Electric guitar

Power chords in dropped D tuning - The beginner rock guitarists short cut

When it comes to beginner electric guitar lessons, this has to be the quickest and easiest short cut I know of to fast track to playing power chords on the guitar. Especially if you’ve only just recently started to play the guitar and your fingertips feel like they really need a break.

To be perfectly honest though, when I first started learning how to play the electric guitar, no-one told me about this, and I think it’s only recently that a lot of guitarists have started to do it.

Here’s how you do it.

Detune the 6th string E down to D, so instead of the tuning being EADGBE it’s now DADGBE, and by the way, the 6th string is the thickest one.

It should be quite easy to tell when the 6th string is tuned to D, cos it’ll sound like the open 4th string except it’ll be an octave lower - same note but half the frequency.

With this alternate tuning you can play power chords using only one finger. The strings you play are the 4th 5th and 6th strings. Try not to let any of the other strings on the guitar make a sound.

You place your finger flat across the fretboard, preferably just behind or at least in the middle between the frets, and then you strum the 4th 5th and 6th strings.

Here’s a picture of the fretboard, and most of the power chords you can play with dropped D tuning.

I know it looks like you have to use three fingers, but you only need one finger.

The three open strings are a D power chord. Once you’ve got your finger flat across the fretboard you can basically just slide it back and forth to get to whichever power chord you want. Simple isn’t it?

If you need more info on tuning the guitar and other beginner guitar chords you can browse the main site play-electric-guitar.net and if you don’t mind signing up for some excellent free guitar lessons, you can pay a visit to the Jamorama site.

Here’s my MyLot page if you want to go there and friend me ClaudesBrother