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 […]
Tag: Guided By Voices
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 […]
The Very Second
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 […]
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 […]
