Guitar Lesson Two

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Guitar Lesson Two - Music

Music

In this lesson, we are going to cover the single most important tool for playing rock guitar.

It's called the POWER CHORD.

More rock and roll songs are centered around POWER CHORDS than any other single ingredient of guitar playing.

They look like this:

Notice that the ring finger is required to play two strings at once. This is called a BARRE (as in "belly up to the bar"). You accomplish this by flattening the finger across both strings at the same time. If you try to keep the index finger using only it's tip you will have a hard time playing this. So, just flatten out the index finger too. It doesn't matter (HEY! this is rock and roll).

This chord is so cool that it can be moved around the fretboard at will, even to another set of strings (Just remember that if a note falls on the B-string or E-string, you have to move it up a fret. [If a note falls on the B-string and there's no one in the audience to hear it, does it still rock?]).

Another thing. If you can't get your ring finger to play both of it's notes, forget about the note on the D-string and just play the notes on the E and A-strings. It doesn't get any more simple than this!

Here's the riff for Iron Man by Black Sabbath:

Here's what it sounds like:

Iron Man

Here's the riff for Cocaine by Eric Clapton:

Notice the red S over the /. This is a slide. What you do is play the note at the 7th fret with your ring finger and then slide that finger up the string to the ninth fret. Here's what it sounds like:

Cocaine

Mess around with power chords, and see if you can come up with anything interesting.

Best of luck!

This lesson is divided into four parts:

Theory

Technique - Left hand

Technique - Right hand

Music

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