Here’s an epic chord voicing that will make your powerchord riffs sound heavier than you ever imagined! Welcome, my guitarist friends, to the heaviest chords: Inverted Power Chords.

This is one of my favourite guitar hacks, I’m really excited to share it with you!

Here’s a tab for an inverted C Power Chord. The root note here is the C, located at the 3rd fret on the A string. Both of the other notes are 5ths: a lower 5th on the E string and the standard 5th on the D string.

Let me give you an overview of how inversions work and how it relates to power chords. Chords have 3 notes, right? A standard chords voicing on piano is a Root, 3rd and 5th. The lowest pitch in a chord is the most important, so it’s almost always the Root. That’s the standard voicing, but you can play those notes in any order – if you play Root, 5th, 3rd that’s a spread chord voicing. But, if you want to put either the 3rd or the 5th as the lowest note in the chord we call that an inversion.

3rd in the bass = 1st Inversion.

5th in the bass = 2nd Inversion.

If you’re playing some kind of 7th chord, you can put that in the bass too:

7th in the bass =3rd Inversion.

So how does this apply to our inverted power chords? Power Chords contain 2 notes: Root and 5th, so the normal language of “1st Inversion”, etc, don’t apply. That’s why I just call them “Inverted Power Chords”