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 […]
Tag: Alternate Tuning
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 […]
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 […]
Volcano
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Surrender Your Poppy Field Guided By Voices guitarist Doug Gillard spices up the “quiet verse/loud chorus” dynamic of “Volcano” with a few cool guitar moves. During the verses, he plays a sparse open string drone figure, leading to explosive power chord choruses. You need to be logged in to […]
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 […]
Downer
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Sweating The Plague “Downer,” the opening track from Sweating The Plague, seemed to throw a few curveballs at us fans. It sounds unlike other Guided By Voices songs, with its backwards cymbal effects, guitar harmonics, and a Robert Pollard guitar technique I’m calling “Barre Four.” You need to be […]
John The Dwarf Wants To Become An Angel
By: Boston Spaceships Appears on: Our Cubehouse Still Rocks On Boston Spaceships track “John The Dwarf Wants To Become An Angel,” Robert Pollard is once again using a guitar arpeggio—with a fretted note on the sixth string along with the open fifth, fourth, and third strings—to great effect. He combines this with a few chords, including […]
More Reduction Linda
By: Guided By Voices Appears on: Warp And Woof The songs on Warp And Woof are all pretty brief, with only two of them passing the two-minute mark. And yet, as always, Robert Pollard manages to stuff more hooks into each tune than imaginable. On “More Reduction Linda,” he includes a killer riff during the verses […]
Two Girl Area
By: Boston Spaceships Appears on: Brown Submarine “Two Girl Area” is played with just a few Floating Chord Shapes, making it a fun song to strum on guitar. There is a sprinkling of lead guitar in this song, but in this post I’ll just provide the chords so you can play the rhythm guitar. You […]
How Wrong You Are
By: Boston Spaceships Appears on: Zero To 99 Chris Slusarenko has talked before about how he tuned his instruments down for some of the Boston Spaceships recordings to match the pitch of the demos he received from Robert Pollard. I believe he did this again for the recording of “How Wrong You Are,” tuning the […]
