Timing Voice

By: Guided By Voices

Appears on: Strut Of Kings

“Timing Voice” has become one of the Strut Of Kings songs to make it to the live set, which should come as no surprise. It’s definitely one of the rockingest songs on the album, with a terrific riff that’s pretty simple to nail down on guitar.

Figure 1 shows the song’s main guitar riff. I included the E note on the open sixth string in parentheses because it should ring out a big during the chord change. In the third and fourth measures, the strummed chord here is a voicing of Dm7 that uses the open position D major chord shape played in the fifth position, leaving the D note on the open fourth string ringing out.

You’ll play through this figure two times without vocals for the intro and then three times with vocals for the verse, including the variations from Figure 2 if you’d like.

In Figure 2, I’m including two variations of the Figure 1 main riff. The changes in these two variations is in the Dm7 chord in the fourth measure. Doug Gillard will add either a G note on the second string (in variation 1) or a C note on the first string (in variation 2). You’ll hear these variations throughout the song, so feel free to mix it up to your liking. Since it would require a bit of a stretch to use your index, middle, and ring fingers to fret the initial chord, you may find it easier to barre your index finger across the third, second, and first strings instead. From there, you can use your middle finger to fret the note on the sixth fret of the second string and then your pinky finger for the higher note of that string.

For Figure 3, you’ll play through to the repeat symbol in the first ending, go back to the start of the figure, then follow the second ending to the end of the figure.

Figure 4 starts off with the main riff, then goes to two measures of a strummed A5 chord. From there, the backwards guitar solo begins (starting in the seventh measure of this figure) and the remainder of the tablature in this figure shows what the rhythm guitar plays during the solo.

Figure 5 comes next; you’ll play through this figure three times.

Then you’ll play Figure 6 one time.

There’s a bit of a breakdown in Figure 7. The strumming shown here is not exact; I mainly wanted to show the timing of the chord changes.

Next, you’ll play through Figure 8 three times: once without vocals and twice with.

And finally, Figure 9 shows the song’s ending. The timing gets a little loose for the last four measures.