
So already even with just one note fed through distortion, you’ve got a depth of tone that includes more soundwaves than you originally played. Those are harmonic tones that echo from the original tone’s vibration frequency.

How it does that is some major math wizardry that we don’t have the space to explain here – just trust us that the end results produce what’s called partials. In other words, however hard or softly you pluck a string, your distortion effect randomly chooses how much it wants to broadcast it through your amp without much input from you except which note you played. That’s because of how amplified distortion makes individual notes sound once it gets done crunching them.Ī typical distortion effect will amplify played notes in different proportions than the strength by which they’re struck. They’re most popular in amplified rock music that uses heavy tone distortion, such as heavy metal and punk. Power chords are when you play the root and fifth notes of a scale or key at the same time without any other note interval added. It’s done all the time to add tensions, indicate movement into another key or section of the song, or just to make your ear feel slightly uncomfortable in a good way like in jazz. Usually, this will be within the same key to enhance and reinforce the emotions of the chosen scale.īut if you’ve played any form of chord before on your guitar or on another instrument that can play more than one note at a time like a piano, you know that it’s easy to make exceptions to that. At its most basic level, a chord is a group of notes that are played at the same time.

What are power chords?īefore we get into the details about power chords, we have to go back to the technical definition of a musical chord itself. They’re a great playing technique to underline the primary tone of the chords in songs that are loud, fast, and heavy, so if you’re ready to melt the faces off your audiences – in a Kirk Hammett kind of way, not like the Nazis from Indiana Jones – power chords are for you. Playing the guitar is all about making an art form of physics, bending sound waves to your will to make your songs come into the real world from where you hear them in your brain.īut sometimes your fingers haven’t quite caught up to the patterns in your head, and that’s where power chords come in.
