Guitar Power Chords

Guitar Power Chords is a special kind of chords that make most of sense on electric guitars with distortion effect on, because playing any other chords will produce too messy sound.

Compare the A minor chord to the A power chord

Power chords mostly used in Metal, Trash, Alt-Rock and other heavy styles.

They basically consist of only the root note and the fifth. The root note is the base note that lays in the name of the chord.
For example in the C power chord the root note is the C.
In order to find the fifth, go counting from the root note five steps higher: 1-C, 2-D, 3-E, 4-F, 5-G. The G is the fifth.

Here is the location on the fretboard.

In guitar song books power chords marked as a figure 5 added to the root note.

so the C power chord indicates as C5, the A as A5, etc...

Very often, for even more powerful sounding, one more note is added to a power chord, it's actually the same root note again but located octave higher.

So for an instance the C5 chord will be:

Use the Guitar Power Chords Chart to easily find location of any power chord.

The fact is that power chords neither major nor minor chords.

Here's one interesting twist I found over my practicing:

If you take any song written for acoustic (clean) guitar,
for example let's take VERSE of Fade to Black song by Metallica,
the actual chords for clean guitar are:

simply convert these chords into power chords:

Open Guitar Power Chord Chart

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