By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Nowhere To Go But Up The main riff in “For The Home” features a type of guitar arpeggio that’s used less frequently in Robert Pollard’s arsenal. His typical arpeggio includes a fretted note (most commonly as the lowest note) followed by two open strings (most commonly the next two […]
Tag: Nowhere To Go But Up
Jack Of Legs
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Nowhere To Go But Up Considering the amount of starts and stops, plus the tempo changes associated with its multiple different sections, “Jack Of Legs” presents a number of challenges to play, and yet it has remained in the Guided By Voices live set since the Nowhere To Go […]
How Did He Get Up There?
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Nowhere To Go But Up Playing “How Did He Get Up There?” on guitar requires some chord strumming, some finger-picking, and some arpeggio picking. None of it is particularly difficult; if anything, you might stumble at first with switching between the finger-picking parts and the strumming. You need to […]
Local Master Airplane
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Nowhere To Go But Up In “Local Master Airplane,” Robert Pollard uses his floating chord shapes guitar technique, using the open position Asus2 shape in different neck positions, similar to the verses of “Tractor Rape Chain.” You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. […]
Song And Dance
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Nowhere To Go But Up “Song And Dance” closes out Nowhere To Go But Up with a slow-burn groove based around one chord progression for most of the song, building up intensity that eventually leads into a faster tempo section. You need to be logged in to view the […]
Puncher’s Parade
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Nowhere To Go But Up I talk a lot on this site about Robert Pollard’s compositions that use non-standard chord voicings. Typically these are made up of common chord shapes being taken from their usual frets on the guitar neck and transposed to different strings or fret positions. But […]
The Race Is On, The King Is Dead
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Nowhere To Go But Up In my opinion, there was no better choice to open the Nowhere To Go But Up album than the song “The Race Is On, The King Is Dead.” From the opening guitar riff that repeats throughout the song to its majestic descending chord ending, […]
We’re Going The Wrong Way In
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Nowhere To Go But Up To play “We’re Going The Wrong Way In” on guitar, we’ll use a combination of arpeggios and chord strumming, with some of the chords being Robert Pollard’s typical floated D shapes. You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. […]
Stabbing At Fractions
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Nowhere To Go But Up “Stabbing At Fractions” is a pretty straightforward rock song that uses mostly strummed power chords for the guitar parts, though Robert Pollard also incorporates one of his favorite guitar techniques that I call “dropping the bass.” This move consists of removing the fretting finger […]
