By: Guided By Voices Appears on: The Bears For Lunch “King Arthur The Red” is an outstanding opening track, full of energy and bottom-heavy guitar tone (not to mention fantastic vocal harmonies). To help achieve this dense, low sound, we’ll use inverted guitar chords. You need to be logged in to view the rest of […]
Tag: Guided By Voices
West Coast Company Man
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: August By Cake On this site, I talk a lot about the chord shapes that Robert Pollard uses most frequently in his songwriting. He seems to have “go-to” shapes and other techniques (such as arpeggios), but the dominant 7th chord shape used during the verses in “West Coast Company […]
Perfect This Time
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Hold On Hope [single] “Perfect This Time” was written for inclusion on the Do The Collapse album, but may well have been one of the poppier tunes that was eschewed at the behest of producer Ric Ocasek in lieu of one of the album’s proggier numbers. So it was […]
Love 1
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Universal Truths And Cycles For several of the songs on Universal Truths And Cycles, including “Love 1,” Robert Pollard uses a chord shape that is very common in his arsenal of guitar tricks. It’s the basic “power chord” shape that we typically play on either the sixth and fifth […]
I Touch Down
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 […]
Mr. Child
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Styles We Paid For In this post, we’ll take a look at the guitar tablature and chords for “Mr. Child” from Styles We Paid For. Besides the killer opening riff, there are a lot of fun guitar parts throughout the song to keep things interesting. You need to be […]
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 […]
