By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Mirrored Aztec When I first listened to “I Touch Down,” I heard a lot of unique chord voicings and assumed Robert Pollard must have been using a slew of unconventional chord shapes to play this song. As I started to learn how to play it on guitar, however, I […]
Category: tab

The Town That’s After Me
By: Boston Spaceships Appears on: The Planets Are Blasted “The Town That’s After Me” is a fairly short song even by Robert Pollard’s standards, but it has a catchy melody, a fantastic ending hook, and it’s just a lot of fun to play on guitar. We’ll just be using some basic chords for this one, […]

Mr. Child
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Styles We Paid For In this post, we’ll take a look at the guitar tablature and chords for “Mr. Child” from Styles We Paid For. Besides the killer opening riff, there are a lot of fun guitar parts throughout the song to keep things interesting. You need to be […]

Roll Me To Heaven
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Styles We Paid For There’s a lot to love about “Roll Me To Heaven,” at least from this guitar-player’s perspective. It features quite a few interesting chords, several distinct sections, and an ending that contains an unexpected chord change and arpeggio, in true Robert Pollard fashion. All these elements […]

Endless Seafood
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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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? […]