why work so hard* on something that doesn’t even sound that good? 
- especially on acoustic!
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I prefer open/spread voiced triads, too, but find that bar chords have a place.
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I think it’s “different” more than better or worse… but this sort of approach DOES sound pretty cool under very high gain.
I could be dead wrong, but I think Billy Corgan does stuff like this in his rhythm playing, or at least as overdubs against power chords here and there. And I think that’s a great use case, too - if you want to do heavily layered guitar parts, it’s certainly easier to get everything to sound consonant, if you’re stripping each layer down to the minimum you can to get the harmony across, to minimize the amount of slight beating that occurs within chords layered on chords.
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I’d prefer to keep my skin, thank you very much!
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Anyone else hearing the ‘Inception theme’ in this progression?!
If you like these sounds, check out tritone tuning where you could stack octaves of these chords (for instance I use F,B,F,B,F,B,F)
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You are totally right! Just after recording this I thought that it reminded me of something.
What a composer that Hans guy!
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If one has lots of effects or distortion, does it make sense to have more than 3 or 4 strings in a chord? And the jazz cats, they seem to like 3 or 4 strings, too… perhaps the barre chord is best reserved for acoustic instruments where one needs maximum volume?
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Gotta know your grips… the spread triads are great also, but there’s a place for everything - and a ton of great music out there that utilizes both!
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I’m not much of a jazz cat but MAN do I love shell chords.
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Having nothing to do with the topic at hand, but it suddenly occurred to me: the early version of Paul Gilbert’s “Technical Difficulties” was called “Metal Dog”… is this a play on jazz cat? Quite possibly!
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IIRC, he called the piece “Metal Dog” because the picking pattern reminded him of scratching a dog.
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Ah, that’s too bad - I like my explanation more. haha
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My personal thoughts - it depends.
A lot of rock music uses “power chords” precisely because the root and 5th alone are extremely consonant, and convey the tonality well, but don’t have any notes that beat against each other and cause weird overtones.
And yet… plug into a heavily distorted half-stack, and play a big open chord of your choice. Just stand there and let it ring out. It DOES sound huge, in ways a simple root-5th diad wouldn’t. I’d mentioned the Smashing Pumpkins already in this thread, but at the time “Siamese Dream” came out I’d be hard pressed to find a higher gain sound used in a mainstream rock album… and the Esus2 (probably an Eb, I think they tuned down a half step) bar chord played as the opening chord to “Today,” after the intro figure, sounds absolutely crushing.
In a very, very different context, and with a lot less gain but still quite a lot for the genre, Stevie Ray Vaughan did a lot with 11th and 13th chords, where there was a TON going on, but all those stacked thirds really helped a rock trio sound a lot bigger than it actually was.
So, I don’t think you can generalize, save that 1) It’s always worth at least trying different voicings in a song you’re working on, and sometimes a full bar chord is going to be the answer, but sometimes it’s not, and you lose nothing by experimenting, and 2) thinking about the “size” of your chords in the context of the arrangement can be a helpful way of looking at this (in that Smashing Pumpkins tune, there’s a bunch of different guitars playing, and at least one of them is power chords, even if there are big sus2 chords floating on top).
One way of looking at it, for sure… but I think looking at this as a way to change the “size” of chords makes sense.
In the jazz world, my understanding (as someone who has studied with jazz players but isn’t himself one) is that a lot of the fondness for “smaller” voicings is to leave as much harmonic space as possible for the soloist, to keep things as tight as possible and leave them as much freedom as they can to push the harmony however they might want to.
EDIT - I guess, final thought here, several hours later…
…if you want your distorted chords to sound as perfectly consonant as humanly possible, you strip them down even further - you harmonize them, one note at a time. That sounds VERY different than playing the notes together, though, because you don’t get any of the effect of notes beating against each other in a chord, through a distorted amp.
No one actually does this, though. Part of the reason is it’s just a pain in the neck and to pull it off live you’d need to have a whole bunch of guitarists… but whether this is the horse before the cart or vice verse, SOME degree of “beating” of notes against each other inside a chord is very much part of the sound of rock guitar.
I’m not arguing against @tommo tommo here, really, because I think this sort of stuff can sound great… but, really, just suggesting that this is something that should very much be a decision, while arranging. Do you WANT that big chaotic full voiced chord sound? Maybe. But maybe not. And this is a great way to dial that back a little.
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