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 […]
Category: tab
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 […]
Port Authority
By: Robert Pollard with Doug Gillard Appears on: Speak Kindly Of Your Volunteer Fire Department “Port Authority” is one of the tracks on Speak Kindly Of Your Volunteer Fire Department for which Doug Gillard, not Robert Pollard, wrote the music. This song uses an alternate guitar tuning and lots of arpeggio. You need to be […]
The Very Second
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Sweating The Plague “The Very Second” is a high-energy number on Sweating The Plague with not too much fancy guitar work going on for the rhythm guitar. But there is a fantastic guitar solo by Doug Gillard, as if you’d expect anything less than “fantastic” from him. You need […]
Angelic Weirdness
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Warp And Woof “Angelic Weirdness” is played with lots of open guitar strings with mostly common chord shapes. Even the ones that are somewhat unconventional are fairly common in Robert Pollard compositions, so they’re good to know. And how about that Mark Shue bass line during the second verse? […]
The Enemy
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Isolation Drills In “The Enemy,” Robert Pollard dips into his arsenal of guitar writing techniques and pulls out a little bit of everything: a heavy, bottom-string guitar riff that’s played during the verses, a gentle arpeggio riff during a quiet section of the song, and a floating chord shape […]
I Can Illustrate
By: Robert Pollard Appears on: Of Course You Are Back when I tabbed out Ricked Wicky tune “Map And Key” for this website, I shied away from attempting to transcribe Nick Mitchell’s excellent guitar solo, despite it being one of my favorite guitar parts from any Robert Pollard-related project. For “I Can Illustrate,” I took […]
Tabby And Lucy
By: Boston Spaceships Appears on: Let It Beard When learning a Robert Pollard song for the first time, I’m sometimes deceived into thinking the guitar work is simpler than it really is. In the case of “Tabby And Lucy,” for example, I started out by playing the chorus with pretty standard chords: A5 – D5 […]
I Love Kangaroos
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Space Gun When I saw Guided By Voices live during the Space Gun tour, “I Love Kangaroos” was the only song from the album they did not play that night. I was a little bummed because I was hoping to learn how to play it on guitar by watching […]
