Power chords are still an essential part of rock music as well as many other guitar dominated music styles. Nonetheless, standard power chords become boring quite fast to every over average guitar player. Power chords can be used perfectly as a musical device within a song but shouldn’t be the center of it. A nice way to bring a little bit more flavour into your power chord strumming is to use one of these ten creative power chord variations.

In this article you find nine power chord variations that I gathered over the years by means of experimenting and listen to many different styles of music. I not only give you a chord scale of each power chord but also a riff that I wrote by use of them. The riffs come in form of tabs and a short video clip. In the last years I have been leaving behind my electric guitar, picking up my steel acoustic guitar more often. So don’t be surprised seeing me playing these rocking power chords on my father’s old steel string guitar. I am quite faithful that you will be able to play them on your distorted guitar anyway.

For notating the riffs I use Guitar Pro 6 (affiliate link) an awesomely simple tab editor and LilyPond, an open source music engraving software, for my chords.