Quote:
Originally Posted by RezZ
Who plays their chords without the fifth? When playing metal I find it neccisery for the right sound but in many rock songs and other genres a full chord without that fifth sounds much more original. I know some jazz players **** on the fifth and look down upon it, but to me it is the foundation of all music I love.
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The thing about the 5th isn't when to use it or not. You can leave it out of anything really, because it can be implied a lot of different ways. The 3rd is more important a lot of the time, because the 3rd is what defines a major or minor chord.
Powerchords get around both of these weird things by not having a third, and therefore being diatonically ambiguous, and also by taking advantage of a resonance phenomenon. The mathematics of it are unimportant, but suffice to say, a 5th interval's harmonics interact in such a way that root and 5th combined sound their respective notes, but the peaks in their waves overlap such that a third pitch is discerned as being one octave lower than the root.
On a clean guitar this is already audible, but adding in distortion compresses the whole thing and gives the guitar a massively increased low end punch. Try it. Play a powerchord at the 12th fret and see if you can hear a lower fundamental equal to the note of the open string.