By: Robert Pollard Appears on: Waved Out For “Rumbling Joker,” you’ll want to make sure you’re comfortable playing barre guitar chords, where you use your index finger to hold down multiple strings across the same fret. And if you have a spare guitar amplifier with built-in reverb laying around that you don’t care much about, […]
Tag: Robert Pollard
Port Authority
By: Robert Pollard with Doug Gillard Appears on: Speak Kindly Of Your Volunteer Fire Department “Port Authority” is one of the tracks on Speak Kindly Of Your Volunteer Fire Department for which Doug Gillard, not Robert Pollard, wrote the music. This song uses an alternate guitar tuning and lots of arpeggio. You need to be […]
I Can Illustrate
By: Robert Pollard Appears on: Of Course You Are Back when I tabbed out Ricked Wicky tune “Map And Key” for this website, I shied away from attempting to transcribe Nick Mitchell’s excellent guitar solo, despite it being one of my favorite guitar parts from any Robert Pollard-related project. For “I Can Illustrate,” I took […]
Soft Smoke
By: Robert Pollard with Doug Gillard Appears on: Speak Kindly Of Your Volunteer Fire Department “Soft Smoke,” at just under one minute long, seems to waft in and out of Speak Kindly Of Your Volunteer Fire Department as quickly as an actual plume of smoke. In its forty-nine seconds, however, Robert Pollard packs in quite […]
Zoom (It Happens All Over The World)
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Airs
By: Robert Pollard Appears on: Honey Locust Honky Tonk For the verses in “Airs,” you’ll just alternate strumming between the G5 and Csus2 chords. In the chorus, however, Pollard uses a two-note chord shape on the second and first strings with an open G note on the third string and moves this shape to various […]
Kick Me And Cancel
By: Robert Pollard Appears on: From A Compound Eye “Kick Me And Cancel” is yet another great example of the Robert Pollard guitar technique I call “Open String Drone.” This technique consists of playing a melody on one guitar string while also playing an adjacent open string. In the case of this song, the melody […]
Pop Zeus
By: Robert Pollard with Doug Gillard Appears on: Speak Kindly Of Your Volunteer Fire Department As I mentioned in the post for “Avalanche Aminos,” another song that was co-written by Robert Pollard and Doug Gillard is “Pop Zeus” from Speak Kindly Of Your Volunteer Fire Department. Just as in that song, Gillard wrote the music […]
Strictly Comedy
By: Robert Pollard Appears on: Kid Marine According to its entry on GBVDB, “Strictly Comedy” from Kid Marine was only ever played live four times. Fortunately for us, there’s video footage of the band rehearsing for one of those performances on the excellent The Who Went Home And Cried documentary (which is available in its […]
Boxing About
By: Robert Pollard Appears on: Normal Happiness I’ve mentioned before on this site that it’s always easier for me to learn Robert Pollard’s songs when I can listen to either a recording of him playing it alone, usually either as a Suitcase track or a demo, or a live version. In attempting to transcribe “Boxing […]
