Ah power chords... The backbone of Rock 'n Roll history! No wonder they’re often one of the first things any guitarist will learn. It allows you to play loads and loads of easy songs.

Because they're so popular, being able to recognise power chords by ear is an incredibly useful skill to have and will make you much better at learning songs by ear in general. In this article, I'll share fifteen power chord songs with you and provide hints to learn them by ear.

As in other articles (one string guitar songs and two string guitar songs) I'll provide hints to make it easier to figure them out by ear. For this article I'll give you:

1. Which string the song is (best) played on (i.e. the lowest note) 2. What the starting fret is (of the lowest note) 3. A link to a correct tab to check if you got it right

All the hints are hidden by default, but just press the blue buttons and they'll appear!

In case you don't know what a power chord is, it's not that hard. It's a chord that consists of only two or three notes and is played on the lower strings of your guitar (E, A and sometimes D). The shape is always the same and you can move it around to make different kinds of power chords. Here's are two examples:

But you can also play a power chord that consists of two notes:

That's pretty much it!

For this article, I've started with the more easy power chord songs and move on to the slightly more involved riffs. Lastly, you might want to check out this step-by-step guide to learning riffs by ear.