What are the Chords on the electric guitar?

Answer 1

There are many chords for the Electric Guitar. They are the same chords as for the acoustic guitar. For how to play them, you should buy a chord book (cheap) or look it up on the internet. But I will go through a few different types ...

First position chords are played with your left hand near the head of the guitar. They use very different "shapes" or finger positions, and some of them are quite tricky. For this reason, I just stick to the common/easy ones, namely; A (major), A minor, C, D, D minor, E, E minor, G.

If you want, you can use these same finger positions to play lower chords (by altering the tuning of your guitar), or higher chords (by putting a capo on your guitar frets). For example if you tune down a step (lower the pitch of each string by one whole note), the E chord becomes a D, A becomes G, D becomes C, and so on.

Bar chords use a few standard shapes that you move up and down the guitar neck to change the chord. I use bar chords to play; F, F minor, G minor, B minor, C minor, and things like F#, C# minor. You can also use them instead of first position chords if it's easier or you prefer the sound (it does sound a little different).

As you can see, I usually stick to major and minor chords, but there are many other types (sevenths etc.) that you can play using either first position or bar chords.

Power chords are truncated or simplified bar chords. They have a very easy shape that can be moved around the guitar neck. You can play power chords on just 2 or 3 strings, but sometimes 4 works also. Power chords are very popular in punk music, because although they don't have the same "full sound" as other chords, once you put heavy distortion on your guitar you can hardly notice.

Answer 2

Power chords are chords that contain only the root and a fifth interval. In many cases, the root is doubled with an octave. There is no third, so the chord quality is indeterminate; it is neither major nor minor. A power chord can be constructed on any degree of the scale and there are several possible fingerings.

Power chords arose because of the nature of signal distortion. When two or more notes are played through a non-linear amplifier, distortion causes an effect known as intermodulation. The intermodulation between two notes will create frequencies that are multiples of the difference between the frequencies. In most cases, those frequencies are not harmonically related to either of the two notes, so they will be very dissonant and will sound like "mud". However, in a power chord, the difference in frequencies between the root and fifth happens to be half the frequency of the root. (That's not an accident, it's a result of the way the musical scale is constructed). When a power chord is played, the intermodulation products are an octave below and an octave above the root, which "fattens" the chord without adding any dissonant (inharmonic) frequencies.

Of course, Link Wray didn't need to know all that when he discovered power chords!

Answer 3

All of the same ones you can on acoustic including A through G, minors, sharps, flats, diminished, 7th, etc. I recommend buying a book of guitar chords commonly sold in music and book stores because there are literally hundreds of possible chords.