By: Boston Spaceships Appears on: Let It Beard When Robert Pollard prepared his demos for the Boston Spaceships album Let It Beard, he recorded his vocals and guitar on his boombox, then spliced sections of songs together to form a full composition. With this method in mind, I’m wondering if he ever had to actually learn […]
Tag: Floating Chord Shapes
Earmarked For Collision
By: Boston Spaceships Appears on: Let It Beard “Earmarked For Collision,” from the Boston Spaceships masterpiece of a double album, Let It Beard, is all about nuance. Robert Pollard uses a couple of his trusty guitar techniques to craft a song with many parts that are very similar to one another, but with subtle differences. For […]
No Steamboats
By: Boston Spaceships Appears on: Let It Beard I’ve always considered Let It Beard to be my least favorite Boston Spaceships album. That’s not to say I never liked it, but in mental rankings it just always seemed to get bottom placement. Lately I’ve been reconsidering this evaluation, as I’ve been spending a LOT of time […]
Keep It Coming
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: The Pipe Dreams of Instant Prince Whippet Isn’t it funny how Guided By Voices can put out a release with ten songs and a running time of twenty-three minutes and call it an EP? Granted, a couple of those songs may be less than a minute long, but it still […]
Dirty Water
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Earthquake Glue In the post for “Apology In Advance,” I mentioned that there are certain songs from Earthquake Glue that never really “did it” for me, and “Dirty Water” had been one of them for a long time. Obviously, I loved those harmonized guitar lead lines towards the end […]
Know Me As Heavy
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: English Little League There’s nothing I don’t love about “Know Me As Heavy” from English Little League. There’s a great combined vocal performance by Robert Pollard and Tobin Sprout, some of Pollard’s trademark cryptic lyrics, and also a sampling of some of his various guitar songwriting techniques at play. This […]
Christmas Girl
By: Boston Spaceships Appears on: Let It Beard When I create these guitar tablature posts, the tablature and chord diagrams are all made from shapes and tables in Google Slides, so I start by copying a song from a previous post that used similar tablature or chord diagrams and modify as needed. As it turns […]
Life Is Beautiful
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 […]
Apology In Advance
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Earthquake Glue Earthquake Glue is a Guided By Voices album that I’ve always loved, and yet some of its songs took longer for me to realize their greatness. When it was first released, the obvious hits to me were “I’ll Replace You With Machines,” “The Best Of Jill Hives,” […]
Roofer’s Union Fight Song
By: Robert Pollard Appears on: Not In My Airforce Over on the GBV Guitar Facebook Page, I asked if anyone had any requests they’d like to see tabbed out on this site, and someone named “Roofer’s Union Fight Song” from the Robert Pollard solo album, Not In My Airforce. I’ve always loved this song, so I […]
