The School of Feedback Guitar Blog

Anyone familiar with My Bloody Valentine's "Loveless" probably enjoys the sound of dense textures. Indeed, when My Bloody Valentine came to Dallas last year, they played 15 minutes of the loudest noise I've ever heard. I have no idea how anyone could go through that concert without earplugs. My Bloody Valentine is happy to create thick sounds, and playing power chords with open strings can help anyone begin to approach doing this.

Imagine creating any chord progression with power chords. The open strings, if played as open during the chord progression, will add a texture that will ring and fly over the power chords. Basically, you take a regular chord progression and refuse to mute the High E, B, or G strings. The result is that you will create this ringing sound that approaches what My Bloody Valentine can do. It gets even more intense to do this with a reverb or delay pedal. Make sure to pick one with reverse echo or reverse reverb (my favs, but I am biased).

Power chords; The metal in Metallica, the "eleven" in Spinal Tap. The racious in Ramones, the sex in the Sex Pistols. Power chords are ubiquitous, even in pop music. Knowing how to play them gives a person an advantage to playing the far more perplexing, if not maddening, barre chord. Power chords have their place in history, and just like everything in guitar, they can be tricky. The good news is that there is a way to hack playing them. Hack, as in "workable, approachable solution." This hack will show you a neat way to make power chords beatable, if you don't have much experience with them yet.

The frets on the guitar get smaller as you approach the actual body of the guitar; The closer your fret is to your body, the smaller it gets. One problem a lot of people have is that their fingers don't like to stretch or compress with the width of the frets. Usually, their third and fourth fingers do not stretch or compress easily enough to play the chord clearly.

The Hack:

Place your eye on the index/pointer/first finger, and position that first. Paying close attention to the position of the first finger means you get the advantage of securing the lowest, and probably most important, note of the chord. Make sure to do that before futzing with the other fingers. The result? Your third and fourth fingers (ring and pinky finger, respectively), will learn to adjust. Once again: Eye on the index finger.

What on earth does Weezer and Glenn Gould have in common? Here is a quote from the book, "Conversations with Glenn Gould."

"...you could have a certain cluster [chord] and there would be one note absent from it that was the key to it's function as a cluster." What Glenn is saying is that a chord might still have the same effect even if it's missing a note. Of course, all I could think about were power chords.

If you know about power chords, aka the ones that are used all over the place in rock including Spinal Tap as well as by Weezer, they have only two notes: The root and the fifth. The third is left out of a power chord. hmmmmm. Glenn Gould once again:

"... you did not have to sound a root tone for that tone to be psychologically present."

Again, Glenn is perhaps inferring that you do not need every single note of the chord, in this case the root, for the chord to have a psycological value. For guitarists, this question comes to mind: How can a song played completely with power chords still be silly and fun to listen to if these chords leave out the most defining note? And yet, this is what happens all the time. Power chords can sound sinister, fun, depressing, creepy, and outright joyful. It's all in the implication.

It tickles me to no end to find funny little connections like this between classical music and rock.

One defining aspect of cooking with Tofu is that it accumulates the flavor of most anything else you cook it with. If you cook Tofu with ketchup, it will taste like ketchup. If you cook it with kimchi, it will taste like kimchi. The same with power chords. Take Weezer's The Sweater Song for example. The chords during the chorus have no tonality because they are power chords, however the song sounds happy. Silly. Fun.

If I played a G power chord, I would be playing any sort of arrangement of the notes "G" and "D" but I would not include the note "B." Both G and D, in whatever arrangement on the guitar, will yield a chord that doesn't sound happy (major) or sad (minor). Yet on The Sweater Song, it somehow sounds major, despite the fact that there is no defining note in any of the chords.

The reason why is that everything that is happening around those power chords flavors them, and the power chords take on the taste of them. Tofu. The power chords can taste like:

• The melody that Rivers Cuomo sings
• The falsetto harmonies that Matt Sharp sings
• The chords in the verse
• The silly guitar introduction
• The guitar solo

If you follow me, many of the other instruments and voices hit the notes that the power chords left out. The chords (tofu) are cooked in the same batch as the melody/harmonies/guitar solos (the kimchi) and the song is memorably happy and silly (1 + 2 = full stomach). If this seems weird to you, feel free to ask me about it sometime. I will sing you a version of the Sweater Song that is minor and depressing using the same exact chords.