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 […]
Tag: Guided By Voices
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 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 […]
Queen Of Cans And Jars
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Bee Thousand Bee Thousand‘s “Queen Of Cans And Jars” features one of Robert Pollard’s most instantly recognizable guitar riffs, which is played using fretted notes on the second string along with a constantly droning open first string. This song also contains a slew of chord shapes that are moved […]
Nothing Gets You Real
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: How Do You Spell Heaven “Nothing Gets You Real” features a common Robert Pollard guitar technique that I refer to as “Floating Chord Shapes,” where an open position chord shape is moved up the neck to a different fret. In the case of this song, the open position chords […]
Queen Parking Lot
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Surrender Your Poppy Field For a lot of the chords in “Queen Parking Lot,” you can keep two fingers on the third frets of the first and second guitar strings and just move your other fingers to different frets on the remaining strings. This is similar to the verse […]
Show Of Hands
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Mirrored Aztec The main guitar riff in “Show Of Hands” is an instant classic Robert Pollard riff, alternating between strummed fifth chords and arpeggios. All in all, this song is fairly simple in terms of song structure and ease of playing. You need to be logged in to view […]
I Think I Had It. I Think I Have It Again
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Mirrored Aztec Mirrored Aztec opening track “I Think I Had It. I Think I Have It Again” starts off with a guitar riff built on open string drones. From there, Robert Pollard uses some floating chord shapes in the chorus, with an open D note droning throughout. You need […]
She Lives In An Airport
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: The Bears For Lunch For the verses in “She Lives In An Airport,” Robert Pollard uses a two-note C5/G chord, with the G on the sixth guitar string being the lowest note. This gives the verse riff a heavy, crunchy feel. Other than this main riff, there are a […]
