By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Isolation Drills In “The Enemy,” Robert Pollard dips into his arsenal of guitar writing techniques and pulls out a little bit of everything: a heavy, bottom-string guitar riff that’s played during the verses, a gentle arpeggio riff during a quiet section of the song, and a floating chord shape […]
Category: tab
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 […]
Tabby And Lucy
By: Boston Spaceships Appears on: Let It Beard When learning a Robert Pollard song for the first time, I’m sometimes deceived into thinking the guitar work is simpler than it really is. In the case of “Tabby And Lucy,” for example, I started out by playing the chorus with pretty standard chords: A5 – D5 […]
I Love Kangaroos
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Space Gun When I saw Guided By Voices live during the Space Gun tour, “I Love Kangaroos” was the only song from the album they did not play that night. I was a little bummed because I was hoping to learn how to play it on guitar by watching […]
Queen Of Cans And Jars
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Bee Thousand Bee Thousand‘s “Queen Of Cans And Jars” features one of Robert Pollard’s most instantly recognizable guitar riffs, which is played using fretted notes on the second string along with a constantly droning open first string. This song also contains a slew of chord shapes that are moved […]
Hue An’ Dye
By: Circus Devils Appears on: Stomping Grounds Todd Tobias, composer of most of the music to which Robert Pollard added vocals in the Circus Devils side project, seems fond of alternate guitar tunings. In “Hue An’ Dye,” the most obvious change was to tune the low E string down a full step to D. In […]
Nothing Gets You Real
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: How Do You Spell Heaven “Nothing Gets You Real” features a common Robert Pollard guitar technique that I refer to as “Floating Chord Shapes,” where an open position chord shape is moved up the neck to a different fret. In the case of this song, the open position chords […]
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 […]
Queen Parking Lot
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Surrender Your Poppy Field For a lot of the chords in “Queen Parking Lot,” you can keep two fingers on the third frets of the first and second guitar strings and just move your other fingers to different frets on the remaining strings. This is similar to the verse […]
Show Of Hands
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Mirrored Aztec The main guitar riff in “Show Of Hands” is an instant classic Robert Pollard riff, alternating between strummed fifth chords and arpeggios. All in all, this song is fairly simple in terms of song structure and ease of playing. You need to be logged in to view […]
