I recently started teaching guitar lessons again. During the first lesson with my new student, we worked on power chords. Among other things, I taught him this power chord vamp, which is a good starting point for anyone as an intro to the fundamentals of guitar playing and rock-n-roll chord progressions:
I put it together in Guitar Pro, which is a great app for guitarists and an essential one for guitar teachers. I highly recommend it. In addition to the PDF above, GP lets you export audio, and uses some fairly convincing synthesis to make is sound like actual guitar playing. Here’s the audio for the music above:
Since I’m starting fresh with this student, I’m planning to put together something of this sort after each lesson, to recap what we learned and as a guide for practice between sessions. And, since I have a blog, why not just post it here? Why not indeed.
Takeaways from this lesson:
- The basic power chord shape, as well three really common examples: E5, A5, and B5.
- Power chords using open strings (E5, A5) and power chords that don’t (B5).
- Power chords that don’t use open strings are movable. They can be used on any of the bottom four strings (E, A, D, G) and also on the two highest strings (B, E), but things get weird when you try to play them on on the G and B strings, for reasons we will get into later.
- Down picking and palm muting are essential techniques for metal and hard rock.
- Repeated patterns of 8th notes are a staple of rock and roll, hard rock, metal, pop, and pretty much every form of popular music since the beginning of time.
Some other things we covered not directly reflected in this lesson:
- The names and numbers of the open strings.
- How the frets are numbered.
- The proper distance behind the fret to place your finger when fretting as well as the right amount of pressure to use.
- Striking the right strings for a chord (while muting or avoiding the others).
- The pros and cons of wrapping your thumb over the top of the neck.
- The pros and cons of anchoring the pinking and ring finger of your picking hand.
Things touched on or implied that will become a bigger deal later:
- The ambiguous nature of power chords, since they lack a third and are, thus, neither major nor minor, compared to other chords.
- The I-IV-V progression.
- Reading tablature and standard notation.