major and this would suddenly sound like an a major progression take a listen [Music] now here's that same chord progression but this time in the background I'm just gonna fill in notes of like C natural G natural notes from a minor and take a listen to how drastically different that same chord progression sounds [Applause] now let's go back to that Hotel California progression because we can kind of put all these ideas together here now I said the first chord in Hotel California is a B minor we can apply that just by playing a B power chord the second chord is f sharp major I can imply that by doing a stretched-out power chord like so the next chord is a major I can apply that with an a power chord the next chord is an E major I can apply that with another stretched-out power chord and so on here's a G major here's a D major that's implied and then an E power chord and an f-sharp power chord so you can actually see now some of the cool chromaticism that's imbued into this chord progression look you can hear it a lot easier too now that we've set it up this way so I think when you start learning all these different options on how to play power chords you provide some really cool ways to play simple chord progressions like that that's a big jump e chord progression but now it's the slide e descending riff kind of sounds like a 38 special but it's really cool to hear that same chord progression without all of the thirds and fifths present all the time what it turns into and the last thing I want to note here is that this stretched out power chord does have other contexts if you look at these two notes I'm playing I'm playing an E flat and an E G sharp attorney these could be two notes of a G sharp Augmented chord right so it's not like this has to be an E major and I just want you to be aware of this these could also be kind of implying a minor flat 6 chord but in my experience anytime you see this most of the times you see this just take a look at that highest note and think to yourself major chord hey might think he's playing an E so this is really an E major and nine times out of ten that's the function that that little shape is being seen in so I personally think power chords are really cool things because there's so many options when you see a power chord pop up it's not major it's not minor it could be either or you can play with that as a composer and you can really mess with people's expectations and come up with really cool you know interesting effects because of the ambiguity of a power chord and they also sound awesome so Revere into rock and metal and just big epic sounding stuff you're really going to want to know power chords and all their variations so I hope you enjoyed this video and I hope you learned something if you did like this video you can thank my patreon supporters for making it possible thanks and see you next time [Music]

Channel: Signals Music Studio

Views: 768,269

Keywords: jake lizzio, crystal lake, free lesson, guitar lesson, cool guitar, how to play guitar, power chords, powerchords, guitar power chrods, music theory, music theory guitar, music theory lesson, guitar lesson theory, rock theory, metal theory, metal music theory, power chord music theory, music theory power chords, how do powerchords work, writing powerchords, writing with powerchords, writing music powerchords, using powerchords, how to use powerchords, signals music

Id: dbhF2wnnT7M

Length: 14min 32sec (872 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 11 2019