By: Robert Pollard with Doug Gillard
Appears on: Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department
“Life Is Beautiful” has a guitar melody that’s really fun to play and built around an open string drone technique. The fourth and third strings will ring open on the D and G notes, respectively, while the note on the fifth string plays the melody. Robert Pollard intersperses this with a floating chord shape technique, using the Cadd9 chord shape shown below. At different points in the song, he’ll play this shape either in the open position, or with the root (note on the fifth string) on the fourth fret, sixth fret, or eighth fret.
