By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Mirrored Aztec When I first listened to “I Touch Down,” I heard a lot of unique chord voicings and assumed Robert Pollard must have been using a slew of unconventional chord shapes to play this song. As I started to learn how to play it on guitar, however, I […]
Category: Guided By Voices
Roll Me To Heaven
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Styles We Paid For There’s a lot to love about “Roll Me To Heaven,” at least from this guitar-player’s perspective. It features quite a few interesting chords, several distinct sections, and an ending that contains an unexpected chord change and arpeggio, in true Robert Pollard fashion. All these elements […]
Endless Seafood
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Styles We Paid For The main guitar riff in “Endless Seafood” uses a Robert Pollard guitar technique of playing a common chord shape—in the case of this song, an open Em—in different spots of the guitar neck. This is a bit different from the “Floating Chord Shape” technique I […]
Never Abandon Ship
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Styles We Paid For Truly one of the stand-out tracks on Styles We Paid For (in my opinion at least, though there really aren’t any tracks on this album that I don’t enjoy), “Never Abandon Ship” is a brief song with a catchy guitar riff that sounds like it […]
Crash At Lake Placebo
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Styles We Paid For How Robert Pollard continues to still write such memorable guitar riffs is beyond me, but here we are with “Crash At Lake Placebo,” with once again a super hooky main guitar riff. This song features an extended instrumental section, which seems a bit rare in […]
Queen Parking Lot
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Surrender Your Poppy Field For a lot of the chords in “Queen Parking Lot,” you can keep two fingers on the third frets of the first and second guitar strings and just move your other fingers to different frets on the remaining strings. This is similar to the verse […]
Show Of Hands
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Mirrored Aztec The main guitar riff in “Show Of Hands” is an instant classic Robert Pollard riff, alternating between strummed fifth chords and arpeggios. All in all, this song is fairly simple in terms of song structure and ease of playing. You need to be logged in to view […]
I Think I Had It. I Think I Have It Again
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Mirrored Aztec Mirrored Aztec opening track “I Think I Had It. I Think I Have It Again” starts off with a guitar riff built on open string drones. From there, Robert Pollard uses some floating chord shapes in the chorus, with an open D note droning throughout. You need […]
Man Called Blunder
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Surrender Your Poppy Field “Man Called Blunder” is one of my favorite songs from Surrender Your Poppy Field to play on guitar. There are a lot of changes from one section to another, as well as a few fun riffs using open string drones. A favored Robert Pollard guitar […]
Volcano
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Surrender Your Poppy Field Guided By Voices guitarist Doug Gillard spices up the “quiet verse/loud chorus” dynamic of “Volcano” with a few cool guitar moves. During the verses, he plays a sparse open string drone figure, leading to explosive power chord choruses. You need to be logged in to […]
