By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Sweating The Plague “Unfun Glitz” features a guitar technique frequently used by Robert Pollard that involves taking an entire chord shape and shifting it either up or down a string. In this case, he’s taking a simple “power chord” shape (consisting of the root note, the fifth note, and […]
Tag: Guided By Voices
Immortals
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Sweating The Plague “Immortals” from Sweating The Plague is fairly simple to play on guitar. There are only a few chords and a quick riff to learn. According to Doug Gillard’s “Track By Track breakdown” of Sweating The Plague on Consequence Of Sound, the riff was sung by Robert […]
Downer
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Sweating The Plague “Downer,” the opening track from Sweating The Plague, seemed to throw a few curveballs at us fans. It sounds unlike other Guided By Voices songs, with its backwards cymbal effects, guitar harmonics, and a Robert Pollard guitar technique I’m calling “Barre Four.” You need to be […]
Heavy Like The World
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Sweating The Plague “Heavy Like The World” is one of two revamped Suitcase tracks on Sweating The Plague, along with “Your Cricket Is Rather Unique” (the original “Heavy Like The World” was titled “I’d Choose You” and appears on Suitcase 2: American Superdream Wow). Another trait they share is […]
Ego Central High
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Sweating The Plague There’s certainly no shortage of riff-heavy rockers on Sweating The Plague; and while “Ego Central High” lands precisely into that category, it also has an anthemic quality both in music and lyrics. When Robert Pollard sings, “Here’s a fight song for everyone,” I just imagine a […]
Street Party
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Sweating The Plague “Street Party” was one of the original working titles of the album Sweating The Plague, so it’s kind of nice to be able to hear the song that inspired that idea. The song “Street Party” opens with an acoustic guitar strumming an A major chord, but […]
Jam Warsong
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Zeppelin Over China “Jam Warsong” is a fairly simple song to play. For most of the song, you’ll play a “boogie woogie” style blues guitar lick in the key of G. You may have noticed some similarities between this song and “Come Together” by The Beatles—both feature that style […]
Avalanche Aminos
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Hold On Hope Though for the most part I prefer to focus my transcribing efforts for this website on Robert Pollard compositions, I occasionally allow for exceptions. For example, I couldn’t pass up the chance to post guitar tablature for Circus Devils tune “Time Trapper,” especially considering that its composer, […]
Striped White Jets
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Alien Lanes Some of the earlier Guided By Voices recordings occasionally sound very “thrown-together,” don’t they? There are several songs on Alien Lanes, for instance, that make me wonder if the band ever actually rehearsed the song or if Robert Pollard just picked up a guitar, started recording, and then […]
Dead Liquor Store
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Warp And Woof “Dead Liquor Store” features two main guitar parts throughout most of the song: a rhythm guitar to strum the chords and a lead guitar to play the open string drone riffs. These riffs involve a fretted note on the second string with the open first string ringing […]
