By: Robert Pollard with Doug Gillard Appears on: Speak Kindly Of Your Volunteer Fire Department The guitar work on “Soul Train College Policeman” highlights a classic Robert Pollard technique where he creates two-note chords consisting of a fretted note on one string in conjunction with the next highest string being played open. In this song, […]
Tag: Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Life Is Beautiful
By: Robert Pollard with Doug Gillard Appears on: Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department “Life Is Beautiful” has a guitar melody that’s really fun to play and built around an open string drone technique. The fourth and third strings will ring open on the D and G notes, respectively, while the note on the […]
Slick As Snails
By: Robert Pollard with Doug Gillard Appears on: Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department I don’t know how to properly explain it, but there’s a certain kind of magic that occurs when Robert Pollard teams up with Doug Gillard. You can hear it all over the Guided By Voices records that feature Doug as […]
