While few guitarists have built a more distinctive voice than David Gilmour, there's one player whose position he has long envied: Eric Clapton.

Not because Clapton is more famous, or because of his technique, but because of the freedom his blues background affords him.

“I have to confess to a certain sort of jealousy of Eric Clapton’s position,” Gilmour says. “He has his wealth of material, and he's such a consummate blues player that he's got a wealth of other people's material that he can play that's not so well known. He can take out a new band every time.

“That would be a nice position to be in. Then reality kicks in. But I'm not in that position.”

It's a surprising admission from a guitarist whose own catalog includes some of rock's most celebrated solos. Yet Gilmour has never viewed himself as a traditional blues player in the Clapton mold.

In fact, he says his signature style was shaped partly by necessity.

“I wasn't gifted with enormous speed on the guitar,” he told Rick Beato in 2024. “There were years when I was younger when I thought I could get that if I practiced enough. But it just wasn't ever really going to happen.”

Rather than chase technical flash, Gilmour gravitated toward melody and phrasing, drawing inspiration from early hero Hank Marvin.

“Hank was just playing a tune,” he said. “I think I come from there.”

That melodic approach would become the cornerstone of Gilmour's playing with Pink Floyd, helping him forge a style that stood apart from both blues traditionalists and the generation of electric guitar heroes obsessed with speed. He’s said before that his style is “an amalgamation of folk and blues.” As a young guitarist, he studied the work of Clapton, Jimi Hendrix and Peter Green, borrowing ideas while gradually developing a voice of his own.

“You bend a note, hold it, then shake it,” he said of his vibrato technique in a 1983 interview. “It's kind of like the way classically trained singers hold a note for a couple of seconds, then add vibrato. I've always enjoyed listening to guitarists who do that well — players like Peter Green.”

Even after decades at the top of the guitar world, during which heÆs performed some of the most-loved guitar solos, Gilmour has remained surprisingly self-critical. Speaking to Guitar World in 1998, he admitted that “about once a year, I have sort of an attack of a guilty conscience about my abilities, so I'll sit and run through a couple of scales.”

That lingering insecurity may help explain his admiration for Clapton's position. Gilmour can appreciate the freedom that comes with being able to draw from a vast blues repertoire, even if pursuing that path would have meant abandoning the qualities that made him unique in the first place.

As Gilmour himself once observed, he can try to sound like Jeff Beck, Clapton or Hendrix, “but it never works.” He only ever sounds like David Gilmour.

Back in 2006, Phil Manzanera was three years removed from Roxy Music’s latest reunion and back in the mix as a hired gun, working for the likes of Robert Wyatt, Brian Eno, Annie Lennox and Chrissie Hynde, among others, as well as recording his own albums. But a stint as David Gilmour’s right-hand man was a welcome addition to the regimen.

“I met David when I was 15, the week he joined Pink Floyd,” Manzanera tells us via phone from his home in Sussex in the English countryside — next door to Gilmour’s, in fact. “Pink Floyd was the coolest band in the world back then, them and the Soft Machine.”

The two guitarists maintained their friendship, and Manzanera co-wrote the single “One Slip” with Gilmour for Pink Floyd’s 1987 comeback album, A Momentary Lapse of Reason.

Fast forward 19 years and Gilmour was preparing for his own comeback with On an Island, his first solo outing in 22 years and his first album since Pink Floyd’s The Division Bell in 1994. He recruited Manzanera to co-produce with himself and Chris Thomas, as well as play guitar on three of the album’s 10 tracks — joining a corps that included Pink Floyd keyboardist Richard Wright and latter-day bassist Guy Pratt, along with David Crosby, Graham Nash, Robert Wyatt, Jools Holland, Georgie Fame and others.

“David doesn’t need a producer,” Manzanera says, “but he likes to have company to bounce his ideas off of, or to say, ‘I’ve got 10 ideas — any of these any good?’”

Manzanera created a chart on which he noted which pieces of music might work well together.

“There were 153 little bits, so I would take it to my studio and go back the following week and say, ‘Bit number 78 with bit number 13, and then a bit of number 121.’ And David would say, ‘What’s that?’ and I’d say, ‘That’s you. You did that!’” He laughs. “He’d either go with it or wouldn’t, but he did go with a lot of the stuff.

“He just had too much stuff accumulated and wanted a bit of help to sort it out. I’m used to doing albums and things.”

Working alongside Gilmour at his houseboat studio Astoria and his studio in Sussex, Manzanera helped him complete the album. Nearby sat Gilmour’s circa-1954 Stratocaster with the serial number 0001, which he purchased in 1978 and reportedly used on “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2.”

“I’d just sit there and have his number 0001 Strat next to me, looking at it,” Manzanera says. “It was just a lot of fun.”

Manzanera adds that all concerned were well aware that Gilmour “hadn’t done anything in a while… so I was just trying to be supportive of him, as a friend, and wanting him to succeed.”

He’s also an unabashed Gilmour fan.

“I love his voice,” Manzanera notes. “Obviously everyone goes on about the guitar, which is fantastic, but I just love that voice. It’s so unique. He does a lot of stuff so well — still does it so well. It’s amazing.”

After On an Island’s release in March 2006, Gilmour recruited Manzanera to be part of the band for a spring and summer tour supporting the album, along with Wright and Pratt.

“When we did ‘Wish You Were Here,’ I got to play it on the actual acoustic 12-string he played on the original, so that was a lot of fun, too.”

Manzanera also co-produced Gilmour’s next album, 2015’s Rattle That Lock, playing both acoustic guitar and keyboards on the album and again joining Gilmour on tour during 2015 and 2016.

In between, he was part of the production team for 2014’s The Endless River — to date the final Pink Floyd album. Intended as a tribute to Wright, who passed away in 2008, the 18 instrumental tracks were built from recordings made during sessions for Floyd’s 1994 album The Division Bell, with additional material added nearly two decades later.

“We were in David’s kitchen one day — this is after Rick died — and there were all these tapes,” Manzanera recalls. “David asked, ‘Do you fancy having a listen and see if you can make anything out of it?’

“So I went away for six weeks and listened to every scrap. I loved Rick’s Farfisa organ from the early Pink Floyd albums, so I particularly chose bits that had it. That was such a unique aspect of Floyd that hadn’t been spotlighted enough.”

After cutting and pasting clips together, Manzanera felt he could create something cohesive from the recordings. Gilmour liked what he heard, but Manzanera was concerned about playing it for Nick Mason.

“I thought, How am I gonna play this to Nick? I’ve taken a few liberties with his drums — one bit from here, one bit from there. Finally I thought, Right, I’m gonna turn the lights off, put the screen saver on and put the music on and just not look at him.

“He listened to it and said at the end, ‘Yeah, there might be something there.’ Phew!”

After a break of a few months, Gilmour pushed everyone into the studio to finish the recording.

“David said, ‘Look, why don’t we all go into the studio at the same time and try and finish this off together?’”

Gilmour recruited his wife, the English novelist and writer Polly Samson, to compose lyrics for the album’s only non-instrumental track, “Louder Than Words.” With assistance from producer Youth, “we all worked together and got it done,” Manzanera says.

The Endless River hit number one in quite a few countries around the world, including the U.K., and number three on the Billboard 200 in the U.S.

Manzanera — who received an Order of the British Empire honor in 2024 — tells many of his other stories in his 2024 memoir Revolución to Roxy, and has brought his An Evening of Words and Music show to the U.S. Current dates include Space in Chicago on May 18, the Shank in Milwaukee on May 19 and the Quinlan Room in Minneapolis on May 20 (tickets and other details via manzanera.com).

In the studio, the guitarist is also prepping a 51st-anniversary reissue (scheduled for September 11) of Mainstream by his pre-Roxy band Quiet Sun, as well as a brand-new album by the band. There will also be a boxed-set edition of Roxy Music’s second album, For Your Pleasure, remastered by Steven Wilson and due out this fall.

“It’s a really great package, with lots of extra stuff on it,” Manzanera says. “I’ve been waiting for this for years, ’cause it’s one of my favorite albums. I heard the Dolby Atmos mix that Steven did; there’s lots of great things Eno had done that I never heard before… ’cause back then you were constrained by the length of sides on vinyl. If you had extra stuff you couldn’t use it, but now it will have a chance to be heard, which is exciting.”

There aren’t many guitarists who can say they were there when Pink Floyd formed and then went on to perform with two of their key members. Tim Renwick is the exception.

The English guitarist’s association with the Floyd stretches far back. He attended Cambridgeshire High School for Boys, where he met future Floyd members Syd Barrett and Roger Waters. Renwick was around as Barrett's mental health began to unravel in 1967 (Alice Cooper told Guitar Player about witnessing his deterioration up close). He was also friends with David Gilmour and saw him perform with his pre-Floyd group Jokers Wild. Many years later, he became the go-to guitarist for the solo tours of Gilmour and Waters.

In between, Renwick carved out his own career. In addition to performing on David Bowie’s self-titled 1969 album (famous for its hit track “Space Oddity”) and doing session work with Eric Clapton and Elton John, he was a guitarist with English outfit Sutherland Brothers & Quiver, who scored a couple of modest U.S. hits with “(I Don't Want to Love You But) You Got Me Anyway” in 1973 and “Arms of Mary” in 1976.

But it was with folk-rocker Al Stewart that Renwick firmly established his reputation. He contributed his six-string stylings to most of Stewart’s 1970s output, including his 1976 hi album Year of the Cat. The title track showcases Renwick’s hauntingly melodic guitar work as he performs the song’s acoustic and electric solos.

In the years that followed, he found himself in demand with his old Cambridgeshire mates GIlmour and Waters. In 1984, Waters invited him to join the tour for his album The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking, where Renwick shared guitar duties with Eric Clapton. A few years later, in 1987, Gilmour asked him to join Pink Floyd’s A Momentary Lapse of Reason. He found the experiences couldn’t have been more different.

“Roger was always quiet when I first knew him, but by the time I actually got to play in his band, he was a bit difficult,” he reveals. “He was very determined to rule everything. He had a problem passing out responsibility to people. He had to sort of do everything for himself, which made him an uncomfortable figure to work with really.

“But when I worked with David, he was much more casual,” he continues. “He'd just let people get into the swing of things without leaning on them too heavily. So, you could express yourself a bit more around him, which was more fun, obviously. So that was the difference between them. David was a far more relaxed person to work with and brought the best out of people.”

With that said, Renwick offered some anecdotes about Pink Floyd’s three guitarists.

Syd Barrett

“I first saw them when they were starting out, and Syd Barrett was very much the leader of the band. I got to know him a bit and he was really lovely, a very wide-eyed and quite amusing young chap. I was told later that pretty much all his material from the first couple of Pink Floyd albums, was written when he was an early teenager, so it was all stuff that he had in his back pocket already as it were.

“They had early success with their singles ‘See Emily Play’ and ‘Apples and Oranges,’ but they didn't really get taken seriously, apart from in London where the psychedelic thing was happening in a much bigger way than anywhere else. And so they were struggling a bit. They'd play gigs out of town that weren't very terribly well attended.

“And Syd was living in a house with a bunch of people that were doing quite a large amount of psychedelic drugs, so he was completely going off his tree. I saw him later in London and hardly recognized him. He was just completely different and very difficult to communicate with. He would answer questions about four minutes after you'd asked them and all completely out of sync.

“And there were wild stories of him turning up at gigs, turning his back to the audience and not playing. He’d be just waving his arms around which became quite a common thing, and was quite strange.”

“Syd had been the main writer in the band, but once he left, David — who’d already been hired to help out due to Syd’s behavior — sort of took over and had a lot of space and room to fill. As Syd’s guitar playing was pretty strange and quite unusual, David basically had to take a lot of those ideas and make them much more musical, and he also brought melody to the band in a big way.

“At the same time, Roger also began to write, but it took a while for him to kind of get going on that.”

Roger Waters

“I got along with him very well when we were rehearsing for the Pros and Cons tour. It was just the two of us.

“But once we actually got involved with the band, he really became a bit too bossy. It wasn't as lighthearted as it could have been. I have to say he took everything very seriously, and tended to want everything to sound exactly the same as the record.

“And he was very vigilant in pointing things out. If you didn't quite play something exactly right or changed the feel of something, he would point that out and let you know that he wanted it to be exactly as close to the record as it possibly could be.”

“It has to be said that Roger was a bit resentful of the fact that whenever Eric Clapton got up and played a solo, the place would erupt. People would get their lighters out and there would be a tremendous outpouring of applause.

“And that annoyed Roger quite a lot because rightly or wrongly, he felt that the audience weren't actually listening to the songs. They were just watching out for what Eric was doing. So there was a certain amount of resentment there.”

David Gilmour

“Jokers Wild was a really good, and popular band, especially with the Cambridge college student set. They used to do a lot of Beach Boys numbers and stuff with three and four-part harmonies. Obviously, David’s playing was good, but the guitar wasn’t at the forefront so, there wasn’t much actual guitar playing or a great deal of soloing involved.

“But he was always a bit of a guitar hero. He was the sort of person that, if you walked into a room, everyone would stop talking. He was quite staggeringly good looking and had quite a presence to him as well.”

“A few years later, when I was in Sutherland Brothers & Quiver, David helped us out a lot. He came and did a bit of production, worked on our demos and things for songs, and we recorded at his home studio. He used to come along and jam at gigs but because we never announced it. No one ever knew who it was.”

“There's not really that much spoken about him and his philanthropy — for example, his work with Kate Bush and how very helpful he was to her. He actually fronted the money, paid for the arrangements to be done and all kinds of stuff. He obviously could see that she had a fantastic amount of talent.

“David also made sure she wasn't exposed to too much rock and roll nonsense when she was young. He kind of held her back in a way too, so she had time to sort of develop and grow up and be able to actually deal with the pressures of the business.”

Pink Floyd found it difficult to follow up their hit 1973 album, The Dark Side of the Moon. The record’s success left them wondering exactly how they could top it, or at the very least come up with something even more stunning.

As guitarist David Gilmour told NPR in October, “We were in a very strange place.”

Now we know just how strange. In a recent talk with NPR for the album’s 50th anniversary, former Floyd drummer Nick Mason explained the group’s methods during their first weeks back in Abbey Road Studios, where Dark Side was recorded.

“In fact, of course, we ended up spending an awful lot of studio time doing nothing or working on a project called Household Objects,” Mason says. The concept behind that latter project, he said, “was to make a record using household objects rather than musical instruments.

“The only thing I remember playing was, instead of using a bass drum, I had an ax and a large log of wood.”

Pink Floyd recorded just two songs before giving up.

“I think if we’d stuck with it, we’d still be in Abbey Road now trying to finish,” Mason says. “We should have carried on touring Dark Side for another year. But we didn’t. We thought we’d sort of had to get on, I suppose.”

It wasn’t all a wasted effort. One of the instruments for Household Objects was a makeshift glass harmonica, made by filling water glasses with varying amounts of liquid and stroking the wetted edges of the glasses to produce bell-like timbres. The instrument reappeared on the intro to “Shine on You Crazy Diamond,” the central track on Wish You Were Here, the album they eventually got around to making.

As Gilmour previously explained, bass guitarist Roger Waters came up with the album’s title, which was in part a criticism of his bandmates, who were, creatively speaking, not all there.

But Wish You Were Here was also a tribute to the band’s founder, Syd Barrett, who abandoned the group as his undiagnosed mental health issues made it impossible for him to perform. His breakdown, which began while the band was on tour in the U.S. — a stint that saw them living for a short time with the Alice Cooper band — led to Gilmour joining the band as Barrett’s condition worsened.

His decline would become a central theme in Waters’ music, including Floyd’s 1970s albums The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall. But nowhere was it more explicitly about Barrett than in the central work on Wish You Were Here: “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.” The song was written expressly in tribute to Barrett, who coincidentally visited the band in the studio on the day they recorded it.

As Gilmour explained to Rick Beato, that song came about after he stumbled onto a note cluster while playing his electric guitar. The passage, consisting of G F Bb E played in sequence (often referred to as “Syd’s Theme”), became central to the song.

“I was in a rehearsal room doing all sorts of little things, and that one [came] out,” Gilmour explained. “Something in your brain goes, There’s something to that! You do it again, and after a while, other people in the room stop.

“You can see this thing on people’s faces, this awakening moment. People are going, ‘there’s a possibility here. There’s something here’. The whole of 'Shine On' grew out of that moment.”

For all Pink Floyd’s efforts, Wish You Were Here was panned by music critics, who felt it lacked the creativity of its predecessor. Melody Maker called it “unconvincing in its ponderous sincerity,” while Rolling Stone‘s reviewer criticized “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” for its “lackadaisical demeanor.”

Fifty years on, however, the album is considered a classic from a decade that — barring some dabbling with household objects — was Pink Floyd’s most productive.

Prog-rock legends Pink Floyd have released a new video for their Syd Barrett–inspired epic "Shine On You Crazy Diamond," presenting it as one 25-minute-long song for the first time in history.

The track serves as a prelude to the 50th-anniversary edition of Wish You Were Here, which comes out next month. The 1975 classic — which has sold 20 million copies to date — is set for reissue with a new Dolby Atmos mix by James Guthrie, who began working with the band on 1976’s The Wall. Originally, the track was split into two, with parts 1–5 opening the album and 6–9 closing it out.

“Shine On…” was written about former Floyd guitarist and vocalist Syd Barrett. Its lyrics were penned in light of his mental health issues, which began to manifest publicly during the band’s ill-fated U.S. debut and led to his departure in 1968. Gilmour, who had been hired for guitar support as Barrett’s health declined, became his full time replacement.

The song centers on what Rick Beato calls “the most famous chord in rock history,” though Gilmour himself describes his electric guitar passage as an arpeggio, given the fact that he never strums through the intriguing note cluster: G F Bb E. Instead, he plays each note individually, with spine-tingling results.

“I stumbled upon that one by accident,” he told Guitar World of the Gm7add6 chord/arpeggio in 2006. But speaking to Rick Beato last year, he went into more detail about that fateful moment, and how his bandmates seemed to know he was onto something special.

“I was in a rehearsal room doing all sorts of little things, and that one [came] out,” he explained. “Something in your brain goes, There’s something to that! You do it again, and after a while, other people in the room stop.

“You can see this thing on people’s faces, this awakening moment. People are going, ‘there’s a possibility here. There’s something here’. The whole of 'Shine On' grew out of that moment.”

Writing the album in the wake of the life-changing success of The Dark Side of the Moon caused problems for the band.

"We were in a very strange place,” Gilmour admitted to NPR, referring to the group's sudden ascension in the charts. “The ‘difficult second album’ thing springs to mind. It wasn’t a second album or anything, but it was the second album after having the knock-your-socks-off, fulfill-all-your-dreams sort of album, right? ‘The Dark Side of the Moon.’”

He said there was “lethargy in the studio” as the respective members battled existential questions of whether they were in the game for fame, money or a pure love of music.

Speaking to Guitar Player in 2024, Gilmour reflected on the brief period in which he and Barrett were members of Pink Floyd with an air of sadness.

“It was tragic, really,” he said. “We’ve got a bit of film of Syd in a dressing room somewhere at one of those gigs, and he dances this little jig — a little dance — and he’s all smiling and laughing.

“But you just look at him and go, ‘Oh God, no, tragic.’ Poor chap. I can’t remember much about it. I was brand new, and I think they knew I’d be taking it over.”

In the end, they only played five shows together.

Wish You Were Here's half-century reissue arrives on December 12 via Sony Music, which bought the rights to the band's back catalog for $400 million in October 2024. The album will be available in several formats, including a Deluxe Box Set and a Blu-ray edition featuring three concert films from the supporting tour and a short film on Storm Thorgerson, the artist behind most of the band's iconic album covers.

Meanwhile, Gilmour’s feud with former Floyd bass guitarist Roger Waters has dashed any lingering hopes of a reunion. Gilmour is already hard at work on a follow-up to his latest solo album, Luck and Strange.

When it comes to ranking the greatest guitar solos ever written, David Gilmour is a player on most people’s lips. It could be argued that his greatness comes from a lack of uniformity in his approach to each cut.

By his own admission, the prog-rock guitar hero can’t shred like Jimi Hendrix and Yngwie Malmsteen. Speed, he once told Rick Beato, has never been something he could master. That, in turn, forced him to reassess his playing style and ultimately took him down a more melodic approach favored by his guitar hero Hank Marvin.

But when it comes to writing lead guitar lines, he tells the Broken Record Podcast he has no fixed way of doing it.

“That's just how I am,” he says (via Ultimate Guitar). “Some of the solos in the studios are pretty much one-take things that you just have to find the right moment and play. Some of them are put together in all sorts of different ways. Sometimes, you find good bits on different [recorded] takes and join them all together.”

He’s also leaned heavily into his lyrical phrasing, using rather literal ideas to ignite ideas.

“Sometimes I get the microphone, and I sing,” Gilmour continues, “because your voice can leap in leaps that are unusual; you might not quite get to on the guitar. There are 100 different ways, and I still haven't quite worked out one proper way of getting to that.

“But once they're done and they've embedded themselves in your brain, it's then a joy to play them live and to be able to depart from them knowing that you can find your way back into something that is both new but familiar at the same time.”

Speaking to Guitar Player in 2003, the guitarist also explained how a sensitivity to Syd Barrett's legacy in the group influenced his playing early on as he learned to let his own voice shine.

“I was trying to play some of Syd Barrett's parts, yet adapt them to my own style and taste,” he explained. “The framework I was working in was already set, and it included a style of guitar playing that was already a part of it. It took a while for me to allow myself to stray from what I thought I should be doing.”

He added that he regularly goes back to his blues and folk roots for answers, admitting that “elements of blues phraseology run pretty deep in my playing.”

Interestingly, Gilmour raised eyebrows earlier this year when he said that he can't play one of Pink Floyd's most iconic solos, having taken a different approach to his live performances over the last 46 years. Meanwhile, he has explained what exactly happened to cause his Animals solo to be wiped from existence.

In that, there's a lesson in the magic of improvised solos, where the player is living in the moment and feeling each note as opposed to executing something they had spent hours upon hours perfecting before they'd stepped foot into the studio.

“You never quite feel 100 percent satisfied,” he said of his inability to capture the deleted solos' spontaneity. “Although every note has been learned and rehearsed and played, you think, Oh, there's something about the feel that had before that is gone forever.” One more, he was forced to change his approach.

In related news, Rick Beato has shared with Guitar Player what he learned by sitting just inches from him during their interview.

You'd have to be crazy to think a Pink Floyd reunion was possible. David Gilmour has made it clear he has no interest in reuniting with bass guitarist Roger Waters, and has said the death of founding keyboardist Rick Wright makes the question moot.

That doesn't stop people from asking, though. The prog icons last shared a stage at Live 8 in 2005. It was a show where Gilmour saw Waters, who left the band in 1985 and promptly engaged in legal battles against the group, as merely a “guest” rather than a band member outright.

If that suggests things are frosty between Gilmour and Waters, it's just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

Sitting down with U.K. newspaper The Telegraph for a rare joint interview with his wife and longtime collaborator/lyricist Polly Samson, Gilmour was asked what could possibly thaw relations between the former bandmates and allow them to perform together once again.

“Nothing,” was his retort. “There is no possible way that I would do that.”

It would be particularly difficult given that Samson has herself been a vocal critic of Waters.

In February 2023, she attacked him in a merciless tweet which, among other choice words, labelled him as “anti-Semitic” to the “rotten core. Also a Putin apologist and a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching, misogynistic, sick-with-envy megalomaniac.”

Gilmour backed up his wife adding, “Every word demonstrably true.”

Waters, in turn, refuted Samson's “incendiary and wildly inaccurate comments,” which were prompted in light of an interview where he seemed to praise the Russian president's leadership and criticized then U.S. president Joe Biden.

Samson said she did it because she thought some readers were confusing Waters and Gilmour.

“The reason I did it was because Pink Floyd are quite a faceless band,” she explains to The Telegraph. “Everywhere I went, there was a chance that people thought I was married to the one who said things like that. And it wasn’t a great feeling.

“If they knew you’re married to someone from Pink Floyd, half the time people were giving me quite strange looks, and it was really uncomfortable,” she continues. “I just wanted to draw a line and make it clear that these were not views held by me or the person I was married to.”

Alongside Waters, Gilmour helped transform the band's fortunes following the departure of founding guitarist Syd Barrett. Gilmour's tenure saw him celebrated as one of rock's greatest electric guitar players, bringing him immense fame and acclaim, while it lifted the group to prominence.

Although he gives Waters credit for his contributions to the band's monumental success — particularly for his songwriting and story-telling talents on albums like Animals and The Wall — he has no wish to carry on with the group.

“I’m at peace with all of these things,” Gilmour told Guitar Player last year. “But I absolutely don’t want to go back. I don’t want to go and play stadiums. I’m free to do exactly what I want to do and how I want to do it.”

He's certainly done that. He believes his latest solo album, Luck and Strange, is his finest work in 50 years, and has already laid out a timeline for its follow-up as he looks to end his run of long gaps between solo LPs.

Elsewhere, he's theorized why vintage guitars outperform their modern counterparts — even though he admits he couldn't pick out his legendary Black Strat in a blindfold test — and named his favorite prog guitarist.

The Dark Side of the Moon put Pink Floyd in a difficult position, guitarist David Gilmour says. Although the group had been a recording act since 1967 — and had even scored a hit with founder Syd Barrett on guitar and vocals — they remained essentially an underground act. Once David Gilmour took over for the ailing Barrett, the group delved into a more experimental and avant-garde style of music.

But The Dark Side of the Moon was something else. With the album, the band found the perfect mix of extended prog excursions and radio-friendly songs, like “Breathe (In the Air),” “Time” and “Money.” In an era of electric guitar heroes, Gilmour became ranked with the best of them, thanks to his fluid guitar solos, played on his famous Black Strat.

The Dark Side of the Moon became an international smash hit upon its release in 1973. Suddenly, everyone knew who Pink Floyd were.

And as Gilmour says, that made creating their followup album incredibly hard. Over eight years, Pink Floyd had released at least one album per year. Now two years would pass before the group released their next record, Wish You Were Here.

"We were in a very strange place,” the guitarist tells NPR. “You know, the ‘difficult second album’ thing springs to mind. It wasn’t a second album or anything, but it was the second album after having the knock-your-socks-off, fulfill-all-your-dreams sort of album, right? The Dark Side of the Moon.

"And there was a lot of lethargy in the studio, a lot of sitting around trying to get ourselves up into getting back to work properly. And it took quite a long time.”

That disorganization was a frustration to bass guitarist Roger Waters, who was central to the band’s musical creations. And it had a lot to with the title and theme of the next record.

Says Gilmour “That is part of what the title of the album and that song is about — Roger’s view that some of us weren’t really there a lot of the time."

The success of The Dark Side of the Moon also forced the band to think more about why they were making records.

"Are you doing this for more fame? Do you want more money when you've done rather well at that moment?” Gilmour says. “All of those things that you dream of when you were a teenager in your first full band were realized by that album.

“And you have to then think, Do I really love music or is it the fame that I really love, or is it the money that I'm after, or is it the other benefits that come with it? I think I got to the conclusion that I really was there for the music more than anything else."

Discussing the origins of Dark Side, Gilmour says that, at that time, he didn’t see a career in pop music as lasting anything more than a decade. However, he adds that, “as soon as Roger came in with the idea of its central themes of how the pressures of modern life can affect your sanity, [the album] started taking shape.”

Waters didn’t have to look far for inspiration: Barrett’s psychological struggles still hung heavy on the band. By the time of Wish You Were Here, his absence and mental decline would become one of the themes the bassist explored within an album about alienation.

As for Gilmour, he was eventually able to see the weaknesses in Dark Side and, in doing so, find a purpose in their follow-up.

“My problem with Dark Side was that I thought that Roger’s emergence on that album as a great lyric writer was such that he came to overshadow the music in places,” he says, “and there were moments when we didn’t concentrate as hard on the music side of it as we should have done.

“That was absorbed into an effort to try to make the balance between music and the words a better one on Wish You Were Here.”

Elsewhere, Gilmour has revealed how one of his "Animals" solos was lost forever, what it was like working with Jimi Hendrix, and why he never saw Pink Floyd as a prog band during their heyday.

“I think I was probably a grumpy old man in my 20s,” David Gilmour says today. Now 79, Gilmour doesn’t sound grumpy but rather philosophical about music, Pink Floyd and the group’s role in prog rock.

Certainly, Pink Floyd are celebrated as one of prog rock’s greatest bands. From their early experimental work to conceptual albums like The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall, the band created extended songs composed with multiple sections, and featuring intricately layered arrangements, long electric guitar and keyboard solos and thematic lyrics, all elements of prog rock. Add in the trippy album sleeve designs and elaborate tour set designs, and you really can't call it anything else.

Yet Gilmour denies Pink Floyd belongs to the prog rock genre and says the group never so much as discussed its style of music.

"No, we didn't talk about style, and I've never talked about progressive rock, or thought that we were — whatever — progressive rock,” he tells Rick Beato. “To me, progressive rock is very, very serious players who can really do their stuff.”

As his example of a guitarist who is firmly in the prog-rock camp, Gilmour points to none other than longtime Yes virtuoso Steve Howe, whose work defined prog on albums like Fragile and Close to the Edge.

“The wonderful Steve Howe,” Gilmour says. “You know, lovely guy, lovely guitar player. But I'd never thought of us in those terms at all."

For that matter, he believes Pink Floyd were prog before the genre existed.

"I think we were doing it long before the term progressive rock, and I think I was probably a grumpy old man in my 20s. You know, sort of, 'Nah, that's not us.'

“And the whole idea of labeling,” he continues. “It's become more essential in this day and age. But I'm not keen on it."

Gilmour is so anti labelling that he’s ready to dispel the idea that Pink Floyd was even much of an entity. Rather, he says, the band was just four musicians who agreed on the music they created.

"It's just that everyone had to agree,” he says. “And when you're on your own, you're the only person who has to agree.

“But the band is a funny thing, as you say. You know, there's a name, Pink Floyd, and it becomes a real object in people's minds throughout the world, for many, many years. It means something that kind of exists, or existed.

“In fact, it's just three or four people who get in a room together and strum guitars and keyboards together, and it's a very approximate, rough way of naming it."

"It's giving it an actual name, and we've all got them. The Beatles are as real a thing, in my mind, as it is to other people. But in fact, it's meaningless. It's just a convenient handle for a pop group, a convenient way of saying these people work together.

“And when they no longer work together, it's gone, and [there's] no sadness about that, or regret. It's just, life changes, and it never was a physical object in the way that none of us can help having it."

Now that Pink Floyd is in his rear-view mirror — thanks to the assistance of his wife and musical collaborator, Polly Samson, Gilmour is devoted to his solo career. He says his last album, 2024’s Luck and Strange, was such a happy affair that he’s moving ahead with its followup.

“I’m slowly building up towards a new album, and I have quite a bit of material that is in some sort of formative stage,” he tells Rolling Stone. “That’s what’s keeping me busy at the moment.”

“It’s always my intention to be a bit quicker [to release albums], and I suspect this one will be a bit quicker. But you never can tell. Within the next year or two.”

In related news, Gilmour has discussed the famous Pink Floyd guitar solo he can’t play and reveals how a solo on the classic Animals track “Dogs” was “Completely erased, gone forever. Done.”

It’s among the most famous electric guitar solos in all of rock music. Some players have put it at the top of their list of best-ever solos.

But David Gilmour says he can’t play it. Which is odd, considering he’s the one who created it.

The solo in question is the second in the Pink Floyd iconic song “Comfortably Numb,” from 1980’s The Wall.

Gilmour tells Rick Beato that he “never learned” it and prefers to just wing it and do something fresh when he performs it live.

"I'm not thinking about the audience and what they want, to be honest,” he tells the host. “I just like it starting the way it starts, and the rest of it sort of so ingrained in me that the various parts of it are going to find their way into what I'm doing.

“But I've never learned it. Yeah, I've never learned that guitar solo."

"I mean, there are a lot of guys who can play that. But I don't play it,” he adds with a laugh. “To me, it's just different every time. I mean, why would I want to do it the same? Would it be more popular with the people listening if I did it exactly like the record? Or do they prefer that I just wander off into whatever feels like the right thing at the time? I don't know.

“I suspect they like they prefer it to be real, and to be happening, you know? There are cues within it, which I use to tell the band, 'We're going to end', or, 'We're going to do this.' And so, they crop up as being the same every time, pretty much."

As The Wall producer Bob Ezrin explained to Guitar Player in 2024, the two solos were cut at different times, with different producers.

“The solo at the end of the song was done when Roger [Waters] and I were in a different studio, and David did that with James Guthrie,” Ezrin said. (For the record, the first solo, which takes place at 2:38 into the song, is Ezrin’s favorite of the two.)

Both solos were cut with the guitarist’s celebrated Black Strat played through a combination of Hiwatt amplifiers and his Yamaha rotary speaker cabinet

While the first solo has a more “composed” feeling about it, the second combines a sense of being both planned and improvised. Gilmour has explained he created this impression by recording five or six takes and compiling the finished solo from the best bits of each. The combination of repetition and development within the structure keeps the excitement building for two minute, before Gilmour moves up an octave to bring a new level of excitement to his creation.

The freedom to create on the fly runs counter to what was Pink Floyd’s tendency to scrupulously plan out every aspect of its recordings. Gilmour tells Beato the group constantly discussed each song’s development.

"All the time, on everything, on every instrument,” he attests, although he says drummer Nick Mason “didn't need telling him very much, to be honest. He had his own thing, and he did it. In the '60s with the very early Pink Floyd, he was very much busier, but he gradually got a bit simpler with it."

"But there were things. On 'Comfortably Numb', there's a place where there's a bass drum missing. I said, 'Can you just not play that bass drum? I want that gap.' And that was my thing. I wanted that gap. Little things like that."

While guitarists ranging from Steve Morse to Joe Perry have raved to us about Gilmour’s first “Comfortably Numb” solo, Alex Skolnick tells us he prefers the second.

“Often overshadowed by the song’s first solo, that second solo somehow manages to be screaming, despite the slow tempo, and is a true lightning-in-a-bottle moment,” he said in our November 2024 issue. “It’s a masterclass in using space, bends, melodic development, resolution of ideas, effective tone, blues in a non-blues context and pure emotion.”

As for Gilmour, his favorite of his solo is on “Dogs,” from the group’s 1977 album, Animals. Sadly, he doesn’t say which of the track’s four guitar solos he’s referring to. And as he revealed recently, one of those solos was accidentally erased, forcing him to redo it.

In related news, Gilmour has said he is currently at work on the followup to his 2024 solo album, Luck and Strange, and says it may be ready “within the next year or two.”

It’s said that all good things must come to an end. After the passing of keyboardist Rick Wright in 2008, Pink Floyd needed to be put to rest.

Floyd guitarist David Gilmour was clearly having trouble doing just that. It was his wife, the writer Polly Samson, who helped him close that chapter of his life and move on to focus on his solo career.

Samson was no stranger to the group's inner workings. Besides being Gilmour's wife, she collaborated with the prog rock greats on 1994’s The Division Bell.

And in the years after Wright's death, she helped him write the band's final chapter with their last album, The Endless River.

“David wanted something as a full stop to the whole Pink Floyd thing,” she tells Prog of her work on that album. Released in 2014, The Endless River was intended to be definitive — a tribute to Wright, and a swan song for one of progressive rock's most established bands.

It wouldn't be toured either; their last show together was at Live 8 in 2005, the first time that Gilmour, Wright, drummer Nick Mason and bass guitarist Roger Waters — who left the band in 1985 — had performed together in 23 years. After the album, Pink Floyd ceased to be.

The Endless River was predominantly instrumental, with ideas plucked from The Division Bell leftovers. Gilmour and Mason wanted to let the music do the talking.

But one song, “Louder Than Words,” became the outlier.

“I didn’t want to write lyrics for that album,” Samson admits. “I loved it so much as an instrumental album, and to impose lyrics without Rick being around felt presumptuous or wrong.”

Gilmour, however, persuaded her to do it. The song would be the punctuation mark he needed.

“So, without a piece of music, I wrote ‘Louder Than Words,’” she continues. “It was an easy lyric to write, because for years I’d noticed this thing: If you’re in a room with David, Nick and Rick — or as I was at Live 8, with David, Nick, Rick and Roger — nobody speaks. There’s nothing but awkward silences.

“They have no small talk with each other, they have no big talk with each other; they just do not speak. If you happen to be the unlucky person in the room, it’s the most awkward feeling you can imagine.

“And then they get onstage with their instruments and suddenly they’re so eloquent, and the way they communicate is beautiful. I wrote ‘Louder Than Words’ to express that feeling.”

With “Louder Than Words” as its lead single, The Endless River was a commercial success. Despite middling reactions from critics, the song's strength made it Amazon’s most pre-ordered album. Vinyl copies flew off the shelves at a speed not seen since 1997, and it topped the charts in various countries.

By that point, Gilmour had already released three solo albums: David Gilmour (1978), About Face (1984) and On an Island (2006). But as he’s recently admitted, his solo career has been stop-and-start at best all along. With 2015’s Rattle That Lock, he had a chance for a fresh start.

Samson calls her husband a “ponderous” conversationalist, saying that he primarily “communicates through the guitar,” thus necessitating Samson's lyrical talents. As work on Rattle That Lock began, however, she pushed for change. She adopted a nurturing, almost maternal approach to broaden her husband’s horizons.

“I’d just written the lyrics to [the song] ‘Rattle That Lock,’ which David was very keen on. But I said, ‘I’m not writing another one now until you’ve written one,’” she says. “It was a bit like trying to get a child to do their math homework. I had to shut him in a room with a blank paper, and he would stare at that blank paper. I’d come in with a cup of tea and say: ‘How’s it going?’ And he’d say, ‘Oh, not very well.’

“Then we’d go for a walk and talk about what he was trying to write about, and it was like squeezing the words out of him. In the end, he got there, and I think they’re two very fine lyrics. But it took a lot of work.”

Granted, the world had to wait another nine years for a follow-up, but Luck and Strange — a record he deems on par with The Dark Side of the Moon — proved that patience is a virtue. Whether or not the guitarist keeps to his word that he'll complete his next record “within the next year or two,” Gilmour is clearly focused on the future.

“It’s impossible to go back there without Rick Wright, and I wouldn’t want to,” he told Guitar Player late last year. “It’s all done.”

Elsewhere, the guitarist has recalled the first moment he saw Jimi Hendrix play, and what happened when one of his “Animals” solos was completely erased.

The U.K.'s Pink Floyd and America's Alice Cooper band were trying to make names for themselves on the rock scene when their world's unexpectedly collided in Los Angeles in the late 1960s.

Floyd was in its early incarnation, and featured guitarist and singer Syd Barrett, keyboardist Richard Wright, bass guitarist Roger Waters and drummer Nick Mason. The group was making its maiden voyage to the U.S. to promote its debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. through a few appearances in clubs and on the TV show American Bandstand.

Alice Cooper and his band were two years away from releasing their first album, Pretties for You, and performing around L.A. as the Nazz, a name they were forced to abandon in 1968 when they discovered an East Coast band with that name — featuring Todd Rundgren — was signed to an Atlantic Records imprint. Like Floyd, the group was playing psychedelic rock, which is why they were interested in catching the Brits' show when they came to town.

"Not many people had heard of them, but we knew all about them,” Cooper told Classic Rock in 2022. "We had a copy of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. They were a big deal to us because they had a record out — and we didn’t.

“So the Floyd came into town, ran out of money — like everyone else does in L.A. — and ended up staying in our house.”

The group's financial difficulties were likely down to their frontman. Syd Barrett's drug use and undiagnosed mental health issues made him behave erratically, and led to the cancellation of numerous dates.

Cooper saw Barrett’s struggles firsthand.

“Syd Barrett was just so out there,” Cooper says. “I’d get up in the morning and go into the kitchen, and Syd would be sitting there with a box of cornflakes in front of him, watching it the way I would watch television. We’d all sit around whispering, ‘How can anybody get that high?’

“But Syd was also very bipolar. We didn’t find out until later that he was half-high, half-insane. That’s a very bad combination.”

Cooper’s guitarist, the late Glen Buxton, who makes a posthumous appearance on the reunited Alice Cooper Band’s latest album, also reflected on his experiences with Barrett.

“He never talked, but we’d be sitting at dinner and all of a sudden I’d pick up the sugar and pass it to him, and he’d shake his head like, ‘Yeah, thanks,’” he recalls. “It was like I heard him say, ‘Pass the sugar.’

“It was like telepathy. That was the first time in my life I’d ever met anybody who could actually do that freely. And this guy did it all the time.”

Although Barrett was physically present for Floyd's appearance on American Bandstand, his mind was somewhere else entirely. He was practically motionless during the song. The band's show at the Fillmore Auditorium up in San Francisco didn't fare much better.

“Syd literally went onstage and stared into space,” Rick Wright later recalled (via Far Out). “[He] de-tuned all of his strings on his guitar, hitting it to make this god-awful noise.”

Ironically, Floyd’s drug-related antics had an unexpectedly positive effect on the Alice Cooper band. During Floyd's stay, Cooper's group scored an audition at Gazzarri's nightclub on the Sunset Strip, the same venue where Van Halen would get their break some seven years later. The group was excited, since a spot on the club's schedule would give them some much-needed exposure.

Thanks to Pink Floyd, they put on a memorable performance.

“We had an audition at Gazzarri’s, and Pink Floyd said they’d come down with us,” Cooper recalls. “They made brownies. They were totally laced with pot, of course.

“I was halfway through the show, and all of a sudden I was…oooooh…errrrrr… The world went that way. I fell off the stage, like, three times.

“We got the job, though. We were so whacked out that the guys at Gazzarri's said, ‘Okay, we’ll hire you!'”

It was also around this time that Cooper's group befriended the Doors, another act making waves on the L.A. scene. Doors guitarist Robby Krieger contributed a solo to the track "Black Mamba" from the Allce Cooper group's recently released comeback record. To complete the band's new revised lineup, they went in search of a guitarist as unique as Buxton, and found their man in Gyasi.

As for Pink Floyd, Barrett’s time in the band was coming to an end. He was ousted from the group the following year, and replaced by David Gilmour, who had filled in on dates when Barrett wasn’t up to the task. It all worked out fine for Floyd and Cooper. As for Barrett, following a brief solo career, he retired from music and maintained a private life until his death in 2006.

Recording studios are meant to be spaces for creativity, but with one wrong push of a button they can become tools of destruction.

David Gilmour discovered this the hard way when his second guitar solo on Pink Floyd’s “Dogs” was erased during the creation of the group's 1977 masterpiece, Animals.

Sandwiched between 1975's Wish You Were Here and 1979's The Wall, Animals was Floyd's 10th studio album and part of the progressive-rock group's career-defining run of success.

As the track after the album-opening snippet “Pigs on the WIng 1,” “Dogs” establishes the album's mood and theme over its 17-plus minutes. But construction on such a lengthy track happened over several sessions. In the course of it all, Gilmour's original second guitar solo was wiped by accident.

“We had the whole first half of the song,” Gilmour explains to Rick Beato in a new interview. “Then we had a middle breakdown, which became all that weird stuff, and that was filled with white two-inch leader tape.

“Eventually, the rest of the song was tagged on there while we were thinking about and working out what to do with it.”

Leader tape would typically be inserted between sections of recorded music, such as songs or takes, on a reel. Visually, it serves to alert the engineer that a recording has ended, and it's a safeguard against continuing to record or erase tracks past their end point and into the song that follows.

But apparently Gilmour's bandmates — bass guitarist Roger Waters and drummer Nick Mason — missed the cue

“There was something on the first half that we wanted to erase,” Gilmour explains. “Roger and Nick put it into 'erase,’ and then forgot that it was in 'erase,’ and went right through the leader tape by two minutes, and then took away my second guitar solo. Completely erased, gone forever. Done. ”

Although the solo was lost, the guitar part that was tracked beneath it avoided a similar fate, as Gilmour had it backed up.

“Luckily, I do take mixes home, and I'd taken a rough mix of that, so I had to go and re-create it from my rough mix,” he explains. However, he says he was unable to recapture the spontaneity of his original solo.

“You never quite feel 100 percent satisfied,” he says with a sigh. “Although every note has been learned and rehearsed and played, you think, Oh, there's something about the feel that had before that is gone forever.”

Gilmour had just become a father for the first time and was less hands-on with the record than he'd been with Floyd's previous efforts. That led to Snowy White being asked to provide a solo for "Pigs on the Wing" in his absence. White was in Floyd's camp to assist with live performance, but when he showed up at the studio to discuss his role in the band, the band put him to work.

“We went back into the control room, and Roger says, ‘While you’re here, why don’t you play a solo on this song I’ve just done called ‘Pigs on the Wing’?" White told Guitar Player in 2023. “I picked up a white Stratocaster [Gilmour's guitar bearing the serial number 0001 ] and it sounded all right. So the track played through once and I fiddled about, and then they did a take, and that was it.”

Unfortunately for White, his work was cut from the vinyl album release, although it did appear on the eight-track cartridge versions of Animals. Nearly 10 years later, another guitarist, Phil Manzanera, carved his name into Pink Floyd history after his demo became a cut on the band's final 13th album, A Momentary Lapse of Reason.

Elsewhere in his interview with Rick Beato, Gilmour reflects on the first time he saw Jimi Hendrix play guitar in a room filled with music greats.

“I went out the next day, trying to find records by this character Jimi Hendrix,” he recalls. “But he didn’t exist.”

Gilmour released his latest solo album, Luck and Strange last year, referring to as the best thing he’s written since The Dark Side of the Moon. The guitarist has historically seen each solo album released after years of inactivity, but he’s intent on bucking that trend with its follow-up, and he's now issued a timeline for its release.

Steven Wilson has remixed more than his fair share of classic albums over the years, for the likes of Yes, King Crimson, Jethro Tull, Chicago, Black Sabbath Gentle Giant, Emerson, Lake & Palmer... The list goes on and on. Yes guitarist Steve Howe is a fan. “I admire him," Howe tells us. "He's one of those really great kind of backroom boys. He loves the music, and he's got these great production skills he brings to it."

But amid that heady list, the film Pink Floyd at Pompeii — MCMLXXII was particularly special for Wilson. The music documentary returns to movie theaters this week (locations and tickets via pinkfloyd.film), with its soundtrack to follow on May 2.

"That was exciting because Floyd is really my favorite band," Wilson tells Guitar Player via Zoom from his home base in London. "I saw that movie when I was a kid. I still remember seeing it at the age of 12 or 13, a grainy print at our local cinema, and just being blown away by it. It made an incredible impression on me.

“So it's a great honor to be involved, and to want to do right by the fans 'cause I myself am an über fan. So I tried to approach it from the point of view of what I would want from a new mix."

The concert film was first released as Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii during September 1972. Directed by Adrian Maben,it documents the group’s performance — the first concert ever staged there — over four days in October 1971. There was no audience, and the performance consisted of material from 1968's A Saucerful of Secrets up through the then-new Meddle. A subsequent 1974 version added studio footage from the making of The Dark Side of the Moon at Abbey Road Studios, including "On the Run" and "Us and Them."

The new MCMLXXII edition was restored by Lana Topham, who's also worked on documentaries for Bryan Adams and Marillion. She handled the project frame-by-frame to transfer the film from its original 35mm into 4K. It rolls out Thursday, April 24, in theaters and IMAX worldwide.

Wilson, meanwhile, created new theatrical and home mixes in 5.1 and Dolby Atmos, helped by the fact that the original mixes by Charles Rauchet and Peter Watts were done relatively well at the time.

"I think any artist like Floyd or Kate Bush, where there's a lot of sound design and there's a lot of layers to the music, a lot of detail to the music — those lend themselves beautiful to being expanded out to spacial audio," Wilson explains. "That's really what I'm doing here; I'm remixing these albums mainly to produce spacial audio, Dolby Atmos and 5.1. I'm not remixing them for the stereo, 'cause the stereos very often are definitive, anyway.

"So when it comes to what would sound amazing in Dolby Atmos and spacial audio, any artist where they have the element of layering to their sound is intriguing. Floyd are a great example. Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel, too."

Wilson says the new Pompeii has "been three years in the making," and he was particularly inspired when he saw Topham's work on the visual end. "The new print is incredible," Wilson says, "so I was also trying to do justice to that in creating the audio soundtrack. It's my favorite era of Floyd; I'm not going to say it's the best era, 'cause objectively speaking what they did after [Pompeii] was the masterpieces. But that area, somewhere between the psychedelic and experimental, improvisational rock music, to me that's the pinnacle.

“And that particular film is the pinnacle of Floyd during the era, because the film points out straight after that how they moved into a very different phase of their career, where the psychedelic and improvisation became much less constituent parts of their sound.

"So for me these are the definitive performances of their repertoire from that era, and it's unbelievable for me to be able to be involved in such an important, pivotal moment in their career."

Wilson — a guitarist himself, of course — adds that immersing himself into the Pompeii recordings gave him greater insight into David Gilmour and his role with Pink Floyd back then.

"What he's playing is often very simple," Wilson explains. "That's the beautiful thing about David — he doesn't play fast, he doesn't shred. He has incredible feel. He has incredible taste in not just choice but he also is brilliant at sound design. Just think of that whole section in the middle of 'Echoes,' with that kind of wah-wah pedal plugged in 'round the wrong way, and the way he kind of channels that into something that's almost morel like 20th century classical music, or electronic music.

"In the great heyday of Floyd that, to me, was the most fascinating thing of what he did, his choice of sound and his sense of sound design, and there it is, all laid out to you in that movie right there. I don't know how much he's into sound design these days, but he probably is, as a tool. I tin he's still curious. He seems fired up about making new records, and obviously he has a great love affair with the guitar as well."

The album version of Pompeii, meanwhile, will include the eight-track performance as well as an alternate take of "Careful With That Axe, Eugene" and an unedited version of "A Saucerful of Secrets."

Wilson shared that he'd "love to go back and do more of the catalog," but for the moment he's busy promoting his latest solo album, The Overview, and preparing for his first solo tour in seven years, which kicks off May 1 in Stockholm, Sweden, with European dates into mid-June and a North American leg starting September 9 in San Francisco and running into October.

It's an enduring friendship that dates back to more than 50 years ago. Roxy Music’s iconic guitarist Phil Manzanera and Pink Floyd former mainstay and six-string hero David Gilmour first crossed paths in the 1960s when Manzanera was an up-and-coming teenage guitarist.

Over the course of the ensuing decades, their friendship developed to the point where they came together musically to collaborate. Gilmour would transform one of Manzanera's demo tracks into the song "One Slip," from Pink Floyd's 1987 album, A Momentary Lapse of Reason.

Manzanera would go on to co-produce David Gilmour’s 2006 album, On an Island, and 2015’s Rattle That Lock, as well as contribute additional acoustic guitar on several tracks, and he was one of the producers of Pink Floyd’s 2014 outing, The Endless River.

“I had first met David when I was 16 and then I followed his career,” Manzanera recalls today. “And when I got into Roxy Music five years later, I reconnected with him when I heard Chris Thomas mixing the Dark Side of the Moon album at Air Studios in London, where we were doing our second Roxy Music album.

“I went in to the control room of Studio Two, and none of the Floyd were there. It was just Chris, and he played me the song ‘Money.’ And when I heard the guitar solo, I thought, Jesus, this is amazing!

“So I sent David a telegram saying, ‘Remember me? I'm in a band now called Roxy Music’ and we reestablished contact. So I have known him a hell of a long time.”

Having become part of Gilmour’s inner circle, Manzanera got to witness his development as a guitar player, from close quarters.

“I watched his style evolve really all along,” he says. “I remember the first time I heard the guitar solo from ‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2,’ I thought, Geez, how the hell did he do that?

“And the sound, and the tone? [Pink Floyd founder and guitarist] Syd Barrett was more off the wall and experimental, and not so blues oriented. But David brought a sort of blues sensibility to Pink Floyd and then had to do the experimental stuff as well too. So he evolved in his own way of creating weird and wonderful sounds.”

When Gilmour decided to enter the studio to record his third solo album, 2006’s On an Island, he called on his friend to assist in its production as well as contribute guitar to three tracks. Manzanera later joined Gilmour’s touring band for the record, all of which gave him insights into Gilmour’s precise playing technique.

“One of the things about David's playing — and in some way it's a bit like me — is that while it seems to be about distortion and echo, it is actually about the way he plays the notes and bends them, along with the strength of his hands,” he reveals.

“And he's got a fantastic sense of tuning. He's very, very hot on tuning. So often when I was recording him, I would have a tuner right there with me to check on the tuning. But he would come in to listen to a take or something, and if a note wasn't bent or pulled or pushed to the right tuning, he'd want to redo it.”

Manzanera says this could be a problem at time.

“People who have perfect pitch — and I don’t know if he has it — but for those who do, it becomes a bit of a problem. You're going to be either under the note or above the note.

“And because I was brought up listening to people like Miles Davis, tuning for me is about the space in between the intervals, which interests me just as much. It doesn't have to be perfectly in tune, but it drives some people mad — obviously those who have perfect pitch.

Manzanera says that while Gilmour is a master of the guitar, he is also highly adept at playing the lap steel.

“His use of the lap steel is quite unique as well,” he says. “There's no one else who can do that in that kind of musical context. It is not country music, nor is it super high-driven steel-string playing. But again, because he’s got this great sense of tuning, he can find the spot. It's like when you’re playing slide, but sitting down and playing in the sort of melodic bluesy way. So, he adapted that. And that's pretty damn unique, I think.”

Gilmour’s search for perfection runs deep. It not only takes precedent when it comes to playing the guitar but underscores every aspect of the writing and recording process.

“He has a guitar palette that he tends to use,” Manzanera explains. “Sometimes in his demos, he will just use a Zoom digital recorder and will D.I. it and get this great sound. But then when we’d be in the studio, we'd spend ages with all sorts of valve amps and expensive stuff trying to recreate the Zoom demo.

“Because he’s doing the demos himself — and he's very adept at doing that — he gets used to the sound of what's on the demo, and he’ll like it. And I will always say, ‘If it sounds good, that's it.’ You just have to trust your ears and things like that.

“And that’s how we would work together, finding the place between the demo and what became the finished product. Because David knows what he wants.”

“When I joined Pink Floyd I was trying to play some of Syd Barrett's parts, yet adapt them to my own style and taste,” David Gilmour told Guitar Player in 2003. “The framework I was working in was already set, and it included a style of guitar playing that was already a part of it. It took a while for me to allow myself to stray from what I thought I should be doing.”

It’s remarkable to think that Gilmour’s evolution as a guitarist has occurred almost entirely before the public. He was all of 21 when he joined Pink Floyd in December 1967, after Barrett’s mental health problems diminished his ability to perform. Up until then, he’d barely played in public, aside from briefly busking with Barrett in Saint-Tropez (for which they were arrested) and performing in the blues-rock trio Joker’s Wild, whose covers of chart hits were reportedly so bad that club owners refused to pay them.

As Gilmour himself says, his guitar style developed from his own folk and blues leanings and the requirements of Pink Floyd’s early psychedelic and prog music. If there is one constant in his guitar style over past six decades, it’s blues. The genre is well-suited to his style of soloing, which relies on sustained notes and melodies rather than sheer speed.

“I wasn’t gifted with enormous speed on the guitar,” he told Rick Beato. “There were years when I was younger were I thought I could get that if I practiced enough. But it just wasn’t ever really going to happen.”

Instead, he played to his strengths, developing a slower, more vocal-like style drawn from his own love of blues.

“My style is my style, and it was created out of an amalgamation of the folk and blues music I started with,” he told Guitar Player, “as well as my early years in Pink Floyd when I was attempting to be a psychedelic-type guitar player. That being said, I think I always come back to certain elements of blues phraseology. The blues run pretty deep in my playing.”

And then there is his love of pedal-steel guitar, an instrument that featured almost exclusively in country music until Gilmour became one of the few rock guitarists to incorporate it into his repertoire, alongside his electric guitar work.

“I’ve always had a jack-of-all-trades mentality,” Gilmour said. “I like to be able to pick up different instruments and be competent on them. It would be nice to be good at everything, but, well, you know,” he said with a laugh.

The instrument, as well as a lap-steel, is heard in memorable flashes throughout his Pink Floyd and solo catalog, most notably in “Breathe,” the opening track from The Dark Side of the Moon.

“I’ve always loved steel guitar,” he said. “I bought my first steel—a pedal steel with no pedals — at a junk shop in Seattle in 1968. I had to get the pedals made when I got back to England. That was the same instrument I used on ‘Breathe’ from Dark Side of the Moon."

But of course it’s with a six-string — usually a Fender Stratocaster — that Gilmour has given his most memorable performance. His solos in tracks like “Money” and "Comfortably Numb" are celebrated as the best of his career, if not in rock itself.

But which of his performances does he like best?

“There's a solo on ‘Dogs’ that I thought was pretty good and unusual,” he says, citing a track from Floyd’s 1977 concept album, Animals. It’s too bad the interview didn’t ask him which — Gilmour delivers four brilliant solos in “Dogs”: one at 1:50, another at 3:40, a third at 5:32, and a final one at 13:26 — but we’d bet he’s referring to the third, given his use of the word “unusual.”

“It hasn't entered the pantheon of the ones people seem to like because it's a slightly different style for me, I suppose,” Gilmour continued. “I tracked it with an old Tele, and I was really thrilled with it.

“Also, ‘Echoes’ has a guitar buildup that I love,” he added, referring to the Meddle track that constitutes side two of that album. “It's a creation of dozens of different parts. That sort of textural thing often thrills me more than a particular solo I may have played.”

He said he often is surprised when he hears certain tracks, like “Echoes,” as if it were performed by someone else.

“I get a charge out of thinking, How the hell did I actually do that? You get this out-of-body experience. You're not quite sure if it was you who did it.”

And yet for all the emphasis placed on his work as an electric guitar player, Gilmour said it is an acoustic guitar that has been the backbone of his songwriting.

“I guess it would be my Martin D-35," he said, referring to the guitar that sold for $1,2 million in a 2019 auction of his gear. "I used it on Wish You Were Here, and I've been using ever since.”

Gilmour’s latest album is 2024’s Luck and Strange, an album he called his best work since The Dark Side of the Moon. “The album feels like a solid body of cohesive work,” he told Guitar Player in our November 2024 issue. “It’s the cohesiveness of the whole thing — the writing, the work, the thrill it still gives me to listen to it all the way through as an album. We’re not talking concept album here, but there’s a consistency of thought and of feeling that runs through it that excites me in a way that makes me make those sort of comparisons.”

When Jimi Hendrix arrived on England's shores in 1966, the music scene had never seen talent like his. His fiery fretwork awed Eric Clapton and almost derailed Jeff Beck’s career.

Yet, while his abilities astonished his peers, Hendrix looked for his kicks elsewhere. Comments he made to Roy Hollingworth of England's Melody Maker magazine in the September 5, 1970 issue offer insights into what impressed Jimi while he was knocking out everyone else.

Asked what his new music would sound like, Hendrix admitted he didn't know. But he did offer his view of how rock's next stage of development would take shape and — more enticingly — who would do it.

“People like you to blow their minds," he says, "but then we are going to give them something that will blow their mind, and while it’s blown, there will be something there to fill the gap. It’s going to be a complete form of music. It will be really druggy music. It could be something on similar lines to what Pink Floyd are tackling.

"They don’t know it, you know, but people like Pink Floyd are the mad scientists of this day and age.”

As of the time of Jimi's Melody Maker interview, Pink Floyd had established themselves in the prog music scene following Syd Barrett's departure and the arrival of guitarist David Gilmour. The group had released two albums with Gilmour — 1969's More and Ummagumma — and were just one month from issuing Atom Heart Mother, the group's first album to reach number one in the U.K. The record would also secure a spot at number 55 in the U.S., Pink Floyd's highest chart placement at the time.

It's not surprising Hendrix was tuned into Floyd. Both he and they were game-changing innovators, and yet Jimi and Gilmour's musical approaches couldn't be more different. Hendrix took the flashy blues of his forebearers to new heights, ultimately paving the way for future generational talents like Eddie Van Halen, thanks to his staggering speed.

Gilmour, however, was forced to adopt a different style.

“I wasn’t gifted with enormous speed on the guitar,” he recently told Rick Beato. “There were years when I was younger where I thought I could get that if I practiced enough. But it just wasn’t ever really going to happen.”

Instead, he looked to the Shadows' Hank Marvin and the sounds he seduced from his Fender Stratocaster in order to take a more lyrical approach to his guitar solos.

In fact, at the time of his Melody Maker interview, Hendrix thought his flashy style of music had become passé in England while he was off on tour in the United States.

"While I was doing my vanishing act in the States, I got this feeling that I was completely blown out of England," he told Hollingworth. "I thought they had forgotten me over here. I thought maybe they didn't want me anymore because they had a nice set of bands.

"Maybe they were saying, 'Oh yeah, we've had Hendrix, yeah, he was okay.' I really thought I was completely through here."

Obviously, that wasn't the case. But Gilmour's comments about soloing do indicate a split from the pyrotechnics that typified Hendrix's late-1960s reign, something that would rear its head again with the arrival of the early 1980s' Yngwie Malmsteen-inspired shredding insanity.

Many guitar greats seem to agree with Gilmour's point.

“At the time, everybody was going crazy about Yngwie Malmsteen," says Alex Skolnick. “I tried to keep my distance. He was doing his thing, but it wasn’t supposed to be my thing.”

Indeed, the rise of talents like Malmsteen and EVH “kind of ruined the ‘80s,” says Wolfgang Van Halen, because players were trying to outdo one another in an effort to be the next Eddie.

However, Dweezil Zappa has come to the defense of ‘shredding for shredding’s sake,’ saying: “Some people look at it like, 'Oh, that's lame. Who cares about what that skill is.' But you've got to put the time in to do it.

“There's going to be somebody that likes what that thing is. It might not always be the thing that makes you have a comfortable financial lifestyle, but if you go full forward into the thing that you love, I'm all for it.”

Either way, Hendrix — deemed by countless fans and critics alike as the world’s greatest guitarist — would have been far more impressed by someone going against the grain than those diving through arpeggios at warp speed. There's a good guitar lesson right there.

There are plenty of musical "what ifs" out there in the ether. From the possibilities of the Beatles continuing to make music together throughout the 1970s, to a world where Bob Dylan never went electric, to the debated direction that Jimi Hendrix's music may have taken had he lived beyond 27. However, a scenario where Jeff Beck joined the Rolling Stones or Pink Floyd probably wasn't on anyone's bingo card.

But that's exactly what the British guitar icon revealed to Alice Cooper in a chat in 2010.

As Beck explains it in the recently resurfaced video clip, he was completely unaware that the remaining members of Pink Floyd were hesitant to approach him about joining the band. He tells Cooper he "didn't know until about a week ago that they were after me," and said they were "all afraid to come and ask me to be in the band."

This all seems to have occurred during the mid to late 1960s, when Beck, following his stint with the Yardbirds, was already a legend on electric guitar. The band found themselves at a crossroads due to fragile frontman Syd Barrett's declining state caused by a combination of psychedelic drug use and mental health problems.

Surprisingly, Beck wasn't sure if he'd even seen the band perform at the time. "I may have seen them at the Speakeasy Club in London," he tells Cooper. "But because it was so dark in there, and they were all prismatic, they could have changed personnel every day, and you wouldn't have noticed."

David Gilmour, of course, ended up being the perfect fit for the role, but considering Pink Floyd's psychedelic and somewhat cosmic soundscapes of the time, Beck's scorching solo work could have fit right in — and then some.

Of course, the Floyd collab happened in part with Beck when he contributed guitar parts on Roger Waters' 1992 album, Amused to Death. He also shared the stage with David Gilmour on more than one occasion.

Later on in the short video clip, Beck reveals that he found himself flirting with another legendary band only a few short years later, as the Rolling Stones were hunting for a new guitarist after Mick Taylor's departure in 1975. However, as he tells it, it was a nonstarter and clearly never truly in the cards.

"I'd already agreed to do the Blow by Blow album. It was all set," Beck explains. "They said, 'Come over and play a couple of tracks.' That's what I did. And then when I went to go, they went, 'Where are you going?!'"

Despite the opportunity, Beck knew it wasn't the right fit. "Me and Keith would never have got on," he tells Cooper bluntly. "They were gloriously sloppy... on an Olympic scale. But that's the miracle of the Stones. I kind of like the fact that they're a sloppy bar band. I think that makes it cool."

"I asked Charlie at the end, 'Do you guys know any endings?' He says, 'No, we really don't. We never practiced. We just stop the song somewhere.'"

Ultimately, Beck clearly had no regrets about any missed opportunities, and even suggested his old bandmate Ronnie Wood for the job. "It's a good job I recommended him, isn't it?" he says before sharing one final amusing interaction with the band's bassist, Bill Wyman. "I actually picked Bill's bass guitar up and started playing like Larry Graham, and dust flew off. It smelled like an antique shop. And he said, 'Oi, you're going to break a string!' I went, 'All right, Bill.' Yeah, I'll leave that one alone."

"I couldn't feel the calling," Beck says. "There was something going on up there that definitely would have prevented either of those from happening."

In the end, we all benefited musically from the direction that all of the parties involved went. However, you still can't help but wonder what Pink Floyd's "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" or the Stones' "Start Me Up" would have sounded like with Beck's unique approach to the instrument—and unfortunately, we'll never know.

You have to hunt through Beck's YouTube channel for more from this candid interview with Cooper. However, another clip from the sit-down shows the guitarist discussing his love of Les Paul, whom he had described as his "hero" and a "musical pioneer" on more than one occasion, stating:

"He was the first guy that came out with a fast, very trebly-sounding guitar with a slap echo, you know, in '49 or something," Beck explained, feeling that he's had to defend Paul's legacy at times.

Beck also recounts a story where he was being interviewed. "I remember some snotty journalist laughing when I said Les Paul because he was so passé," Beck recounted. "And I said, 'Excuse me, pal, without him, I wouldn't be here, and a good many of you bastards wouldn't either.'" Well said, Jeff. Well said.

In case you've been living under a rock—or on The Dark Side of the Moon, for that matter—David Gilmour's brand-new studio album Luck and Strange dropped last month, and the Pink Floyd legend has been doing his fair share of interviews and appearances to promote it.

While in New York City for a run of shows at Madison Square Garden to close out the 2024 tour, Gilmour stopped by The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon for a performance and a rare chat that brought up some unusual topics.

During the show, Gilmour found himself reflecting on one of music's most enduring conspiracy theories: the unusual synchronicity between Pink Floyd's seminal album The Dark Side of the Moon and the 1939 film classic The Wizard of Oz.

As some Pink Floyd fans discovered in the mid 1980s — coincident with the VHS home rental boom — if you start The Dark Side of the Moon at the third roar of the MGM lion, the album aligns eerily well with scenes in the movie. Some examples include “Time” playing during a sequence involving clocks; the “Brain Damage” lyric "The lunatic is on the grass," coinciding with the Scarecrow's whimsical dancing (he has no brain, of course); and the album’s overarching themes of time, conflict, and mental illness mirroring the film's storyline.

When asked about the theory during the interview, Gilmour acknowledged to Fallon, tongue in cheek, "There are these strange coincidences. I'll call them coincidences."

Conspiracy theories in music are nothing new. They range from hidden messages in Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven," Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust" and numerous Ozzy Osbourne tracks to claims that Paul McCartney died in the mid 1960s and was replaced in the Beatles by a doppelgänger. As far-fetched as some of these may be, the coincidences between Dark Side and The Wizard of Oz are a little too on the nose to ignore.

But if the matter is entirely unintentional, what could be the explanation for it? This type of phenomenon is often attributed to apophenia, the human tendency to find meaningful patterns in unrelated things. Pink Floyd's mystique during the pre-internet era — undoubtedly combined with some fans’ recreational drug use — no doubt made any correlations between the two more obvious.

Although Floyd has never officially acknowledged any intentional influence, and drummer Nick Mason once dismissed the theory as "absolute nonsense," Gilmour told Fallon he has seen some of the synchronicities. "People have done the donkey work, the chore work, and added it on YouTube. You can watch bits of it. It's kind of amazing," he said with a grin.

Gilmour's take on the "connection" came out during a Fallon segment that also included a playful "True or False" game, with Gilmour addressing some of the myths surrounding his life. From his modest modeling days to a famous picture of him and Paul McCartney with "a great big joint in my hand," the 78-year-old legend admits it scuppered his chances of warding his kids off smoking.

Later on in the show, Gilmour joined Fallon's house band, the Roots, for a rendition of his single, “Dark and Velvet Nights.”

Whether you believe the Dark Side of the Moon/Wizard of Oz connection is deliberate or just a case of apophenia, like every other conspiracy theory, it will probably live on forever. As Gilmour puts it, someone on YouTube has done the "donkey work," so you can check it out yourself and decide.

"David Gilmour is my favorite guitar player,” producer Bob Ezrin tells Guitar Player. “That's the truth. I love his work. What makes David my favorite guitar player is the combination of beauty, dignity, power and memorability that he musters up every time he picks up a guitar and plays something. I've said in the past that if you gave that guy a ukulele and a Pignose amp, he'd make it sound like the solo in ‘Comfortably Numb.’ He just has a way of massaging sound out of the guitar.”

Ezrin is well qualified to make that statement. The Canadian-born producer helmed three albums for Pink Floyd: The Wall, A Momentary Lapse of Reason and The Division Bell.

But of all the moments he committed to tape with Pink Floyd, Ezrin’s favorite by far is the first solo in “Comfortably Numb,” from 1980’s The Wall. Of the song’s two guitar solos, it’s the first that many guitarists name as their favorite of Gilmour’s many six-string excursions.

"The soaring melodic tone is an inspiration for me to try to find the right notes and really play from the heart,” Steve Morse told Guitar Player in its November 2024 issue in a tribute to Gilmour. “I've had the honor of working with Pink Floyd producer Bob Ezrin on many projects, and he always jokes with me when I'm having difficulty finding a solo he likes. He would remark, 'You know, Gilmour played the solo on 'Learning to Fly' in one take on a little practice amp,' which would elicit a predictably dour comeback from me about how we all can't be David Gilmour!"

Joe Perry is another fan of the first solo in “Comfortably Numb,” and credits both GIlmour’s tone and note selection for why it’s so good. “He’s got probably the best Strat tone I can think of,” Perry tells Guitar Player in the November 2024 issue. “He relies very little on distortion, and the stuff just sounds so sweet. It’s almost like what he doesn’t play that’s most important because he’s such a tasteful guitar player. It’s not about what speed; it’s about telling a story. He’s one of those guitar players who is few and far between, who really understands that.”

Ezrin agrees with that sentiment. When it comes to what makes Gilmour so exceptional, he says, “It's just a unique combination of musicality and sound and power that I don't see in anybody else, at least not that perfectly combined.

“There's two sides to David Gilmour,” he continues. “There are the amazing rhythm parts that he comes up with and the riffs that drive a song. They're all so simple, musical, memorable, and they stand repetition without ever getting boring because they are just so perfectly constructed. They're economical. There's no wasted notes, and every note that that is there plays a role towards advancing the overall idea of the riff. I think his playing is cinematic.”

At the heart of it all is Gilmour’s ability to communicate with listeners through his guitar, expressing emotion as clearly as if speaking words.

“David tells stories with his guitar parts,” Ezrin says. “He has a very narrative style. There's a beginning, a middle, and an ending, especially to his soloing."

As Ezrin sees it, the formula works something like this.

“It starts off with a declaration: 'This is the emotion that I'm feeling at this moment, and this is where I'm about to take you.' And then he lays out a melodic structure that's in its way very classical. It almost goes through movements by the time it comes around to the end, and it refers back to itself several times during the process. It's a remarkable talent. It's never about flash with him, and he'll be the first one to say he's not the flashiest, he's not the fastest and he's not the most technical player out there. It's always about the melodic and sonic structure, and he is very, very aware of his sound.

And it all starts with Gilmour’s choice of gear.

“It's about the instrument he selects, and the combination of that plus whatever pedal it might go through and the amplifier that it ends up in,” Ezrin notes. “That's something that he does that he's very precise about and he's very considered about.”

But once the gear has been selected and it’s time to perform, Gilmour tends to lose himself in the moment.

“The parts themselves, most of the time he doesn't predetermine them,” Ezrin explains. “He gets into a zone and just starts reacting to the music. When soloing, he'll get the sound he wants, he'll mess around a little bit, and then the music will fly, and he finds the story that he wants to tell within the music, and usually very quickly. This is not hunt and peck. This is not somebody who's just playing shapes and looking for sound and continuity. He actually knows what it is that he's putting out there. And if he can hear it, he can play it. I think that's a remarkable talent.”

Part of it is down to an individual quirk of the guitarist. As Ezrin tells Guitar Player, much of Gilmour’s lyrical style of soloing is the result of him vocalizing the notes he’s playing. And as he points out, it's this technique that's at the heart of what makes his playing so emotive and affecting.

“Most of the time, he's singing along with what he's playing,” the producer explains. “It's sometimes audible in the room, but whether it's audible or not, you can see it on his face the way his cheek muscles move or the way his mouth moves, that he’s singing along and he knows what he's playing.”

All these elements came together in one magical moment when Gilmour cut the first solo in “Comfortably Numb.”

As Ezrin explains, the two solo were cut at different times, with different producers. “The solo at the end of the song was done when Roger [Waters] and I were in a different studio, and David did that with James Guthrie,” he explains.

“But the solo in the middle of ’Comfortably Numb' is the one that I think is the classic solo.”

As for how they achieved the solo Gilmour and Ezrin have different recollections. While both agree Gilmour used his famed Black Strat through a combination of Hiwatt amplifiers and his Yamaha rotary speaker cabinet, Gilmour recalled to Guitar World in 2015 that the solo is a composite of several takes.

“I banged out five or six solos,” the guitarist said. “From there I just followed my usual procedure, which is to listen back to each solo and make a chart, noting which bits are good. Then, by following the chart, I create one great composite solo by whipping one fader up, then another fader, jumping from phrase to phrase until everything flows together. That’s the way we did it on ‘Comfortably Numb.’ ”

Ezrin, on the other hand, recalls that the first solo was one complete take and quite possibly the very first of the bunch.

“That was essentially a first take” the producer states. “He played that part that's on the record his first time, ripping on top of the guide track that we were doing. Then he spent a bunch of takes trying to make it better. And my recollection, as is his, was that we went back to the original take; if not the original take, we went back to one of the very early ones.

“But that melody — that unbelievable, uplifting, memorable, bring-people-to-their-knees melody — that just came out of him all at once. We got the sound and we had a guide track that we were working with. The track wasn't even finished yet. We didn't have all the elements that would end up being on the record.”

Despite his achievement, Gilmour was reportedly unexcited by what he had created.

“David is one of the most understated and even tempered people that you've ever met,” Ezrin says. “He would never register extreme displeasure nor would he register extreme joy over a part that he played. He would play it, and he might turn and say, ‘That wasn't bad.’ He's a master of understatement, as many British people are.”

Ezrin, on the other hand, was thrilled by what he heard. “I fell on the floor when I first heard this solo,” he says. “For me, it's the most memorable I've ever heard. And for me, that solo is actually the emotional high point of the song. And as much as I love the lyric, which I think is one of the most brilliant that's ever been written by anybody, that solo just rises above everything as being the transcendent moment. A moment of pure musical joy.”

(Note: The solo begins in the video below at 2:38.)

Though it would be another year and change before they went supernova with The Dark Side of the Moon, it was in 1971 that Pink Floyd laid down one of their greatest epics, the side-length prog-funk odyssey Echoes.

Having spent years attempting to settle on a sonic direction in the wake of the departure of Syd Barrett in 1968, Echoes was the sound of a band finally locking into place, and was arguably the moment David Gilmour became one of rock's preeminent guitar heroes.

Though one can't discount his sublime, funky, none-smoother soloing throughout, perhaps Gilmour's most famous moment on the song comes at around the halfway mark, when the guitarist creates a series of otherworldly, screeching, bird-like sounds on his electric guitar.

“That,” Gilmour explained to GP in a 2009 interview, “is an oscillation created by having a wah pedal plugged in the wrong way around, and it has nothing to do with the strings.

“The noise it makes is unbelievably loud and horrible, so you have to have a volume pedal after it, and then a delay, and you have to turn the volume pedal way down. You put your heel all the way down on the wah, and then those noises come out when you manipulate the volume and tone controls on the guitar.”

The wah pedal quirk, Gilmour says, was far from intentional, and came about as “a serendipitous accident that happened in about 1969 or 1970.

“A roadie had plugged the wah in the wrong way, and I stomped into it and got this incredible screaming noise,” Gilmour told GP. “But, you know what they say – waste not, want not.”

Aside from its tonal innovations and Gilmour's inspired performance, Echoes also showcased Floyd's ability to balance envelope-pushing arrangements and concepts with memorable melodies and genuine hooks, a balance the band would take to the pop charts less than two years later on Money, and to the very top of the pops in 1979 with Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2.

David Gilmour’s iconic Black Stratocaster became the most expensive guitar sold at auction when it fetched just under $4 million in 2019. The guitar was his go-to, and a legendary instrument from Pink Floyd's heyday on which he'd played his soul-searching solo in "Comfortably Numb." It was even featured in the classic Pink Floyd lineup's final show at the 2005 Live 8 concert.

But Gilmour has no regrets. For one thing, he regards guitars as “tools of the trade.” For another, he contends his Fender signature model, the Black Cat Strat, is every bit as good.

“Fender did a David Gilmour model, so now I’ve got the Black Cat Strat,” he says. “And it’s the same, you know? It does what it says on the tin.”

The signature model was released in 2008 after the design had met the exacting standards of Gilmour and his team, making the final product a worthy addition to his tool kit.

“Phil Taylor, my guitar tech, insisted on a lot of affection from Fender before we’d agree to do it,” he goes on. “The David Gilmour Signature Strat is a fine, fine instrument — and we make sure it stays that way. We’re on their case about it regularly. I think they’ve done an extremely good job in making a beautiful guitar.”

Pressed on whether it would pass a blindfold test against the original Black Strat, which is now lovingly owned by Jim Isray, he replied: “It certainly would with me. Why wouldn’t it?”

In addition, Gilmour has championed how the money raised by its sale has gone to a worthwhile cause.

“The charity the money went to, ClientEarth, is doing the most extraordinary work throughout the world,” he says. “Every day — I got one this morning — there’s an email about a court case they’ve won somewhere in the world, against countries where they break their own laws on climate change and emissions, or against people who are building plastics factories or cutting down medieval forests in Poland.”

Gilmour is currently on tour for his album Luck and Strange, which he promoted at a small British pub with a performance of the Pink Floyd classic Wish You Were Here featuring his daughter, Romany, on vocals.

When discussing the guitars that were crucial in the making of the record, Gilmour made his arguments for why vintage guitars will always sound better than their modern counterparts. But it seems in the case of the Black Strat versus the Black Cat, there will always be an exception to the rule.

In the video below from Gilmour's YouTube channel, he discusses the Black Strat prior to its sale.

Shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, David Gilmour recruited Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason and bassist Guy Pratt for Hey Hey, Rise Up, a new song featuring Ukrainian musician (and soldier) Andriy Khlyvnyuk on vocals.

Gilmour sought to use the Floyd name to raise as much awareness of, and money for, the Ukrainian cause as possible, and in that he certainly succeeded, with the song helping raise over $600,000 for relief efforts. Beyond this one-time effort, though, Gilmour says that he has put Pink Floyd “to bed.”

In a new interview with Guitar Player, Gilmour – while maintaining that he was proud of his work with the band – stated that their journey was over.

“I put the whole Pink Floyd thing to bed many, many years ago,” he said. “I mean, it’s impossible to go back there without Rick [Wright, Floyd's late keyboardist], and I wouldn’t want to. It’s all done.

“I’m very happy and satisfied with the little team I’ve got around me these days. We had a lot of offers to go and tour and so on and so forth, but I’m in this selfishly lucky position of having more than enough money and having had more than enough fame. I just don’t need that stuff these days.”

Though Hey Hey, Rise Up was released in the period between them, Gilmour's comments on the future of Pink Floyd are quite similar to those he made the last time GP sat down with him, in 2020.

“I’m done with it,” he said at the time. “I’ve had a life in Pink Floyd for quite a lot of years, and quite a few of those years at the beginning, with Roger. And those years in what is now considered to be our heyday were 95 percent musically fulfilling and joyous and full of fun and laughter. And I certainly don’t want to let the other five percent color my view of what was a long and fantastic time together.

“But,” he continued, “it has run its course, we are done, and it would be fakery to go back and do it again. And to do it without Rick [Wright] would just be wrong.

“I’m all for Roger doing whatever he wants to do and enjoying himself and getting the joy he must have had out of those [2010-2013] Wall shows. I’m at peace with all of these things. But I absolutely don’t want to go back. I don’t want to go and play stadiums. I’m free to do exactly what I want to do and how I want to do it.”

To read Gilmour's full interview with GP – which covers gear, guitar solos, and the making of his first solo album in nine years – pick up a new issue of the mag at Magazines Direct.

It’s not often a British seaside pub can share something in common with Pompeii and the Royal Albert Hall, but David Gilmour has offered one watering hole that unlikely connection after he joined his daughter, Romany, for an impromptu performance of Wish You Were Here.

Gilmour’s storied career has seen him play in some incredible venues, but his latest and more intimate setting was special for a whole different reason.

The Pink Floyd legend has been taking an interesting campaign trail to promote Luck and Strange, his first solo album in nine years, which he believes is the best album he’s done since Dark Side of the Moon.

Alongside more traditional routes like talking about the guitars behind the record – and explaining why vintage guitars will always sound better than new builds – he’s also snuck lyrics into local newspapers across the UK. Now he’s played one of Pink Floyd’s biggest hits during a surprise performance at a tiny pub last Sunday (September 8).

Romany, his 22-year-old daughter, was playing a short set of covers at The Neptune Inn in Brighton and Hove when her dad popped by for an unexpected duet.

“Oh my gosh, you're here. And you've brought your guitar,” Romany was caught on camera exclaiming, with genuine surprise on her face.

Of course, it’s normally not very cool when your dad tries to muscle in on your set – in fact it sounds like a nightmare for the common guitarist – but when your dad is David Gilmour, it’s a little different. Still, Romany feared the worst.

“You're going to come and upstage me?” she laughed. “OK, great.”

Gilmour Sr. suggested Floyd’s 1975 hit while unpacking his Martin D-35 signature acoustic out of its hardshell case, before their guitars and voices entangled during the special cover version.

Ben Worsley and Guy Pratt, the guitarist and bass player in Gilmour’s solo band, Ugly Kid Joe vocalist Whitfield Crane, Romany’s brother Gabriel, and Prog Magazine's Jerry Ewing were also in attendance. It seems everyone but Romany was aware of what was to unfold.

Gilmour’s children played key roles in Luck and Strange, with Romany playing the harp and handling lead vocals on their tender reimagining of The Montgolfier Brothers’ Between Two Points. She also features on Gilmour's standalone single, Yes, I Have Ghosts, which sees the pair duet.

Speaking in a press release around the song's release several years ago, Gilmour explained how the duet was a happy accident after plan A had fallen apart.

“I was working on this song just as we went into lockdown and had to cancel a session with backing singers,” he says. “But, as it turned out, the solution was right here and I couldn’t be happier with the way Romany’s voice blends with mine, and the beautiful harp playing has been another revelation.”

Gabriel, meanwhile, provided backing vocals on The Piper's Call and A Single Spark, while Charlie Gilmour contributed to the lyrics of Shattered.

Gilmour will take Luck and Strange on the road later this month, with dates in more familiarly large settings, including London’s Royal Albert Hall and Madison Square Garden, scheduled.

Head to David Gilmour for the full list of tour dates.

David Gilmour’s first solo album in nearly a decade, Luck and Strange, is set for release next month, and it's been bolstered by a production team whose “lack of respect” for Gilmour’s heritage helped him create, what he feels, is his best work since The Dark Side of the Moon.

Produced by Gilmour and Charlie Andrew (ALT-J, Marika Hackman), the co-producer’s decidedly non-prog rock background helped the Pink Floyd guitarist expand his horizons for the better.

Speaking in the new issue of Prog magazine, he’s uttered its title in the same breath as Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon – one of the best-selling albums in music history – believing nothing else he’s created since that 1973 LP matches it in terms of quality.

“It’s over 50 years now since The Dark Side Of The Moon,” Gilmour reflects. “My feeling is that this album is the best album I’ve made in all those years since 1973 when The Dark Side Of The Moon came out.”

It’s quite the statement, and one sure to whet appetites that haven’t been satiated with a new Gilmour album since 2015’s Rattle That Lock.

So far two singles, The Piper’s Call and Between Two Points, have been released, alongside a series of videos showcasing the guitars behind the record's creation. Among that collection is a 1945 Martin D-18 acoustic guitar, one that led Gilmour to voice his opinion that vintage guitars will always sound better than modern builds.

Indeed, the fact that Andrew arrived for the studio sessions unphased by Gilmour’s illustrious history – that includes a slew of Grammy wins, a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and a reputation as one of progressive rock’s most important figures – helped him get the best out of the guitarist.

“We invited Charlie to the house, so he came and listened to some demos,” Gilmour said in the record’s PR. “[He] said things like, ‘Well, why does there have to be a guitar solo there?’ and ‘Do they all fade out? Can’t some of them just end?’.

“He has a wonderful lack of knowledge or respect for this past of mine. He’s very direct and not in any way overawed, and I love that. The last thing you want is people just deferring to you.”

Expanding on that relationship in his conversation with Prog, he said: “Our plan is just to get this one out and run it and then do another one straight away, I will be working with all these people again.

“I’ve had this problem in the past, of wanting to throw myself in the studio with a few people and just kick stuff around, but not knowing who those people should be.

“And that is now a pressure that’s evaporated because I’ve got these phone numbers. It feels like a team and I love being in a team – I didn’t choose to be a solo artist.

“When you have achieved the higher levels of success, most of the people that come into your sphere are going to look to you,” he continues. “They’re not going to be like Charlie Andrew – Charlie is the kind of refreshing thing that you want to have happen to you.”

Alongside his video series documenting his Luck and Strange guitars – which survived his instrument cull that resulted in a huge 2019 auction – Gilmour also recently demonstrated his trademark swell technique. The soloing trick is created using delay pedals, rather than the volume knob, as many have (wrongly) assumed.

Luck and Strange will release on September 6 and is available to pre-order now.

In a recent video, David Gilmour cited his belief that vintage guitars will always sound better than their modern counterparts. 

Speaking about his beloved 1945 Martin D-18 acoustic guitar as part of a YouTube series that sees the Pink Floyd guitarist detailing the guitars that feature on his forthcoming album, he’s provided evidence for his argument. 

“No new guitar sounds quite as good as an old one in my experience,” he says with the Martin – that’s “older than me” – in his lap. 

“I think a guitar like this gets better and better with age, maybe something the glue that's holding it all together, and these different pieces of wood gradually come in harmony with each other over years of playing.” 

Granted, the 78-year-old is simply stating his opinion. But given the fact that his vast guitar collection – some of which sold for a record-breaking $21m during a Christie's auction in 2019 – includes a staggering amount of instruments, he can certainly talk with a degree of authority. 

The other guitars thus far showcased by Gilmour ahead of the release of his fifth solo album – Luck & Strange, which arrives in September – includes ‘Alice,’ a late '70s acoustic named after his daughter built for him by luthier Tony Zemaitis. 

Zemaitis has been dubbed the “king of custom-made guitars”, having built instruments for Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, and Ronnie Wood. 

This particular guitar was commissioned for Gilmour's children to learn to play on, but “it was so nice and so beautiful that I didn't let them play it.”  

The others were his Rickenbacker Frying Pan lap guitar, which features on lead single Piper's Call and Velvet Nights, and a black Gretsch electric guitar which he's owned since the mid-'70s and has “a very particular hi-fi sound.”

It’s noticeable, then, that all these guitars were crafted some decades ago, backing up his theory. 

Even ‘Alice’, which the guitarist fell in love with when he first played it, was ultimately “forgotten” until it came to writing his latest record, presumably with older builds taking his fancy instead. 

It isn't the first time he's championed the aura of older guitars, however.  In 2019, he told Guitar World: “I do unrepentantly like the old ones. Older instruments have a tonality of their own that often takes years to develop.”

And so, his latest solo release is rich with vintage instruments. His first solo LP since 2015’s Rattle That Lock, it was produced by Gilmour and Charlie Andrew (ALT-J, Marika Hackman). 

Contrary to his vintage-honoring instrumentation, he has praised Andrew for his “lack of respect” for the guitarist’s heritage. Gilmour said that Andrew's challenges to his creative decisions elevated the record. 

“We invited Charlie to the house, so he came and listened to some demos, and said things like, ‘Well, why does there have to be a guitar solo there?’ and ‘Do they all fade out? Can’t some of them just end?’,” Gilmour reflects.  

“He has a wonderful lack of knowledge or respect for this past of mine. He’s very direct and not in any way overawed, and I love that. That is just so good for me because the last thing you want is people just deferring to you.”

The album features eight new songs, including a reworking of The Montgolfier Brothers’ Between Two Points, with the title track featuring late Pink Floyd keyboardist, Richard Wright. 

His contributions were taken from the recording of a 2007 jam in a barn at Gilmour’s house. It represents a final tribute from Gilmour to his former bandmate.  

Polly Samson, Gilmour’s co-writer over the past thirty years, penned most of the record’s lyrics, with Gilmour talking up her contributions to the record, helping unshackle him from his past.  

• David Gilmour's Luck & Strange is set for a September 6 release via Sony Music. It can be pre-ordered here.

The following interview was published in the April 2021 issue of Guitar Player magazine.

When I interviewed Nick Mason and Roger Waters and asked about the likelihood of a Floyd reunion, Nick said, “I love touring and I live in hope.” Roger said it was “out of the question”…  

Pink Floyd so far is a three-act play. Will there ever be a fourth act? 

“No. I’m done with it. I’ve had a life in Pink Floyd for quite a lot of years, and quite a few of those years at the beginning, with Roger. And those years in what is now considered to be our heyday were 95 percent musically fulfilling and joyous and full of fun and laughter. 

“And I certainly don’t want to let the other five percent color my view of what was a long and fantastic time together. But it has run its course, we are done, and it would be fakery to go back and do it again. And to do it without Rick [Wright] would just be wrong.

“I’m all for Roger doing whatever he wants to do and enjoying himself and getting the joy he must have had out of those Wall shows. I’m at peace with all of these things. But I absolutely don’t want to go back. I don’t want to go and play stadiums. I’m free to do exactly what I want to do and how I want to do it.”

Give me an example of a Pink Floyd moment that you re-run in your head over and over again because it was magnificent. 

“Oh, the great moments are legion. I have thousands of snapshot memories that are great. Meddle was a great moment for us. It showed the way forth, and it was successful. 

“But then so was A Saucerful of Secrets. The Dark Side of the Moon obviously was the breakthrough moment and was terrific, and we suddenly moved up from the medium-time to the mega-time.” 

How about a moment when you curl up, thinking about the horror of it all? 

“I don’t have any that embarrassing. Though if I watch Live at Pompeii, I cringe.”

What do you remember of the brief period when you and Syd were both in the group?

“It was tragic, really. There were five gigs we did together and he would… [sighs]. We’ve got a bit of film of Syd in a dressing room somewhere at one of those gigs, and he dances this little jig – a little dance – and he’s all smiling and laughing. But you just look at him and go, ‘Oh God, no, tragic.’ Poor chap. I can’t remember much about it. I was brand new, and I think they knew I’d be taking it over.”

What are your memories of performing at Live 8? [Gilmour, Waters, Mason, and Wright performed for the first time in 24 years at the 2005 event.] 

“I thoroughly enjoyed it, though we had a few days of very tense rehearsals. Roger and I hadn’t spoken to each other for years.”

How did you decide what to play?

“We made suggestions and Roger made suggestions, and I didn’t care for Roger’s suggestions. In the end, I thought, ‘Actually, we’re Pink Floyd and he’s our guest, and he can just do what we tell him to do or fuck off.’”

What did he suggest?

“He wanted to do Money – which we all did actually – and Another Brick in the Wall and In the Flesh.”

And he was overruled.

“Basically, yes.”

Roger once told me that musicians who achieve the level of success you achieved ‘must have holes in our psyche that only adulation can fill.’ That’s quite an honest thing to say. 

“It is an honest thing to say. And I think he’s right, actually. But hopefully I don’t have that hole in my psyche any longer, as I don’t see the need for that sort of adulation on that scale. 

“Also, the strange thing about stadiums is you have no way of telling if it’s going well. It’s a crowd – in the singular. You can’t retain them as individuals. The power and energy of their love, so to speak, is a wonderful drug to boost your ego to the point where it’s overinflated.”

Terence “Snowy” White is one of those unassuming quiet achievers whose passion for playing blues-infused guitar music has never wavered. Having started out working on sessions, he served as a touring member for artists such as Joan Armatrading, Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel, and Pink Floyd before joining Thin Lizzy in 1980. But he soon found the gig a mixed blessing. 

“There were many good things about Thin Lizzy, as they were a great band, but working with Phil Lynott was difficult,” White recalls over the phone from his home in Petersfield, England. “He’d say, ‘I’ll be there at 11 a.m. to start recording,’ but he wouldn’t turn up until 10 p.m. and expect us to work all night. I’d be thinking, They’re wasting so much money, which they probably didn’t realize, since the record company was paying for it initially but would be taking it back out of royalties. 

“So by the time they started working, I was tired, and I’d say, ‘I’m going home now, as it’s midnight.’ Because I knew what I had signed up for, I worked really hard at being positive, but sometimes it was quite difficult. For example, when Phil turned up to put vocals on, he hadn’t done any work on them at all, and we’d be sitting there for hours while he worked on them. Yet all he had to do was spend a couple hours getting some of the lyrics down beforehand.” 

After two studio albums with the group, White exited Thin Lizzy in 1982 and began forging a successful and prolific solo career. Since his 1983 debut outing, White Flames, he’s released more than 20 solo albums. He also spent more than two decades playing guitar as part of Roger Waters’ touring band, with whom he performed around the world. 

For the duration of his playing career, White’s weapon of choice has been his goldtop 1957 Gibson Les Paul, which he purchased in 1969 while in Sweden. He eventually sold it at auction in 2015 and has since played a custom copy.

“I didn’t know the copy existed until a friend called me when I was staying at the Savoy in London during Roger’s shows at the London 02 Arena,” White explains. “He told me a Japanese guy wanted to give me a guitar that was a copy of my old one, which I was still playing at the time. So he came down to the hotel and showed it to me, and it looked rather nice — had all the scratches in the right places, et cetera. 

"So I said I’d be happy to have it, and he just gave it to me! He didn’t want anything in return, not even a photo of me with it or any sort of endorsement. I didn’t use it, because I still had my old one, but when I sold that a few years later, I thought I’d give the other electric guitar a try. It doesn’t sing on the top frets like mine did, but it’s a nice guitar anyway. I’ve had a bit more work done on it — wider frets, neck shaved and so on — to make it feel comfortable for me”. 

White officially retired from live performances after a 2019 show with the White Flames in St. Petersburg, Russia, and now focuses on recording blues albums. Despite touring the world and performing in arenas and stadiums, he says his live career highlight was when he was playing small clubs. 

“Back in the 1990s,” he explains, “I had a three-piece that featured two Dutch-Indonesian musicians: Juan van Emmerloot on drums and Walter Latupeirissa on bass and rhythm guitar duties. We’d play in small clubs in Europe. Sometimes a gig would feel great, because it sounded good onstage and sounded good out front with the audience, and we were on form and had great vibes. 

"Everything came together, and for an hour and a half it would be wonderful. I still remember how good that felt. It wasn’t like playing in stadiums or Berlin. It was really nice.”

Pigs on the Wing – Pink Floyd (Animals 8-Track, 1977)

“I got a call from somebody to say Pink Floyd’s manager was trying to get in contact with me because the band were looking for a guitar player, and that I should give them a call. 

"Pink Floyd didn’t mean anything to me, as I was a very narrow-minded blues player, so if it didn’t have blues in it, I wasn’t interested. Also, I didn’t know anything about them. But then somebody said, ‘Why don’t you ring them up? Won’t hurt to find out a bit more.’ I thought, Well, I’m not doing anything, so I called them and went to their manager’s office, in London. He told me they were in the studio around the corner at Britannia Row, recording the Animals album. 

“Dave [Gilmour] took me aside and explained to me that they needed a bit of bass, some rhythm guitar, a bit of 12-string and some harmony and lead bits, and could I play them? I said yes, and then Dave asked did I want the gig? And I said, ‘Yes, but maybe we should have a jam so you can hear me play?’ Dave answered, ‘You wouldn’t be here if you couldn’t play, would you?’

“So that was it! We went back into the control room and Roger [Waters] says, ‘While you’re here, why don’t you play a solo on this song I’ve just done called ‘Pigs on the Wing’? I said, ‘That’d be nice.’ Roger asked the engineer to put the song up, and Dave said, ‘Yes, use any of those guitars.’ 

"I picked up a white Stratocaster and it sounded all right. So the track played through once and I fiddled about, and then they did a take and that was the take. I got lucky and did quite a nice solo straight away. It turns out the guitar was Gilmour’s white Strat, with serial number 0001 on it.” [White’s contribution appears only on the 8-track tape release of the Animals album.]

In the Skies – Peter Green (In the Skies, 1979)

“I’d known Peter for quite a long time, and we were quite close. He called me up and said he was going to do a bit of recording — an album — as his brother Michael worked for this little record company called PVK Records. It wasn’t like a big comeback for him or anything; he was just happy to help his brother. And Peter wanted to use my band, too, so we went in and started jamming, and this was one of the tracks we came up with. 

“Peter began playing the chords to the song, and I came up with the melody and played all of it just off the top of my head. Then Peter wrote some lyrics to it, as there were no vocals on any of it. The actual session was fun, because I hadn’t really played much with Peter. We had jammed a bit, but nothing much on the musical front with him. 

"It was easy-going, as nobody had any particular thing that they wanted to do. I played quite a lot of the lead bits, and then Pete went away and worked on things, and later we went back in and re-recorded the stuff. There is a recording of the original jam where I’m just playing the melody on guitar.”

Chinatown – Thin Lizzy (Chinatown, 1980)

“I had bumped into Scott Gorham in the rehearsal place at Shepperton Studios [a famous film studio in Surrey, England], and he said they were auditioning guitar players next door, and did I want to come? I couldn’t go then, and they called me up a few days later and said they still hadn’t found anybody. 

"So I went and had a jam, listened to one or two songs and was asked to join the band. It was the same sort of scenario as Pink Floyd. I said, ‘Yeah, all right,’ but told them I had to do The Wall shows in America with Pink Floyd first. And they said they would wait. 

“So while I was rehearsing The Wall shows in America, Floyd gave me an apartment off Sunset [Boulevard] and a car, so I was able to get about and do things, and in between rehearsals with Floyd I was learning the Thin Lizzy stuff. 

"I knew that [Thin Lizzy] were going to go in the studio as soon as I got back to do some recording, so I came up with a few ideas – the main riff and a few other bits and pieces for ‘Chinatown’ were my first contributions. We went into the studio and I just started playing that riff, and they went, ‘That’s great, let’s do it!’ And we built it up from there. 

“That was fun to do, too! However, I’m not a rocker that jumps about onstage, which was the only problem with me doing that gig. I did explain that to them, but they said that it was all right, and that I could be the blues player in the band. 

"Of course, people just wanted to hear the old songs, so it didn’t work out like that. But I enjoyed doing all those harmony guitar bits. I was using my goldtop Les Paul through a Fender Twin Reverb."

Bird of Paradise – Snowy White (White Flames, 1983)

“It was such a good feeling to get into the studio with my friends and do my own thing with this album [White Flames]. The idea for ‘Bird of Paradise’ had been in my head for a while — just the chord progression and the idea of the solo. And when I’d finished with Thin Lizzy, ‘Bird of Paradise’ was one of the tracks that I wanted to record. 

"The guitar solos were all done in one take, because it was such a relief for me to just get on and play without anybody else. The only problem with that song was that I’m not a singer. I was looking for someone to do vocals, and my work on there was only intended to be a guide vocal while I searched for a professional singer. 

“Suffice to say I'm not happy with my vocal on ‘Bird of Paradise.’ But when the record company heard it, they wanted to put it out as a single. I figured it would sink without a trace anyway, so it didn’t really matter. 

"I went with the engineer into Ringo Starr’s studio, at Tittenhurst Park [John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s former home, which Starr lived in from 1973 to 1988], and we remixed it and sped it up a little bit, cut one of the solos and turned it into a single. The label put it out, and I thought that was probably the last I was going to hear of it. 

"That is, until I was driving my car one day over Putney Bridge with the radio on and it came on, and it happened to be on the biggest afternoon show on BBC Radio 1 that millions of people listened to. The most popular DJ, Steve Wright, just kept playing it and turned it into a hit.”

Midnight Blues – Snowy White & The White Flames (No Faith Required, 1996)

“This was my first proper recording with my new White Flames band, a pickup rhythm section from Holland that were great. I’d been doing a few gigs around Europe with them, and we ended up being a band. I loved it. When it came to making the album, I went in with the attitude of not caring how long the songs were or how commercial they were. I just had some things I wanted do with the band. 

"John ‘Rabbit’ Bundrick played this lovely Hammond organ part, which gave me a great bed on which to put my guitar, and it sort of inspired me. We did the whole thing in one take, straight through, including the lead guitar. And I put the vocals on later. I’m so happy with it. I thought it was an uncommercial song, because it’s long and slow and it doesn’t really go anywhere, but it’s become the most popular streamed and downloaded of all my songs. 

“I’d never heard of American rapper Meek Mill until I got an email saying he wanted to sample it [for his 2016 song ‘Blue Notes’]. He just rapped over my whole exact song without doing anything, apart from speeding it up. That track sold a lot and led people who heard it to check out my original song. 

“A lot of people got into me from listening to that track, and it sort of snowballed. I was so happy with that. Over the years it felt like the right place for me. Again, I used my goldtop Les Paul through a Vox AC30. ’Midnight Blues’ feels like the highlight of my recording career.”

For more on Snowy White, visit his website

For a time in the 1970s, guitarists were using phase shifters like they were going out of style. Remarkably, while the effect lost some of its popularity in the decades that followed, it has remained a staple of the guitarist’s arsenal. 

After all, why hack out static-sounding guitar tracks when a phaser can give them a stunningly three-dimensional swirling sound?

Maestro and Electro-Harmonix were among those that popularized the devices, but undoubtedly the most-loved phaser of its time was the MXR Phase 90. 

More dramatic sounding than MXR’s Phase 45, more affordable and less obtrusive than the larger two-knob Phase 100, the Phase 90 hit the sweet spot, and it landed on a bucketload of classic recordings and touring pedalboards as a result. 

Edward Van Halen smeared its tones all over Van Halen I, David Gilmour used one to add six-string sheen to Pink Floyd’s “Shine on You Crazy Diamond,” and Mick Jones slathered it on the Clash’s “Lost in the Supermarket,” to name just a few artists and recordings associated with the Phase 90.

At the heart of a phase shifter is a circuit that splits the incoming signal in two and reverses the phase of one strand by 180 degrees. A low-frequency oscillator is then applied to the signals, causing them to intersect at varying points along the frequency spectrum. 

When the two signals meet, they are 180 degrees out of phase with one another and cancel each other out, creating a “notch” in the frequency. As the oscillator sweeps those notches up and down the audio spectrum, it produces the characteristic swooshing effect that these pedals are famous for.

The Phase 90 was the debut effect from MXR, which Terry Sherwood and Keith Barr formed in 1972 in Rochester, New York. Designed by Barr and released in either 1972 or ’74 (sources vary), the Phase 90 is a four-stage phaser, since it has four independent stages at which the signal’s phase is reversed, resulting in two modulated frequency notches.

The speed at which these notches are swept up and down the frequency spectrum is controlled by the Phase 90’s lone control knob. 

Because the original MXR pedals were not true bypass, the input signal passed through the pedal’s buffer stage even when the effect was switched off, which caused it to suffer from tone suck.

By late 1974, MXR had introduced other pedals, including the Blue Box octave fuzz, Distortion+ and Dyna Comp compressor. Toward the end of the same year, the Phase 45 was released, followed by the Phase 100 in 1975. 

These early pedals had their names and MXR’s logo silkscreened on their fronts in a distinctive script font. By 1976, all the pedals in the line were given more modern block-letter logos encircled by a black box. 

By then, MXR was the pro choice among the many alternatives on the market. Unfortunately, the competition was massive, and that, among other factors, helped drive the company out of business in 1984.

Dunlop acquired the MXR brand in 1987, and has released several reissue renditions of the Phase 90 and other MXR favorites, as well as modernized phasers that pay homage to the original circuit, with conveniences such as contemporary DC power inputs, LED indicator lights and true-bypass switching. 

But for purists, nothing except an original script-logo Phase 90 will do.

This week, 17 years ago, the guitar world lost one of its most mysterious yet influential pioneers, Syd Barrett. 

A rare musical visionary, Barrett spearheaded London’s psychedelic rock scene of the Swinging ‘60s as singer, guitarist and principal songwriter of Pink Floyd.

Following his departure from the band in 1968, he embarked upon a solo career, releasing The Madcap Laughs in 1970, followed by Barrett later the same year.

But it would be Pink Floyd’s 1967 singles – including "Arnold Layne" and "See Emily Play" – along with the band’s Summer of Love debut album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn that Barrett became more widely known for.

In this kaleidoscopic clip of Pink Floyd’s epic instrumental opus "Interstellar Overdrive", Barrett can be seen playing a Danelectro model 3021 and his famous reflective disk-covered Fender Esquire.

Combining a Binson Echorec Baby delay machine with an improvised slide (thought to be either a ruler or Zippo lighter) Barrett stirs up the kind of tripped-out textures that made Pink Floyd a hit in London’s UFO Club.

Though the band went on to achieve monumental success during the '70s and beyond following Barrett’s departure, his influence endured – not just within the Pink Floyd camp but throughout the music world at large.

Indeed, many guitarists and songwriters – including Graham Coxon and John Frusciante – have cited Syd Barrett as a major inspiration.

Over the years, Barrett has remained a cult figure of psychedelic rock – an enigma whose reclusive life only fueled the interest of curious fans.

Aiming to address some “unanswered questions” about the troubled artist is a brand-new documentary titled Have You Got It Yet? The Story of Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd that begins screening in theaters across North America later this month.

Directed by Roddy Bogawa and the late Storm Thorgerson, Have You Got It Yet? features fresh interviews with family, friends and lovers of Barrett, plus input from his Pink Floyd bandmates Roger Waters, David Gilmour, and Nick Mason.

“You know you couldn’t over emphasize his importance, because he was, he was that, the creative genius,” said drummer Mason, whose own band – Nick Mason's Saucerful of Secrets – continues to celebrate the songs of Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd.

Growing up in classic rock’s golden years shouldn’t negate the possibility that you enjoy music made today. I may have an extensive vinyl collection of favorites dating back to my childhood, but I stream music everyday and constantly discover great songs by inspiring artists across the genres.

Yet, there are some who believe the modern music scene is a wasteland.

If you think that, you probably aren’t listening. But if one thing has suffered in the past two decades, it is the long-player. There are fewer epic albums being made today, and there is less reason to invest one’s time and ears in 40 minutes or more of an artist’s music.

Of course, I say this with the benefit – and certainly blessing – of having grown up at a time when the album was king.

Take 1973. A half century ago, we experienced one of the greatest years in rock and roll. It was a year that saw debuts from potent acts like Queen, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Aerosmith, and Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, as well as from guitar heroes like Tony Rice and Lindsey Buckingham, making his nod with Buckingham Nicks.

From my youthful vantage point, 1973 was lived as 52 weeks of breathless Saturday trips to the record store, where we were tempted by such epic albums as Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions, Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and the Who’s Quadrophenia, not to mention prog monsters like Yes’s live three-album set Yessongs, Manfred Mann Earth Band’s Solar Fire, Todd Rundgren’s A Wizard/A True Star, Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s Brain Salad Surgery and, the behemoth of them all, Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon.

In 1973, we saw the last flashes of glam rock with Bowie’s Aladdin Sane and Pin-Ups, Rick Derringer’s All American Boy, Alice Cooper’s Billion Dollar Babies and the debut from the New York Dolls.

But it was a great year for art rock, with Fripp and Eno’s experimental tour de force (No Pussyfooting), John Cale’s orchestral pop masterpiece Paris 1919, Lou Reed’s dramatic Berlin, Camel’s brilliant self-titled debut, and a pair of landmark Roxy Music albums: For Your Pleasure and Stranded.

That was all but the tip of that year’s multi-genre, stylistically freewheeling musical iceberg.

For any album to stand out among this pack, it would have to be pretty freaking great. Which is the least you can say about Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy, a compilation of eight wildly inventive songs that together serve as a cross-section of that year’s dizzying musical styles, including prog, reggae, glam, folk, funk and art-rock.

It was the first Zeppelin album I bought and the first – perhaps only – album they made that kept their bombast in check, served up an ear-catching range of styles and delivered with economical arrangements.

As Jimmy Page said: “You can hear the fun we were having.”

Indeed, we can, to this day. Here’s to singing in the sunshine and laughing in the rain.

One might establish the first “session” toward the making of The Dark Side of the Moon as the band meeting at Nick’s place, at which Roger’s idea of a continuous conceptual piece about things that “make people mad” was first sketched out. This was followed by Roger hiding away in his garden shed studio out back of his Islington home and creating a few demos of the material they had collectively begun writing. Next came working on the material through 12 days of rehearsals at Decca Studios in West London, followed by the live-show rehearsals at the Rolling Stones’ 47 Bermondsey Street warehouse and then, innovatively, the touring of the “Eclipse” suite.

Inextricably linked with EMI, Abbey Road Studios had at times been state of the art and sometimes not. Pink Floyd had recorded there regularly over the years (although not exclusively), with the most significant recent visits being for 1970’s Atom Heart Mother and portions of 1971’s Meddle. Significantly, the band felt they had to move on from Abbey Road to finish “Echoes” (comprising all of side two of Meddle) because, at the time, it was limited to eight-track recording. Nearby, both AIR and Morgan had 16-track facilities, which Abbey Road acquired in time for Dark Side.

For a mixing board, Abbey Road now had an EMI TG12345, its first solid-state, replacing the REDD .51, which was vacuum-tube based. The new console featured 24 microphone inputs and eight tape outputs, which came in handy, given the complexity of the sound effects the guys wanted on the album. Alan Parsons, engineer on the project, is emphatic, however, that the making of the record was essentially a 16-track production (“24 channels into 16 groups”), with many of the tracks being second generation because the band had run out of tracking room and had to consolidate and bounce first-generation tracks (the “Money” loop alone took up four tracks). The mix was conducted off the second-generation recordings, i.e. second-generation basic/backing tracks plus overdubs.

As Parsons told me, “Being an engineer for Pink Floyd was arguably the biggest challenge I ever gave myself. They’re so sound oriented; they used the studio to the absolute maximum. So it was a big challenge as an engineer. But I think I learned a bit, and I think they learned from me as well. It was a really good team effort overall.”

Asked about his Abbey Road employers George Martin and Geoff Emerick, Parsons says, “They were both mentors to me. George, I consider that probably, to a certain extent, I modeled myself on him because he commanded enormous respect from every artist he worked with and he respected them, and so that’s why he was the perfect inspiration.”

Of course, Abbey Road had essentially served as headquarters for the Beatles. Floyd would return there for work on Wish You Were Here and portions of The Final Cut and The Division Bell. The two Syd Barrett albums – 1967’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and 1968’s A Saucerful of Secrets – were cobbled together there, and Roger as a solo artist would use the facility as well.

Work on The Dark Side of the Moon began at Studio 3 on June 1, 1972, after the band had returned from dates in West Germany and the Netherlands, the culmination of about 40 shows playing the whole album live. Typically the band worked from 2:30 in the afternoon until midnight. The first song worked on was “Us and Them,” with the band sticking with Studio 3 for three days. Parsons had worked with the Beatles by this point but had also served as assistant tape operator on Atom Heart Mother, so he knew the guys well.

Work then shifted to Studio 2, from June 6 to 10, where the basic tracks for “Money” were recorded on June 7 and “Time” the following day (Gilmour’s use of a Kepex processor for tremolo can be heard on “Money”). [Made by Allison Research, the Kepex was a compressor/expander that could be triggered by an external source. Gilmour reportedly used a sine wave from the band’s EMS Synthi AKS synthesizer to trigger the Kepex and create an amplitude-modulated effect.] Roger had originally captured the sound effects for “Money” by recording on a Revox A77 the sounds of coins and other items tossed into a mixing bowl in his wife’s pottery studio and then splicing tape the old-fashioned way, working with the song’s 7/8 time signature. But this got re-recorded in the studio, given the possibility of improving it for the planned quadraphonic mix. One can hear a cash register (from a sound library record), an adding machine (Alan’s contribution) and paper tearing. Nick recalls drilling holes in old pennies and threading them onto strings to help create the innovative sonic symphony.

After two days off, it was back to work again at the same locale, June 13 to 17, followed by a move back to Studio 3, June 20 through 25, where the basic tracks were recorded for “The Great Gig in the Sky” on the final day.

Besides the new mixing board, also crucial to the process was the cutting-edge EMS Synthi AKS synthesizer, which allowed the band to create loops of sequenced notes, most famously for “On the Run,” where Gilmour and Waters collaborated on the effect. This was also used for the solo on “Any Colour You Like.”

As for Waters’ and Gilmour’s individual tools of the trade, Roger’s weapon of choice was the Fender Precision bass he’d been using since 1970, modified at this point with a maple neck by Charvel and Kluson tuning machines. David used his black 1969 Fender Stratocaster, which he later modified many times, soon with an additional switch that allowed him to manipulate the pickups to evoke the sound of a Fender Jazzmaster, and then with a Gibson PAF humbucker in time for the shows with Roland Petit’s Ballets de Marseille in early 1973. Also, notably on “Money” (and probably “Brain Damage,” “Us and Them,” and “Eclipse”), Gilmour played a 1970 mahogany-body custom Bill Lewis guitar with 24 frets. On “Money” this was used specifically to get the high notes in the third part of his solo. On “Breathe” and “Great Gig in the Sky” you can hear a Fender 1000 twin-neck pedal steel.

For effects, Gilmour used a Dallas Arbiter Fuzz Face (BC108), a Colorsound Power Boost, a Univox Uni-Vibe, a Binson Echorec 2 and PE 603, the aforementioned Kepex processor, and the EMS Synthi Hi-Fli guitar effects processor, which was a prototype version Gilmour bought from the manufacturer in 1972 at great expense. But effects were minimal, given there was nothing digital out at the time. Parsons indicates that most of his sounds were coming right out of the cabinets, augmented perhaps with a plate reverb or tape delay.

In the amp department, Gilmour used Hiwatt DR103 Custom 100-watt heads, a Fender Twin Reverb silverface 2x12 combo, a Maestro Rover rotary speaker, a Leslie rotary speaker cabinet (plus effects simulating Leslies), and WEM Super Starfinder 200 cabinets, which Parsons mic’d with Neumann U87s or U86s placed a foot in front of the cabinets. The classic Leslie rotary speaker effect can be heard on “Breathe.”

Concerning the legendary cacophony of alarm clocks on “Time,” that was something that Parsons had previously put together for a quadraphonic test record for EMI, recording each clock separately in an antiques shop in Hampstead. Quad was being touted at the time as the next evolution beyond stereo, and Parsons and Pink Floyd were ready participants – Atom Heart Mother, Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here would all come out on quad. Parsons took a portable tape machine to the shop and had to have the proprietor stop all the clocks so Parsons could capture them one at a time. Also on the effects front, explained Alan, “the footsteps on the intro to ‘On the Run,’ that was me and my assistant engineer, Pete James, pacing the floor at Number Two studio at Abbey Road.”

After some time off (but also more shows), there were further Dark Side sessions on October 10 through 12 and 17, 1972, followed by a show at Wembley Empire Pool on October 21. Work resumed October 25 to 27, but then the band was sent back on the road in mainland Europe in November. Work would often be interrupted to watch Monty Python’s Flying Circus, or to allow Roger to cheer on his beloved Arsenal FC. Parsons has said that he’d stay behind and keep working during the breaks for Monty Python, recalling that this is when he’d get some of his best ideas down on tape.

Rehearsals in advance of the final recording sessions took place January 9, 1973, with the band recording sporadically over two weeks beginning January 18 in Studio 2 before moving permanently to Studio 3. At this point the band recorded “Brain Damage,” “Eclipse,” “Any Colour You Like,” and “On the Run,” plus overdubs needed for the basic tracks from earlier sessions. Mason recalls that “Any Colour You Like” was a two-chord jam cooked up on the spot to fill space, with the highlight being Gilmour’s guitar solo. Dick Parry’s sax parts were recorded for “Money” and “Us and Them” (using a 1969 Henri Selmer tenor sax) plus four female backing vocalists – Doris Troy, Lesley Duncan, Liza Strike, and Barry St. John – were brought in to sing on “Brain Damage,” “Eclipse” and “Time.” Their voices were fed through a pitch shifter to achieve a sweeping effect. Of note, also on the vocal front, Parsons double-tracked most of the lead vocals, adding effects like reverb and delay.

Clare Torry’s vocals for “The Great Gig in the Sky” were recorded on January 21, with the sessions wrapping up February 1. Noted Parsons, “I suggested calling up Clare Torry to sing ‘Great Gig in the Sky’– they were unacquainted with her. There were a few specific instances like that where I injected some ideas.”

Torry did three or four takes, with Parsons indicating that the final performance was a composite. Torry remembers fondly the excellent mix Parsons got between her voice and the music in her headphones and greatly enjoyed closing her eyes and belting it out. Torry also recalls that the guys (other than Dave) looked completely bored during the process and she was ushered out quickly after she was done, feeling that she probably was not going to make the record.

At the end of the process, producer Chris Thomas was brought in to check out the final mixes. He recalls picking up the task at midnight and then driving over to AIR to work until 5 a.m. on Grand Hotel, his third of what would be four records in a row for Procol Harum.

Although he doesn’t admit to any disputes, apparently there was vehement disagreement about the final mix, with Roger and Nick wanting a drier sound emphasizing the sound effects and David and Rick wanting more echo, emphasizing the songs and melodies. Thomas was called in as mediator; both David and Rick would hover over him at different times, willing the faders to move their way, to the point where both ended up in the control room with him (Gilmour says he got his way). Parsons wasn’t happy with Thomas’s propensity to “limit” the drums, and later regretted that the drum sound could have been better.

Notably, Thomas was also at the Clare Torry session on “The Great Gig in the Sky,” and proved instrumental in synchronizing the echo on “Us and Them.” Parsons recalled that Chris had rode him hard to locate the “magic” rough mixes for the Rototoms used at the beginning of “Time,” but they were unsuccessful in their search. In the final analysis however, after three weeks of work, all parties were more than pleased with The Dark Side of the Moon. All that was left was to tour a record that actually existed.

Excerpted from Pink Floyd and The Dark Side of the Moon: 50 Years, by Martin Popoff (Motorbooks, 2023, $50). Copyright 2023 Quarto Publishing Group USA Inc. Used by permission.

I’m rarely surprised by the response when interviewers, including those for Guitar Player, ask musicians, “Did you have any idea your record would be a hit?” The answer is almost always “no.” It’s the rare artist who knows when he or she has on a hit on their hands. It’s a question David Gilmour has been asked many times about The Dark Side of the Moon, and while his answer has always been a definitive “no,” he could be excused for saying “yes.”

After all, Pink Floyd worked the album on the road through the first five months of 1972 before entering Abbey Road Studios to record it, then continued to tour their magnum opus while putting the finishing touches to tape.

From all reports, the fans were ecstatic about what they heard at those shows, even if the work’s concepts eluded them.

50 years on from its release (and around 45 million copies later) The Dark Side of the Moon continues to thrill as generations of fans discover, and rediscover, this seemingly timeless record.

Discovering how another person experiences and interprets music – or anything, really – is an opportunity to shape or reshape our own perceptions, and in doing so broaden our minds and gain new insights that possibly give us a fresh spin on art, politics, life... pretty much anything you can think of.

So join us for a track-by-track tour of the Dark Side, as we take a look at some of the concepts, gear and stories behind Pink Floyd’s best-selling LP...

“Speak to Me”

Credited to drummer Nick Mason, this sound collage lasts slightly longer than a minute and is an unsettling introduction to the album, fading in slowly and prompting listeners to turn up the volume, only to find the track surging to menacing sound levels in its final 10 seconds.

The cut is an overture of sorts, foreshadowing the various sounds – clinking coins, ticking clocks and haunting voices – yet to come over the album’s two sides, all of it over a steady tom-tom (according to David Gilmour) standing in for a heartbeat. Together, they evoke the emotions explored on the album, including fear, anxiety and pressure, as well as birth, time and death.

The organ-like tone that groans in toward the end is a piano chord played by Rick Wright, recorded backward.

“Breathe (In the Air)”

Featuring music by David Gilmour and lyrics by Roger Waters, “Breathe (In the Air)” releases the tension of “Speak to Me” with a languid soundscape over which Gilmour sings and plays his pedal steel, as well as a rhythm guitar through a Univox Uni-Vibe.

Gilmour’s majestically minimal guitar work reveals his gift for choosing the right notes and tones to evoke just what the song requires.

As his pedal steel establishes a sort of free-floating idyll, Waters’ busy bass lines suggest the perpetual movement of time and humanity that scrapes against our inner peace.

“On the Run”

In early shows, this sequenced synthesizer track was a jam known as “The Travel Sequence,” performed with keyboards and guitars.

Thematically, it’s about the pressures Pink Floyd faced from constant touring and, specifically, air travel, as well as the fear of death that went with it.

In the studio, the tune became something entirely different when Waters programmed an eight-note line into the sequencer of an EMS Synthi AKS synthesizer. Gilmour says he created the sound and worked the controls. “He made that little sequence up,” the guitarist said, “but I had got the actual original sound, and I actually was the one doing the controlling on the take that we used.”

The group then added Mason’s hi-hats and sound effects, including a backward guitar and an airplane engine.

“Time”

Opening with a cacophonous recording of ticking and chiming clocks that engineer Alan Parsons compiled for a quadraphonic test record, “Time” is a study in musical contrasts. The atmospheric intro, featuring Mason’s tuned Rototoms and Gilmour’s heavily reverberated “spaghetti western” guitar stylings, sets the stage for high drama.

Waters’ aggressive vocals punctuate the spiky verses – on which GIlmour turns in some fine funk-infused licks – while Gilmour and Wright lend their dulcet voices to the shimmering sustained choruses, which includes backing vocals fed through a pitch shifter, according to Martin Popoff’s research, although they sound heavily flanged.

Gilmour’s biting guitar solo was performed using the F# minor pentatonic scale and recorded at high volume through his Hiwatt amp. It’s an excellent example of his flair for exploiting the fretboard’s range with a combination of fast lines and slow sustained notes to full expressive effect.

“The Great Gig in the Sky”

Wright’s creation, this tune was originally an instrumental work and featured readings from the Bible and the British satirist Malcolm Muggeridge.

Most of the music was recorded on June 25, 1972. Roughly six months later, on January 21, 1973, the spoken-word bits were replaced by the wordless gospel stylings of 25-year-old session singer Clare Torry during a three-hour session.

Torry said the band seemed so indifferent to her efforts that she wasn’t sure her vocals made the cut until she saw her name in the album credits while visiting a record shop.

“Money”

The opening track on the original vinyl album’s second side, “Money” was mostly recorded on June 7, 1972.

Waters developed the unusual (for rock) 7/8 bass riff in the studio, then created the coins-and-cash-register audio collage in his wife’s pottery studio, using a Revox A77 tape deck, before remaking it at Abbey Road with assistance from his bandmates and Alan Parsons.

The resulting audio loop he devised served as a metronome for the song, over which the band performs at its funkiest. Gilmour strums a psychedelic stuttering tremolo guitar, Wright plays his Wurlitzer electric piano through a wah pedal, and Gilmour’s old chum Dick Parry blows a mean sax solo.

But the song’s 7/8 time signature goes out the window once Gilmour launches into a trio of furious blues-based guitar solos midway through the track. He performs the first two on his Black Strat, while the third is played using his 24-fret Bill Lewis electric, after which the band swings back into 7/8 time for the final verse before riding the fade out in 4/4.

Oddly – for Pink Floyd – “Money” was released as a single in the U.S. and reached number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100.

“Us and Them”

Tracked on the first day of Dark Side’s studio recording sessions, June 1, 1972, “Us and Them” began as an instrumental composition that Wright wrote for the band’s contribution to the soundtrack of the 1970 film Zabriskie Point.

Although the song was rejected, it found a new life when combined with Waters’ lyrics juxtaposing distinctions of rank, race and class to illustrate life’s inequities.

The stereo-panning echoes on Gilmour’s vocals, which occur on the beat, required some ingenuity to create at the time. Parsons says that he achieved them using a 3M eight-track tape recorder: Gilmour’s vocal was sent to one pair of tracks and bounced along to the next pair and so on, to achieve four distinct echoes that could be panned within the stereo spectrum to give the sense that the echoes were traveling from speaker to speaker.

“Any Colour You Like”

This instrumental is essentially a reprise of “Breathe” – it’s even called “Breathe (Second Reprise)” in some tab books – as it uses roughly the same chord pattern as that song’s verses, transposed from Em to Dm.

Gilmour has said he based his guitar tone on Eric Clapton’s guitar in the Cream song “Badge,” using either a Uni-Vibe or a Leslie rotary speaker to achieve his liquid tone.

As for the title, Waters – the only Floyd member not credited on the song – explains that it comes from hawkers who would visit his Cambridge neighborhood selling china sets from the backs of trucks. “If they had sets of china, and they were all the same colour, they would say, ‘You can ’ave ’em, 10 bob to you, love. Any colour you like, they’re all blue.’ And that was just part of that patter. So, metaphorically, ‘Any Colour You Like’ is interesting, in that sense, because it denotes offering a choice where there is none.”

“Brain Damage”

Originally written, but not recorded, for Pink Floyd’s 1971 album, Meddle, “Brain Damage” was alternately titled “The Dark Side of the Moon” and “The Lunatic Song.”

Waters wrote it for Floyd founder Syd Barrett, making it both an anchor for the Dark Side of the Moon album and a forerunner to Floyd’s 1975 tribute to Barrett, Wish You Were Here.

Gilmour plays a Beatles-esque fingerpicked pattern on his guitar through either a Uni-Vibe or a Leslie. According to Waters, the lyric “The lunatic is on the grass” was inspired by the square in Cambridge between the River Cam and King’s College Chapel and is meant to connote the idea that those who don’t follow society’s rules are dangerous, when in fact the real insanity is refusing to let people enjoy the beauty of the grass.

“Eclipse”

Segueing from the previous track, “Eclipse” transitions to a dramatic 6/8 time signature led by Wright’s Leslie organ and Gilmour’s arpeggiating guitar lines, played at a higher register than in “Brain Damage.”

Running just slightly over two minutes in length, “Eclipse” feels less like a song of its own than a coda to its predecessor.

Lyrically, the song speaks to the themes of light and dark that run throughout the album, concluding with the line that “everything under the sun is in tune, but the sun is eclipsed by the moon.”

Speaking of the song’s lyrics, Waters said, “I think it’s a very simple statement saying that all the good things life can offer are there for us to grasp, but that the influence of some dark force in our natures prevents us from seizing them.”

Order The Dark Side Of The Moon 50th Anniversary Deluxe Remaster here.

David Gilmour never imagined in 1973 that he would still be talking about Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon well into the 21st century. “Longevity in pop music, in terms of me as a 20-whatever – I was a 27-year-old when we did Dark Side of the Moon – was measured in maybe five, possibly 10 years,” he reflected in a rare 2011 interview. “As soon as Roger [Waters] came in with the idea of its central themes of how the pressures of modern life can affect your sanity, it started taking a shape from there on I would say... But that feeling that that we were on to a real magical ‘something’ came a bit later down the line, I think.”

And it’s persisted ever since. The Dark Side of the Moon resided in the U.S. Billboard chart for 723 weeks, from 1973 to 1988, longer than any other album in history. And with an estimated 45 million copies sold, it’s Pink Floyd’s most commercially successful effort and one of the best-selling albums. But what has made it such an enduring success?

“My view,” said Floyd drummer Nick Mason in his autobiography, Inside Out, “is that there was no single reason, but a number of factors working together and multiplying the effect.” Most notably, he writes, “The musical quality spearheaded by David’s guitar and voice and Rick [Wright]’s keyboards established a fundamental Pink Floyd sound.”

Indeed, with The Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd finally found their unique voice. It was their eureka moment. Since 1968, they had been slowly rebuilding a career left in tatters following the departure of their errant leader Syd Barrett. At the time, Pink Floyd were primarily a live experience, and the band had a long-standing history of testing and refining newly written material on the road prior to recording it.

The problem, however, lay in the group’s live repertoire – or rather the lack of it. They’d been on a virtually non-stop tour since 1967, playing every pub, club, university and town hall that would have them, and slotting in recording sessions when they could. In those days, Gilmour recalls, “tours got booked in, and back then they weren’t promotional vehicles.”

While the band were not exactly idle when it came to recording, turning out the regulation one album per year, most of the songs on their studio recordings didn’t lend themselves to the live environment. As a result, they were still filling up their set with their ’60s “hits”: “A Saucerful of Secrets,” “Astronomy Dominé,” “Careful With That Axe, Eugene” and “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun.”

Panicked into writing new material for an already announced U.K. tour commencing in January 1972, the band began discussing ideas for something new toward the end of 1971 at a meeting in the usual venue of Mason’s kitchen. This was then followed by a period of writing at a rehearsal space in Broadhurst Gardens, in West London.

Waters, the main driver behind the project, began furiously writing lyrics. It was he who came up with the idea of addressing things that drive people mad, as well as a way to link in some unfinished and unused studio pieces. The album would focus on the enormous pressures the band itself was experiencing on the road: the strains of travel, the problems of living abroad for great stretches of time, and coping with money. It would also explore violence, social problems and the comforts of religion.

This last theme was no doubt prompted by their recent tours through middle America. Lyrically, the songs were Waters’ most profound and focused efforts to date, and for the first time he dominated the creative input, conveying a vision all his own.

But Gilmour says Waters’ growing lyric-writing talents had a downside. “My problem with Dark Side – and I’ve said it before and I’ll no doubt say it again – was that I thought that Roger’s emergence on that album as a great lyric writer was such that he came to overshadow the music in places, and there were moments when we didn’t concentrate as hard on the music side of it as we should have done – which is what I voiced to all the band after the making of Dark Side. That was absorbed into an effort to try to make the balance between music and the words a better one on Wish You Were Here.”

Regardless, both onstage and on record, the music on The Dark Side of the Moon would propel Pink Floyd into the superstar league. For Waters, it boosted his confidence as a writer – his skills clearly outstripped anything the others could achieve – and he became the self-appointed lyricist of the band.

The tour was also the first time Pink Floyd had taken an entire album on the road, and although they were used to previewing material before recording it, The Dark Side of the Moon was a piece that was vastly improved and refined as a result of the decision to tour with it first. Live, the songs were performed in the same order as they would appear on the finished album, although the early shows were without synthesizers.

Despite first-night hitches at the Brighton Dome show on January 20, 1972 – caused by an electrical fault that knocked out the tape playback at the start of “Money” – and a total power failure in Manchester, the tour was acclaimed, even if its message was not fully comprehended by the public.

Proving the value of roadwork, Waters came up with the lyrics for the concluding “Brain Damage”/”Eclipse” sequence in time for the show in Leicester on February 10, eight dates into the tour. “The piece felt unfinished to me when we were doing it on the road,” he later said. “I came in one day and said, ‘Here, I’ve just written the ending and this is it.’”

The pivotal performance on the tour was undoubtedly at the Rainbow in London in mid February, where the world’s press sat in attendance to witness The Dark Side of the Moon in all its well-rehearsed glory. In a series of presentations, and despite some rather stilted performances, Pink Floyd’s work was heralded as a triumph of the imagination.

For the first time, they received critical acclaim throughout the national press. Programs distributed at the show also included the by now complete lyrics for the work (but not the song titles) under the heading An Assorted Piece for Lunatics. “It was a hell of a good way to develop a record,” Mason recalled. “You really get familiar with it; you learn the pieces you like and what you don’t like.”

Yet even then, the Dark Side of the Moon album was not top priority for Pink Floyd. French film director Barbet Schroeder invited them to write music for La Vallée, his film about a young woman’s spiritual awakening in Papua New Guinea. In two one-week sessions – one before and one after a tour of Japan that March – the band composed and recorded the entire work at Strawberry Studios in the Chateau d’Hérouville near Paris (known as the Honky Chateau, thanks to Elton John). It was released as an album in June with the name Obscured by Clouds.

Finally, with that project complete, Pink Floyd returned to Abbey Road Studios at the end of May to get down to the serious business of recording The Dark Side of the Moon.

In Nicholas Schaffner’s excellent Pink Floyd biography, Saucerful of Secrets, he describes how, during the band’s last tours, conversations among the side musicians would inevitably focus on David Gilmour’s musical brilliance and inspirational presence as a bandleader. It’s not surprising. Despite being a member of one of the most popular bands of all time, Gilmour is a musician’s musician, admired by peers and devotees for his melodic mastery as a guitarist and vocalist and his willingness to craft parts that flawlessly dovetail with the entire arrangement.

It’s also no surprise then that Gilmour’s searing emotive lead break on “Comfortably Numb,” from 1979’s The Wall, was recently voted the greatest guitar solo of all-time by Guitar Player readers, who were likely entranced by its sublimation of technique into sheer lyrical beauty.

Noted Pink Floyd touring saxophonist Scott Page, “To me [he] is the master of melody. He can kill you with two little notes.”

In honor of the 50th anniversary of The Dark Side of the Moon, let’s examine Gilmour’s playing approach on this groundbreaking record.

Ex. 1 recalls the languid ii - V (or i - IV) Dorian progression arpeggios, Em - A7, on the track “Breathe,” which opens the album. Notice the added color tones, like 7ths and 9ths, and the sliding-6ths fill in bar 4.

I’ve changed the original Fmaj7 - G - D7#9 - D7 b9 turnaround (something Pink Floyd keyboardist Richard Wright said was inspired by the turnaround in Miles Davis’s “All Blues”) to a B bmaj7 - B7#9 progression and switched the original meter from 44 to 128.

Kick on a Uni-Vibe pedal with wide depth and slow speed and you should be able to catch the vibe of the original.

Before committing The Dark Side of the Moon to vinyl, Pink Floyd performed the suite of songs live numerous times, during which they experimented with various arrangements. What would become “On the Run” started as an improvised piece on an E tonality called “The Travel Sequence.”

Ex. 2 is based on some of the elements found in these live jams.

Gilmour was often experimenting with delay regeneration from a Binson Echorec unit. You can achieve a similar effect with a tape-head delay modeler, with the delay time set to produce a quarter-note rhythm, relative to the tempo, which is approximately 150 beats per minute; 400 milliseconds should get you close. Set the dry/wet mix to about 60/40, with two or three repeats.

When it came time to record their grand epic, the Floydians replaced “The Travel Sequence” with an eight-note E minor pentatonic pattern that they fed into an EMS Synthi A synthesizer, sped up considerably and repeated for several minutes.

Atop this, the band overdubbed sound effects, recordings and tape loops, including one of Gilmour scraping his guitar neck against a mic stand.

Ex. 3 reimagines “On the Run” as a 16-note pentatonic pattern that can be used as an exercise for both pick-hand and fret-hand phrasing technique. It also serves as a reminder that, as a musician, editing your playing and/or laying out completely is sometimes the best choice.

Despite its conceptual and sonically adventurous nature, something about The Dark Side of the Moon resonated with a large portion of the music listening public. Perhaps one of the most relatable things about it was Gilmour’s clever use of traditional blues phrasing and scales in his guitar solos.

Ex. 4 is based loosely on the i - iv - v minor blues breakdown in the song “Money,” moved from the original key of B minor to A minor.

Bars 1–8 trace their origins to variations of a B.B. King-influenced call-and-response lick.

Bars 9–16 tastefully nail the root notes of the changes before segueing into some funky double-stop stabs.

Another showcase for Gilmour’s elegant improvisational skills, the instrumental “Any Colour You Like” provides the basis for Ex. 5.

The original recapitulates the Em - A7 chord progression of “Breathe,” down a whole step, in D minor. Here, I’ve kept the same key and 12 8 meter of Ex. 1.

Reference the recorded version to get a sense for how Gilmour’s precise deployment of unison bends and R&B-style double-stops are the perfect foil to Wright’s phantasmagoric layers of synthesizer.

Try adding a rotary speaker or Uni-Vibe effect to simulate Gilmour’s psychedelic Strat tone.

Ex.6 is modeled on the hypnotic Travis-picked fingerstyle arpeggios in “Brain Damage,” which was originally conceived by Roger Waters as a folky acoustic ballad.

I’ve moved it down from the original key of D to A but kept the I - V7 progression (G to D7/F#) – with the b7 of the chord in the highest voice, which provides the album version with its dark “verge of madness” undercurrent – and the I to II/I (A to B/A) sequence, which offers an ethereal lift.

Again, try employing a rotary speaker or Uni-Vibe effect, in this case faster and somewhat more subtle than on previous examples, to emulate the original’s sonic landscape.

Fifty years on, The Dark Side of the Moon is considered one of rock’s most brilliant and groundbreaking works. What is most compelling about Gilmour’s contributions is not technical flash or daring improvisational forays but rather the pristine perfection of his note and tonal choices.

Perhaps the best testimony to his overall impact comes from vocalist Clare Torry, who ad-libbed the wordless vocal improvisation on the track that would become “The Great Gig in the Sky.” Although Gilmour had nothing to do with the song’s composition and only contributed atmospheric lap-steel washes to the recording, Torry claims his direction and encouragement was most influential in conceptualizing and executing her iconic vocal performance.

David Gilmour is a brilliant guitarist, but beyond that he is indeed a master of melody.

On the 50th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s breakthrough magnum opus, The Dark Side of the Moon, we go behind the music with Gilmour, Roger Waters and engineer Alan Parsons, all of whom deliver insights into the album’s history, from its inception as a stage presentation to its creation in the studio. We dig deep into Gilmour’s rig to reveal all the gear he used on the album, as well as tell the story behind every song.

Plus, Guitar Player gets up close with Gilmour’s iconic Black Strat as we detail every modification he’s known to have made to the guitar featured on albums like The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall. 

And we take a deep exploration into the guitarist’s Dark Side-era tone and technique by exploring passages from key songs, complete with examples featuring transcripts and audio.

This issue also includes a brand-new career retrospective interview with Harvey Mandel. The Sustain King discusses everything from his first solo album, Cristo Redentor, to his latest, Who’s Calling.

Then, we catch up Neil Giraldo, who talks about his career – from Derringer to Pat Benatar and beyond – and his recent Rock Hall induction. 

We also have an in-depth conversation with Jonny Polonsky, who tells how a few homemade cassettes – and a penchant for chasing his dream – led him to record on albums by Johnny Cash, Neil Diamond and Donovan. Polonsky is back in action with his latest solo effort, Rise of the Rebel Angels.

You’ll also find Steve Morse sharing his five weirdest guitar tips in our monthly Tip Sheet, plus interviews with Angela Petrilli and Dawes guitarist Taylor Goldsmith. 

And in our ever-popular How I Wrote feature, we tell the story behind the 1970s MOR pop tune that was an unlikely favorite of former Beatle John Lennon as Little River Band guitarist Graeham Goble talks about the group’s hit "Reminiscing.”

All this, plus reviews of the Reverend Pete Anderson Eastsider Custom and Rick Vito Soul Agent, Erica Synths Zen Delay Virtual, the Boss Katana-50 MkII EX, Vertex Effects Boost MK II + Volume/Expression pedal, and Kiss My Strings JAM Offset and Telecaster Bridges.

Click here to order.

Most guitarists who have plugged into a whirling, sound-warping, Doppler effect-inducing Fender Vibratone can recall the major impression that playing through a rotary-speaker cabinet made on them. It’s unlikely any compact electronic rendition of the effect will fully satisfy them.

The occasionally crosspollinated worlds of vibrato and chorus have been immensely popular with guitarists in their many forms since they first became available. From the late-’60s Univox Uni-Vibe to the mid-’70s Boss CE-1 Chorus Ensemble and today’s contemporary re-creations of those and other beloved analog pedals, each is an electric guitar classic in its own right.

But the trail begins with the granddaddy of them all: the Fender Vibratone. Produced from 1967 to 1972, it’s a hulking electromechanical sound swirler that produced what is still the most hypnotic and enveloping version of this effect.

Fender licensed the Vibratone from an original rotary-speaker design by inventor Don Leslie, who introduced his rotary-speaker cabinet for use with Hammond organs in the 1940s. The most popular of these units were formidable beasts that contained their own power amplifiers as well as two different types of rotary speakers.

That trenchant swirl you hear from a great Hammond player like Jimmy Smith, Booker T. Jones, the Heartbreakers’ Benmont Tench and the E Street Band’s Danny Fenderici is most often the result of a big Leslie Model 122, 142 or 147.

Aptly called Tone Cabinets, these beasts weighed upward of 150 pounds, were housed in louvered wood cabinets, and included a built-in tube amp, a 15-inch woofer firing downward into a ported rotating drum, and a dual-horn tweeter that spins on a horizontal plane. (One of the horns is a dummy that simply acts as a counterweight to its partner to maintain balance.)

A crossover splits the lower and higher frequencies between the woofer and horn, respectively, and both the drum rotor and horn spin, speed up and slow down at different rates, creating a veritable maelstrom of sound when the drum and horn are spinning at full tilt.

Standing in a room or onstage amid such a storm of sound can be a heady experience. Indeed, play through a Leslie and you’ll discover why many guitarists will never settle for anything less than the sound of a true rotary-speaker cabinet.

While guitarists have lusted after the rotary-speaker effect virtually since its incarnation, and occasionally adapted Leslies for use with the six-string, these cabinets really weren’t well suited to the instrument. Aside from being huge and monstrously heavy, the contribution of the upper tweeter section was often regarded as less than ideal for reproducing the guitar’s frequency range, and the built-in amp was seen as redundant, since most guitarists were already plugged into standard amps that they liked. What’s more, the Leslie cabinet took its power through a cable connected to the organ, making the adaptation of one for guitar a particularly complicated endeavor.

As it happened, the Fender Vibratone was based on the somewhat smaller, black Tolex-covered Leslie Model 16, which required the use of an external amplifier and contained only a single 10-inch speaker firing forward into a rotating 15-inch foam drum, which threw the sound out through ports in the sides and top of the cab. The result was a sound that lived in the guitar’s midrange band and emanated via a more portable and user-friendly unit.

Like the Model 16, the Vibratone included a devoted cable set and interface/crossover, which connects between the speaker output of a traditional guitar amp and the rotary cabinet. This was equipped with a two-button foot switch for changing between the cab’s slow (chorale) and fast (tremolo ) speeds, and switching your amp’s signal between its internal speaker and the Vibratone speaker.

Introduced at the height of the psychedelic-rock movement, the Vibratone was one of several popular effects that helped bring acid-tinged sonics to many prominent recordings.

Jimi Hendrix tapped one for “Little Wing” and “House Burning Down,” and the Byrds, Cream, Pink Floyd, Todd Rundgren and scads of other artists all dove in, too. 

Later, Stevie Ray Vaughan famously broke out a Vibratone for several songs on his album Couldn’t Stand the Weather, the title track included, although it’s relatively low in the mix and he doesn’t appear to have found the speed switch.

If you’re looking to acquire the real thing for use today, be sure it’s in good mechanical condition and has a fully functioning foot switch and interface. And make sure that you’re prepared to haul around a 70-pound, 29 x 21 x 15-inch box in an age where such things are no longer considered compact and portable.

Alternatively, try to forget that addictive, unreproducible, in-the-room sound and make do with a modern Uni-Vibe clone – which, of course, is why the Uni-Vibe was invented in the first place – or Fender’s Pinwheel rotary-speaker pedal, which features three different rotary-speaker emulations, including the Vibratone.

Essential Ingredients

• Ported rotating drum
• 10-inch speaker
• Chorale (slow) and tremolo (fast) speeds
• Cable set and interface between amp and cab
• Two-button foot switch

Throughout the course of his long career, Jeff Beck collaborated with a vast array of artists.

Diverse, dynamic and in-demand, the number of fellow musicians he teamed up with is astounding.

The following list of classic moments captured on tape could easily be expanded without compromising on quality.

From Jon Bon Jovi and Roger Waters to Ozzy Osbourne and Kate Bush, here are 10 of Beck’s greatest studio collaborations…

1. “Blaze of Glory” by Jon Bon Jovi from ‘Young Guns II’ (1990)

“Blaze of Glory” was written by Jon Bon Jovi in response to a request from actor Emilio Estevez who had originally hoped to use the Bon Jovi classic “Wanted Dead Or Alive” for the Young Guns II soundtrack.

The similarity in feel between the two songs is no accident, but the crucial added ingredient to the mix is Beck’s blistering, iconic solo.

Utilizing his matchless whammy bar technique and volume swells, he opens up the solo with lines that mimic the sound of slide guitar. But it soon becomes clear there is so much more going on as Beck builds in intensity, taking the song to another level while unleashing the kind of fretboard pyrotechnics only he could deliver.

One of Beck’s most celebrated collaborations, it is unsurprising that countless YouTube videos explore exactly how Beck played the piece.

As is often the case, seeing how it’s done may remove some of the mystery, but the genius is in the conception as much as the execution. No one approached a song with the left-field slant that Beck brought to everything he worked on.

2. "Look Out Mabel" by Big Town Playboys from ‘Roll the Dice’ (2004)

Beck was always a huge fan of rock and roll and rockabilly. In fact, he devoted an entire album to Cliff Gallup’s pioneering guitar work with Gene Vincent in the form of 1993’s Crazy Legs.

In order to authentically recreate the tones of Gallup, Beck turned to a DeArmond Model 2000/Dynasonic-loaded 1956 Gretsch Duo Jet, eschewing the Strat with which he’d become synonymous.

The Big Town Playboys helped Beck recreate the timeless genius of Gallup and Vincent on the album, and he later reunited with the group for 2004’s Roll the Dice.

Amongst a slew of great guests on the record, this particular track saw Beck team up with fellow ‘50s rock and roll devotee Robert Plant.

The song they took on was a cover of a single originally released in 1958 by G.L. Crockett on the Checker label. Long revered as a lost classic of the genre, it was the perfect vehicle for Beck to flex his rockabilly chops.

For a full 24 bars, Beck slips and slides into flurries of pull-offs and glissandos to deliver a knockout solo that bridges the gap between vintage rockabilly and modern rock.

3. “Hello Jeff” by Stanley Clarke from ‘Journey to Love’ (1975)

Beck collaborated with Stanley Clarke many times throughout his career, both in the studio and on stage. In 1975, Beck released his best-selling solo album, Blow by Blow, and recorded this track with Clarke the same year.

Clarke’s genius and vision along with his ability to redraw the parameters of what the bass guitar could do paralleled Beck’s own astoundingly innovative approach to the electric guitar.

The fusion of two intensely creative mavericks was bound to deliver something unique and “Hello Jeff” did not disappoint.

The opening theme rapidly gives way to Clarke’s instantly recognizable bass before Beck re-enters to play a relatively simple hook, lulling the listener into a false sense of calm. The guitarist then unleashes a cascade of blazing licks – each one a masterclass in delivering the unexpected.

Every time you think you know how a line is going to end, Beck confounds your wildest expectations by finding the outside notes that somehow just work.

Even when referencing the standard licks in every guitarist’s trick bag, he manages to extract something astonishing from the fretboard.

4. “I Just Want To Make Love To You” by Paul Rodgers from ‘Muddy Water Blues: A Tribute to Muddy Waters’ (1993)

Given Beck’s dynamically expressive approach it is perhaps a shame that he didn’t play more of the straight-ahead gutbucket blues he rips out on this track from Paul Rodgers’ 1993 all-star project.

The tone on the opening few riffs instantly focuses the listener’s attention. The raw, nasty, down-and-dirty edge Beck brings creates a perfect counterpoint for Rodgers’ muscular blues-wailing vocal.

From there, things only get more intense as singer and guitarist push each other to deliver some of the deepest blues recorded by either.

For the solo, Beck opens with a curveball of deep, growling bass licks – instantly wrongfooting the listener as he builds on a handful of perfectly chosen notes delivered with extraordinary finesse. Halfway through, Rodgers joins Beck as they ratchet up the urgency to breaking point.

The mark of a true artist is knowing when not to play – when to sit on a note and extract the maximum juice. And Beck’s solo on this track is the epitome of such an approach.

Here, Beck has nothing to prove – no need to shred a million notes a minute. For him, it’s all about the intensity of emotion.

5. “Amused to Death” by Roger Waters from ‘Amused to Death’ (1992)

According to Waters, Amused To Death completed a conceptual trilogy alongside Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall.

The bleak, mournful tone of the title track provided Beck with the perfect sonic soundscape to paint an extraordinarily soulful solo.

Having had David Gilmour – a master of the understated – by his side for the first of the two albums in the putative trilogy, Waters knew he’d need to bring a seriously heavy hitter to the show for the final piece of the puzzle.

And with Beck on board, Waters found perhaps the only guitarist who could effectively convey the message at the heart of his dystopian lament.

For over nine minutes, Beck picks precisely the right moments to interject with the subtlest of fills, each one finding a way to counterbalance the vocal line that preceded it.

Dispatched by Beck with apparent ease, the guitar work here is sparse; choice vignettes of meticulous precision that expand the reach and depth of the song with every note.

Manipulating harmonics with his whammy bar, Beck produces sounds that most guitarists would not suspect lurk within their own instruments.

6. “You’re the One” by Kate Bush from ‘The Red Shoes’ (1993)

On reflection, the pairing of Beck and Kate Bush seems like a no-brainer; Beck specializes in producing unearthly guitar tones and intensities of emotion that no other can equal, and the same could be said of Kate Bush’s unique voice.

She can move in an instant from the deepest of growls to the most sublime falsettos. Likewise, Beck possessed the ability to turn on a dime and take the listener to places never imagined.

A lament for loss, “You’re the One” was written by Bush at a time she later revealed had been particularly tough on a personal level. She needed someone who could turn that pain into joy.

Enter Jeff Beck.

Played over the gospel-flavored keyboard of Procul Harum’s Gary Brooker, Beck’s guitar solo finds endless ways to twist, turn and manipulate the melody into a statement of salvation and hope. It rises, phoenix-like, from a world gone wrong.

As Bush’s vocal sears with raw pain, Beck’s guitar solo brings a gentle, restorative calm.

As was so often the case, it is his ability to speak volumes with a handful of notes that brings the song home on an optimistic note.

7. “A Thousand Shades” by Ozzy Osbourne from ‘Patient Number 9’ (2022)

Beck’s most recent work on this list, his playing here is as fresh and unexpectedly disarming as anything he ever recorded.

Ozzy has worked with some true legends of guitar – all of whom would happily defer to Beck as the master.

Taken at a slower pace than many of Osbourne’s songs, there is a hint of Beatles-esque melancholia about this track (unsurprising given Ozzy’s oft-stated love of the Fab Four.)

Beck’s guitar asserts itself from the moment it appears, instantly transforming a standard mid-paced rocker into something transcendental.

The solo finds ways to continue ascending with quirky phrasing and virtuosic whammy bar moves. This utterly unique take on melodic invention enables Beck to find nuances in the song that Osbourne surely could not have conceived of.

Beck and Ozzy were both well into their 70s when this track was recorded; proof, if ever it were needed, that rock music is the elixir of youth. There is no trace of the miles on the clock in Osbourne’s voice or the insane energy that Beck imparts with every flurry of notes and unerringly precise flick of his vibrato arm.

8. “People Get Ready (feat. Rod Stewart)” from Jeff Beck’s ‘Flash’ (1985)

Rod Stewart and Beck's musical connection goes way back, with Stewart delivering vocals for the guitarist’s first two albums, Truth and Beck-Ola in 1968 and 1969, respectively.

During the ‘70s, Stewart became a household name as he shot to fame as a solo artist. And while the singer had expressed some unhappiness concerning the Jeff Beck Group early on, he later became much more positive about his time with the band.

Beck had spoken fondly of Stewart and his vocal prowess, thus the stage was set for some kind of musical rapprochement.

Having featured on Stewart’s 1984 LP Camouflage, Beck asked him to return the favor by appearing on his Flash album released the following year.

For Stewart’s collaboration, Beck had earmarked the gospel-like “People Get Ready” – a Billboard hit for the Impressions in 1965.

Written by Curtis Mayfield (no slouch on the guitar himself!) Beck took this stirring melody and rendered its every minute inflection with an almost absurdly light touch.

Beck was able to convey every nuance of Mayfield’s vocal before Stewart even got to sing a note. But when Stewart does enter the fray, he delivers one of the strongest performances in his catalog, and the half-step key change towards the end sets the seal on a truly uplifting tune.

9. “Love Is the Light” by Beverley Craven from ‘Love Scenes’ (1993)

Perhaps the most unlikely collaboration of Beck’s long career is this track with the somewhat maudlin, U.K.-based singer-songwriter, Beverley Craven.

Seemingly, the two artists have nothing whatsoever in common and it is appears unlikely their paths would ever have crossed – much less that Beck would play on one of her songs.

However, there was a connection.

Love Scenes, Craven’s second studio album, was produced by Paul Samwell-Smith, Beck’s former Yardbirds bandmate from way back in the ‘60s. He managed to rope Beck in to play on three tracks, the best of which, “Love Is the Light,” sees the guitarist deliver a solo that turns a fairly anonymous MOR piano ballad into a serious musical statement.

From the first note Beck plays, the outrageously supple fluidity of his technique elevates the song to a whole new level.

Beck’s guitar stands out clearly from the backing – indeed, it is perhaps one of the most exposed-sounding lead breaks in his collaborative catalog. Furthermore, it is arguably the most transformative a contribution he has made to a recording that would otherwise appear unremarkable.

10. “Can’t Start Over Again” by Dion from ‘Blues With Friends’ (2020)

On an album crammed full of astounding guitar players, including Billy Gibbons, Joe Bonamassa, Sonny Landreth and Brian Setzer, it is Beck who steals the show on Dion’s blues collaborations collection.

Dion himself attested to the importance of Beck’s contribution. “I’ll be honest, when Jeff Beck said yes, I think I knew anybody else would say yes to playing on the album,” he stated. “Like, okay, it’s bona fide, certified, y’know? That was important because Jeff is such a huge talent, and his presence has such a weight.”

Ironically, given the overall blues feel of the album, Beck’s contribution was to a song that had something of a Hank Williams feel about it. His guitar mimics the sound of a pedal steel at times and exudes intense emotion.

What he plays on the intro is amazing enough, but the solo appears extraordinary as Beck mixes chords, harmonics and microscopically accurate microtonal bends.

“Anything he plays is just mesmerizing,” agreed Dion. “He’s one of the greatest guitarists on the planet. We have a lot of great roots in common – he loves rock and roll. I saw him do a version of ‘People Get Ready’ at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame where he did about six choruses of solos and each one was amazing.

“He’s the only guitarist who can make me cry.”

On this day in 1996, Pink Floyd were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame by Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan.

“Pink Floyd are the ultimate rock and roll anomaly,” said Corgan during his speech. “They sold massive amounts of records, have always been a popular live band, and they were never a singles-driven band – a lesson forever needed to be learned in this particular business.”

“Everyone is different, everyone has a different approach to the music,” said co-founder Richard Wright (1943-2008) as he collected his award. “But we’ve all touched people, I hope, with our music. And that’s all we want to do.”

During his acceptance speech, keys player Wright expressed his gratitude for co-founder Syd Barrett (1946-2006) who led Pink Floyd following their inception in the mid-‘60s before a severe decline in the guitarist/singer’s mental health forced a parting of ways in 1968.

That evening, members of the band along with Corgan performed a poignant rendition of the David Gilmour/Roger Waters-penned Pink Floyd classic “Wish You Were Here.”

While absence is the theme of the Wish You Were Here album, the title track’s lyrics are open to personal interpretation (“It’s a big hit at funerals” Gilmour told filmmaker John Edgington.)

However, in the 2012 documentary Pink Floyd: The Story of Wish You Were Here, Gilmour maintains that he “can't sing it without thinking about Syd."

In the wake of the dizzying global success of 1973’s The Dark Side of the Moon album, Pink Floyd began recording its follow-up, Wish You Were Here, in 1975 amidst confusion and bewilderment.

“We were clueless for a long time,” Gilmour told Paul Rappaport. “We were faffing about blindly trying to find a way forward. That sort of ‘blindly wandering about not knowing what the fuck we were doing’ was what helped to create what came: with [the Barrett tribute] “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” and the whole of that Wish You Were Here album.”

The opening guitar part on “Wish You Were Here” was recorded using a 1971 Martin D-28-12 Gilmour bought second-hand. Strumming this newly acquired acoustic guitar in the control room of Abbey Road’s Studio 3 he suddenly hit on the now iconic riff.

Speaking of the AM radio-style effect used on the recording, Gilmour revealed their vision was to create the sound of a guitar playing on the radio while the listener joined in with a second acoustic.

This lead part was played on Gilmour’s once-treasured 1969 Martin D-35 – an instrument he identified during a 2003 Guitar Player interview as being the guitar with the most songs attached to it.

Nevertheless, during his epic 2019 charity auction at Christie’s in New York, Gilmour’s D-35 and D-28-12 were sold for a massive $1,095,000 and $531,000, respectively.

Following the sales, Gilmour collaborated with Martin on a pair of signature flat-tops inspired by these legendary acoustics, the Martin D-35 David Gilmour and Martin D-35 David Gilmour Twelve String.

Syd Barrett picked up the guitar during the skiffle boom before falling under the spell of the blues. 

In the mid-1960s, he named his combo the Pink Floyd after American bluesmen Pink Anderson and Floyd Council.

The group might have continued in that vein if Barrett hadn’t begun dropping acid regularly, opening his mind to a host of new avenues of musical exploration.

By April 1966, months before Hendrix arrived in London, Pink Floyd were performing an extended jam called “Interstellar Overdrive,” on which Barrett created searing swells of echo by sliding his Zippo lighter over the strings of a Danelectro or Fender Esquire electric guitar, which he plugged into a Binson Echorec.

The group's wild improvisations made them the flagship for London’s psychedelic rock scene, but their momentum was short-lived.

Following a disastrous tour of America in 1968, Barrett eventually drifted away from the band, an early acid casualty.

Working solo, in 1970 he released The Madcap Laughs and Barrett, a pair of largely acoustic guitar albums filled with whimsical and charmingly eccentric tunes that proved influential to future psychedelic purveyors.

Sadly, his continued mental deterioration led him to retire from music and become a recluse.

“All I ever wanted to do as a kid was play guitar properly and jump around,” he told Rolling Stone in 1971, “but too many people got in the way.”

Last month, Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast where he told the tragic story of Barrett.

“Syd went crazy in 1967,” remembers Waters. “By ’69, we weren’t seeing him anymore; he’d disappeared completely.”

Barrett’s singular brand of quintessentially English eccentricity fed directly into his songs. Writing outré lyrics with odd meters, his compositions were integral to the identity of Pink Floyd. 

Naturally, Barrett's condition called into question the future of the entire band.

“How could we possibly survive?” says Waters. “If the guy who writes the songs in the band goes crazy, you’re fucked, basically.

“Unless somebody else starts to write. Luckily, I did.”

Watch this insightful interview clip here…

Browse the Syd Barrett catalog here.

Browse the Pink Floyd catalog here.

Bill Hall has been a dedicated Guitar Player reader for decades. Picking up the guitar at the age of ten he quickly fell in love with the instrument and was playing in bands and teaching by the time he was a teenager.

Drawing inspiration across a broad range of genres, Hall skilfully blends myriad styles from rock, jazz and blues to Spanish, classical and beyond.  

Performing unique cover versions with a nylon string acoustic guitar, his virtuosic arrangements have seen him win numerous guitar competitions over the years while a new album of original material, Shadows On Empty Spaces, appeared last year.

"I love playing now as much as I did when I first started...even more so!" Hall tells us. "I am a real fan of music and have many different influences."

Hall's passion for playing and sharing music is palpable. And as this recent Facebook post shows, his solo performances attract thousands of listeners from music lovers the world over.

In this mesmerizing live performance, Hall is using a Breedlove acoustic-electric guitar.

Speaking of his new acoustic album, Shadows On Empty Spaces, Hall says, “I recorded it all during the pandemic, so it has a really introspective feel. And it’s all guitar – no other instruments – and just two tracks: one guitar part on one side; the other guitar part on the other side.

“I’m doing all the stuff I love. All my influences come out from Ritchie Blackmore to Yngwie to Al Di Meola to John McLaughlin, Vinnie Moore…All that stuff is in there.

“I also mix in world influences; there’s some Spanish and flamenco…Some middle eastern-sounding stuff. I’m just a huge fan of so many different styles. I blended them all together on this album and I think it turned out really nice.”

For a great example of Hall's incredible technique check out this acoustic rendition of Pink Floyd's "The Great Gig in the Sky" from their landmark 1973 studio album The Dark Side of the Moon.

Hall performs the piece using a Breedlove Pursuit model. 

With a price tag well below a grand, Breedlove says these guitars are, "The perfect professional grade instrument for players looking for an all-in-one guitar that can stand out and carry the rhythm or be soft, sweet and nuanced when played fingerstyle."

Pink Floyd have today released 'Hey Hey Rise Up', the first new original music that they have recorded together as a band since 1994’s The Division Bell.

And it is very new. The song was recorded just last Wednesday, 30th March 2022.

'Hey Hey Rise Up' sees David Gilmour and Nick Mason joined by long time Pink Floyd bass player Guy Pratt, award-winning multi-instrumentalist, composer and producer Nitin Sawhney on keyboards, with vocals by Andriy Khlyvnyuk of the Ukrainian band BoomBox.

The surprise release was inspired by an Instagram post of Andriy Khlyvnyuk singing in Kyiv’s Sofiyskaya Square from 27th February, three days after the Russian invasion began. The singer had left an American tour with BoomBox,  and had gone back to Ukraine to join up with the Territorial Defense army.

By the time Gilmour wrote the music for the track, Khlyvnyuk was in hospital in Kyiv, with a mortar shrapnel wound.

The song takes Khlyvnyuk's vocal directly from his Instagram video. And fans of David Gilmour's playing are in for a treat: the guitar solo starts at 1:22 and continues for around a minute and a half. 

Gilmour has a Ukrainian daughter-in-law and grandchildren. “We, like so many, have been feeling the fury and the frustration of this vile act of an independent, peaceful democratic country being invaded and having its people murdered by one of the world's major powers,” he commented.

“In 2015, I played a show at Koko in London in support of the Belarus Free Theatre, whose members have been imprisoned. Pussy Riot and the Ukrainian band, Boombox, were also on the bill. They were supposed to do their own set, but their singer Andriy had visa problems, so the rest of the band backed me for my set – we played Wish You Were Here for Andriy that night. 

"Recently I read that Andriy had left his American tour with Boombox, had gone back to Ukraine, and joined up with the Territorial Defense. Then I saw this incredible video on Instagram, where he stands in a square in Kyiv with this beautiful gold-domed church and sings in the silence of a city with no traffic or background noise because of the war. It was a powerful moment that made me want to put it to music.”

In his post, and on 'Hey Hey Rise Up', Khlyvnyuk is singing ‘The Red Viburnum In The Meadow’, a Ukrainian protest song from the first world war, recently adopted as a anthem of protest against the invasion of Ukraine. The title of the Pink Floyd track is taken from the last line of the song which translates as ‘Hey Hey Rise up and rejoice’.

Gilmour spoke to the singer in hospital and explained the collaboration that he was proposing. “I played him a little bit of the song down the phone line and he gave me his blessing. We both hope to do something together in person in the future.”
 
“I hope it will receive wide support and publicity," says Gilmour. "We want to raise funds for humanitarian charities, and raise morale. We want express our support for Ukraine and in that way, show that most of the world thinks that it is totally wrong for a superpower to invade the independent democratic country that Ukraine has become.”

The single's artwork features a painting of the national flower of Ukraine, the sunflower. It is, says the band's PR "a direct reference to the woman who was seen around the world giving sunflower seeds to Russian soldiers and telling them to carry them in their pockets so that when they die, sunflowers will grow."

'Hey Hey Rise Up' will be available at midnight tomorrow, April 8, on all streaming services. Starting then, you can listen to the song on Pink Floyd's website.
 

Joe Bonamassa has released an animated music video accompanying the new single from his latest album, Time Clocks. 

“Mind’s Eye” is the sixth track on the blues-rock titan’s critically acclaimed LP that appeared in October last year, and this retro-inspired film certainly lives up to the track title.

Paying homage to ‘70s-style prog rock themes and the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, viewers are transported on a psychedelic journey that moves through scenes of space juxtaposed with a plethora of flora and fauna, before being immersed in a lysergic seascape.

Among the surreal imagery in this trippy collage, viewers will be delighted to observe a Strat-toting, pipe-smoking seafarer straddling a cod.

“Joe wanted this video to emulate the great prog rock videos of the past using cool custom illustrations and psychedelic scenes,” commented Roy Weisman, CEO of Bonamassa's J&R Adventures label.

“The song has a very Pink Floyd feel so the video needed to step up and meet that unique vibe. The whole Time Clocks record is about a journey and “Mind’s Eye” gives you a fun glimpse of what could be swimming around inside someone’s mind.”

Bonamassa is renowned for pushing the boat out and venturing into uncharted territory. He has continuously surprised fans with new music throughout an illustrious career that began as a 12-year-old electric guitar playing prodigy.

Representing his rawest, most hard-rocking long-player to date, Time Clocks showcases Bonamassa’s world class guitar skills and vocals in full. 

One of the most celebrated blues guitar players alive, this album sees Bonamassa “at a newfound peak.”

Buy Time Clocks here.

The genus of electric guitar-gear worship includes a significant subcategory that instantly defines a species of eternal classics that we can simply label “anything Jimi used.” 

Among the ever-iconic pedals canonized by Hendrix’s touch are the Fuzz Face, Vox Wah-Wah, Roger Mayer Octavia and – the last to land in the chain – the Univox Uni-Vibe.

Acquired by the legendary artist in 1969 approximately a year before his death, this effect appeared only on recordings and live performances made after that time, but those that employ it represent a notable evolution in Hendrix’s sound, and they likely inspired its use by the many other great guitarists who came along to help show the world what the Uni-Vibe can do.

New solid-state effects units were hitting the ground fast and hard in the late ’60s, and some stuck in the market while others faded relatively quickly into obscurity. Despite its emotive sonic capabilities, the Uni-Vibe might have been among the latter if not for a quick re-jig of the supply chain early on.

The circuit was designed by Japanese engineer Fumio Mieda in the latter part of the mid ’60s and first marketed in Japan around 1967 as the Honey Vibra Chorus.

With the implosion of the Honey company, the effect was taken up in 1968 by fellow Japanese manufacturer Shin-ei, with a modification added to include an external speed-control pedal. This is the unit supplied for distribution in the U.S. by Univox as the Uni-Vibe.

While it feels natural to call it a pedal, the Uni-Vibe was conceived as a desk-top unit for keyboards and includes no foot switch; the treadle-style external speed pedal cancels out the effect when placed in the heel-down position. In the truest sense, the Uni-Vibe represents the evolution of cumbersome electro-mechanical sound-effects devices into more compact, portable solid-state replications.

It was intended as a representation of the rhythmic, swirling, phasey sound of the Leslie rotary speaker that was not only hugely popular with the electronic organ but was also being used more and more with the electric guitar. Unfortuately, the oversized cabinets were a pain in the back to carry from show to show.

As is so often the case, Mieda’s attempt to squeeze the sound of a 140-pound box containing a revolving drum and tweeter horn into a desk-top unit didn’t hit the mark precisely. But it created an entirely new sound in the process, one that many players would prefer to the original, regardless of weight and portability.

The circuit inside the Uni-Vibe’s semi-wedge-shaped metal housing is, in fact, a four-stage phaser. Each stage contains a coupled light bulb and photocell and is tuned slightly differently so that a chorusing effect is produced as the oscillator sweeps the signal across them.

The unit’s Chorus/Vibrato switch let you select a blend of dry and wet signals (Chorus) or go fully wet (Vibrato) for a more throbbing and extreme effect.

Many early chorus pedals were attempts to produce an even more compact, efficient emulation of the Uni-Vibe. As such, the Uni-Vibe is clearly the first of the solid-state effects units that attempts to create a chorus sound, yet it remains a thing unto itself – more a phaser-meets-chorus than a proper member of the chorus pedal family.

The song “Machine Gun” from the 1970 live album Band of Gypsys is often cited as a premier example of Hendrix’s use of the Uni-Vibe, and indeed it’s a good one. But he also made excellent use of the effect on the various live and studio cuts of “Izabella,” and perhaps employed it to most dramatic impact in the Woodstock performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” in which the Uni-Vibe’s incessantly swooshing chorus helps cast a psychedelic haze over Hendrix’s sonic recreation of the death and destruction then raging in Vietnam.

David Gilmour displayed the Uni-Vibe’s ability to enhance dreamy soundscapes on Pink Floyd’s “Breathe,” from 1973’s The Dark Side of the Moon, and Robin Trower is invariably cited as another creative proponent of the effect, which is heard throughout his 1974 album, Bridge of Sighs.

The title track makes a good case for its emotive power, though “Too Rolling Stoned” and “Lady Love” also stand out. Trower, like Hendrix before him, also shows how well a fuzz pedal partners with the Uni-Vibe, pushing it into a chewy, textured, vocal snarl that helps to make the incessant swoosh a little less seasickness-inducing.

Original Shin-ei Uni-Vibes have become extremely collectible, and quite expensive, but several contemporary makers have rendered satisfying re-creations of the sound. The Jim Dunlop company now owns the Uni-Vibe trademark (along with the Jimi Hendrix and MXR trademarks), so competitors have to be creative with their otherwise telltale model names.

Fulltone’s Deja Vibe and Mini Deja Vibe, Sweet Sound’s Ultra Vibe and Mojo Vibe, and Roger Mayer’s Voodoo Vibe are all respected and longstanding renditions of the original sound, generally rendered in somewhat reconfigured formats.

Relatively high-end, boutique offerings such as the Sabbadius Woodstock Funky-Vibe and Funky-Vibe Fillmore East, and Shin-ei’s own Vibe-Bro aim at more thorough re-creations of both form and function, while Voodoo Lab’s Micro-Vibe, JHS’s Unicorn V2 Analog Uni-Vibe, Dunlop’s JHM Series Uni-Vibe and MXR’s M68 Uni-Vibe provide more affordable options that yield acclaimed sonic results.

Essential Ingredients

• Entirely analog solid-state circuit
• Four tuned lightbulb-and-photocell phaser stages
• Switch for chorus or vibrato
• Controls for volume and intensity
• External controller pedal for speed

In 1971, rock and roll guitar was barely in its teens. But, remarkably, what started as R&B- and western-swing-infused three-chord rave-ups had grown to incorporate elements of folk, Chicago blues, modal jazz, Indian classical music and flamenco. The music of the 1960s – especially that of the Beatles – proved that the pop charts could deliver expressive, high-quality artistry that rivaled that produced in jazz clubs and symphonic halls. The music of the time also became the de facto voice of one of the most significant cultural upheavals in American history.

As the new decade dawned, musicians were presented with a blank canvas on which they created what can rightfully be seen as the rock era’s belle époch. Indeed, many famous artists released their defining masterpieces during this fertile 12-month period.

Guitar Player has celebrated the 50th anniversary of this magic year with features on some of the greatest albums from 1971. Now, with it just about over, let’s have one final celebration of the albums, artists and guitarists that made the year so significant.

Power (Chords) to the People

The Who’s 1969 rock opera Tommy was an ambitious project that established them as major players, but it was 1971’s Who’s Next that is often considered their crowning achievement.

Ex. 1 is loosely based on the pugilistic power chords Pete Townshend delivers during epic anthems like “Baba O’Riley” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” The consummate rock rhythm player, Townshend didn’t merely “strum.” Rather, he attacked his strings with powerful percussive jabs, pioneering a style that would evolve into punk and metal in the hands of the next generation. When playing this example, try using a short, controlled wrist motion, striking the lowest strings with extra oompf! 

Going for Soul

A 2020 Rolling Stone poll cited Marvin Gaye’s 1971 release What’s Going On as the greatest album of all time, and though polls are subjective and art isn’t easily quantifiable, the album’s merit is unquestionable. Gaye’s emotive vocals and heartfelt lyrics are front and center on this song cycle about a Vietnam vet returning home to find his country in turmoil. However, the unsung heroes of this and many other great Motown releases are the Funk Brothers, a loose collection of studio musicians who played uncredited on dozens of hits.

Ex. 2 recalls guitarist Robert White’s pulsating chord work on the title track, a clever combination of jazz harmony and funk rhythm. To play the percussive “scratch” strums (indicated by Xs), simply loosen your fret-hand’s grip on the neck without taking your fingers off the strings. This will effectively mute the strings, so that, when strummed, they produce the hollow, pitchless “chick” sound that is a signature of funk guitar.

Sticking It to the '70s

The Rolling Stones were indisputably one of the most popular and influential musical acts of the ’60s. As the decade drew to a close, however, dark clouds seemed to be forming on the horizon. The band experienced the death of founding member Brian Jones and watched in horror as the Hells Angels security detail they hired for a 1969 concert at Altamont Speedway murdered one attendee and brutalized several others. 

They also sought to extricate themselves from management and recording contracts. Come 1971, the band returned with their own label, a new iconic tongue-and-lips logo, and arguably their finest record to date, Sticky Fingers.

Around this time, Keith Richards had fully embraced open-G tuning (low to high: D, G, D, G, B, D), and Ex. 3 takes inspiration from his clever riffage and chord voicings on such Stones classics as “Brown Sugar” and “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking.” 

Meeting of the Masters

Miles Davis was a pioneer of multiple styles of jazz, including bebop, cool, hard-bop, and modal jazz, and when he incorporated electronic instruments and rock beats on 1969’s Bitches Brew, jazz-rock fusion was born. 

Two years later, former Davis guitarist John McLaughlin formed the Mahavishnu Orchestra, a quintet that blended jazz harmony and improvisation, Indian classical scales and rock instrumentation into an incendiary mix. Their 1971 debut, The Inner Mounting Flame, was a hit with rock audiences and established them as the premier fusion band of their time.

Ex. 4 is modeled after “Meeting of the Spirits,” a track that begins with McLaughlin’s hauntingly exotic arpeggiated chords before exploding into an impassioned exploration around the Phrygian-dominant mode (1, b2, 3, 4, 5, 6, b7). 

Tapping Into English Moods

Without a doubt, 1971 was a landmark year for progressive rock, a style of music that drew heavily on European classical influences.

Ex. 5 is an homage to guitarist Steve Howe’s use of classical guitar techniques to enliven songs such as “Roundabout” and the solo piece “Mood for a Day” that were featured on Yes’s brilliant album Fragile.

Another significant prog release from 1971 was Genesis’s Nursery Cryme. Although not as well-known as Fragile, the record did herald the debut of Steve Hackett, a guitarist who employed fretboard tapping several years before Eddie Van Halen.

Ex. 6 recalls his approach on “Return of the Giant Hogweed,” but unlike Van Halen, Hackett would tap the strings with the edge of his pick instead of using a fingertip. 

A Case of the Blues

Although often labeled as a folk artist, Joni Mitchell drew inspiration from many sources. Throughout her storied career, the eclectic composer has melded elements of jazz, pop, blues, and electronica in with her songwriting and has collaborated with artists as varied as David Crosby, Charles Mingus and Pat Metheny. 

Mitchell often wrote and performed in a wide variety of open tunings, many of her own design, but for 1971’s Blue, her instrument of choice was often a four-string Appalachian dulcimer.

Because of variances in string thickness, it’s impossible to match the dulcimer’s tuning and timbre on a standard guitar, but for Ex. 7’s approximation of “A Case of You,” we tuned the top two strings down a whole step, to A and D, respectively, and the G string up a whole step to A, resulting in two unison A strings. This makes our tuning, low to high, E, A, D, A, A D.

If you stick to the top four strings, it evokes the droning unisons, octaves and 5ths associated with dulcimer tunings. Perhaps the larger lesson here is inspirational and not technical. Mitchell’s fearless artistic exploration and constant experimentation is a beautiful reminder to step outside of our comfort zones. 

My Back Pages

As 1971 dawned, Led Zeppelin – the supergroup that Jimmy Page had formed in the wake of the Yardbirds’ dissolution – was already in full flight, but it was their fourth album (generally referred to as Led Zeppelin IV, but officially named by the four cryptic symbols that adorned a sticker on the album’s wrapper) that would cement their legacy as the greatest hard rock band of all time.

Ex. 8 is inspired by the outro to “Black Dog” and demonstrates Page’s clever appropriation of country and blues licks to extend rock’s lead vocabulary beyond simple pentatonic scales. Centered on an A dominant-7 tonality, it makes effective use of b3, b5, and b7 color tones (the C, Eb, and G notes, respectively).

For our final example, we’ve chosen to template what is perhaps the most culturally iconic and controversial guitar lick from 1971; Page’s intro to “Stairway to Heaven.” Recent lawsuits have pointed out a similarity to Spirit’s 1969 track “Taurus,” but to our ears, both songs are based on a common musical trope – an A minor chord arpeggio with a bass note that descends down in half steps. Its use in rock music predates Spirit (Google: Ace of Cups “Simplicity” 1968). And, like a 12-bar blues shuffle, it’s arguably fair game when songwriting.

What makes Page’s take on this cliché stand out is his incorporation of contrary motion between the outer voices, with ascending notes on top pitted against descending bass notes. This is a cleverly appealing compositional move, which we’ve also used for Ex. 9.

Although we’ve covered several albums with an enduring legacy, we’ve barely scratched the surface of the major releases that turned 50 this past year. David Bowie’s Hunky Dory, the Allman Brothers’ At Fillmore East, Jethro Tull’s Aqualung, Pink Floyd’s Meddle, the Doors’ L.A. Woman, Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain, Black Sabbath’s Masters of Reality, Elton John’s Madman Across the Water, Janis Joplin’s Pearl, John Lennon’s Imagine, Van Morrison’s Tupelo Honey, George Harrison’s The Concert for Bangladesh, Rod Stewart’s Every Picture Tells a Story, and Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On are among the many great albums making a compelling case that 1971 was in fact the guitar’s – and modern music’s – greatest year.

In a surprise move, Pink Floyd have released a dozen live albums to streaming services.

Covering the period of 1970-1972 – during which the band released Atom Heart Mother (1970), Meddle (1971), and Obscured By Clouds (1972) – the albums were released without prior announcement, and feature similarly themed covers.

Recorded before the band went supernova with 1973's Dark Side of the Moon, the albums show the band finding their feet creatively after a couple of years of uneven sonic exploration following the firing of their original lead singer, songwriter, and guitarist, Syd Barrett, in 1968.

Intriguingly, one of the sets – Live, Lyon 12 June 1971, Tokyo 16 March 1972 – features early, jam-heavy performances of almost every track that would go on to appear on Dark Side of the Moon.

Now, before you get too excited, there is one drawback. The recordings certainly haven't been remastered, and are not of particularly good quality.

Given the unexpected and unpublicized nature of the releases, and their somewhat shoddy audio quality, some reports have suggested the albums surfaced as a means of copyright extension, and to prevent their falling into the public domain.

Boasting a tag of Pink Floyd Music Ltd. though, we can confirm that the live LPs are official.

The full list of live albums is as follows: 

They Came in Peace, Live, Leeds University 1970/Washington University 1971
Live at Grosser Saal, Musikhalle, Hamburg, West Germany 25 Feb 1971
Mauerspechte Berlin Sportpalast, Live 5 June 1971
Live, Lyon 12 June 1971, Tokyo 16 March 1972
Live in Rome Palaeur 20 June 1971
Amsterdamse Bos Free Concert 26 June 1971 (Live)
Live in Montreux 18 & 19 Sept 1971
KB Hallen, Copenhagen, Live 23 Sept 1971
KB Hallen, Copenhagen, Vol II, Live 23 Sept 1971
Over Bradford Pigs on the Groove Bradford University, Live 10 Oct 1971
Embryo, San Diego, Live 17 Oct 1971
The Screaming Abdabs Quebec City, Live 10 Nov 1971

The results of our 'Greatest Guitar Solos of All Time' online pole are in! In our latest issue we take a close look at all 50 of these stone-cold classics to find out what makes those lead breaks so great through conversations with Brian May, Kirk Hammett, Michael Schenker and others.

What constitutes a great solo is, of course, a thorny issue full of debate. Every solo is different and in many ways virtually incomparable to the next one. Still, opinion ebbs and flows and we were interested to hear what you the readers had to say.

Top of the pole stands David Gilmour’s “Comfortably Numb” solos, and that’s not a huge surprise. The question is, which of the song’s solos qualifies for inclusion? The fact that Gilmour came up with both on the same track is simply inspired.

In this clip from Gilmour’s Live at Pompeii recorded in 2016, the Pink Floyd guitarist wrings every inch of expression from his Black Strat. A good solo can have great tone, rhythms, melody or expression, but only a work of rare brilliance features them all to this degree.

Gilmour recorded the solos on “Comfortably Numb” (from Pink Floyd’s 1979 The Wall album) using his now legendary late ‘60s Fender Stratocaster aka the Black Strat. He continuously modified this electric guitar over the years and it is believed a DiMarzio FS-1 bridge pickup was installed at the time of the recording.

Combined with an Electro-Harmonix Ram’s Head Big Muff fuzz, a little goose from an MXR Dyna Comp, and the formidable Hiwatt DR103 amplifier Gilmour had so much sustain he could hold the notes as long as he wanted.

If you like the look of this iconic electric guitar then check out this special offer over at Guitar Center where you can instantly save $100 on this limited-edition maple neck black Fender Stratocaster.

Progressive rock’s most expressive lead guitarist, David Jon Gilmour was born in Cambridge, England, on March 6, 1946. Joining Pink Floyd in 1968, Gilmour would go on to lead the band to international success as one of the highest-selling groups in music history.

Here are five reasons Gilmour is a guitar legend…

1. Early Starter

As a youngster, he became interested in music after hearing early rock and roll hits by Bill Haley, Elvis Presley and the Everly Brothers. At age 13, he borrowed his neighbor’s guitar and never returned it, teaching himself to play using The Folksinger’s Guitar Guide, a lesson book and record by Pete Seeger. While in grammar school, he befriended future Pink Floyd founders Syd Barrett and Roger Waters.

2. Prog Rock Pioneer

In December 1967, Gilmour was invited to join Pink Floyd as guitarist and co-vocalist to help cover for the increasingly erratic Barrett, who would leave the following year. The band became one of prog-rock’s most influential and successful acts through albums like The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall. Following Waters’ departure in 1985, Gilmour led the band through three more studio albums before they broke up in 2014.

3. Signature Style

During this time, Gilmour became known for his distinctive lead guitar style, characterized by bluesy phrasing and expressive note bends. His main electric guitar was his legendary Black Strat, which he purchased at Manny’s in New York City in 1970 and modified frequently. His tone also relied on effects like the Binson Echorec delay, the Colorsound Power Boost, and rotary speakers by Leslie, Yamaha and Maestro.

4. Collaboration

In addition to releasing four acclaimed solo albums, including 2015’s Rattle That Lock, Gilmour helped Kate Bush get her career started and has worked with artists including Roy Harper, Jimmy Page and Paul McCartney.

5. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Gilmour was inducted with Pink Floyd into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996, and in 2003 was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).

Browse David Gilmour releases here.

This historic performance was filmed 50 years ago in the ancient Roman amphitheater of Pompeii, Italy. Built around 70 BC it’s hard to imagine one of today’s venues surviving well over 2,000 years (or indeed what kind of performances might take place in the fifth millennium!) Regardless, this timeless rendition of “Echoes” still sounds powerful today.

Performed in front of an audience of absolutely nobody (aside from crew), the bulk of the Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii concert footage was shot in October 1971. Released the same month, side two of Pink Floyd’s sixth studio album, Meddle¸ comprises solely of “Echoes” in its hypnotic twenty-three-and-a-half minutes entirety.

In addition to the Roman amphitheater’s naturally reverberant acoustics echoes were produced using Italian-made Binson Echorec 2 units. (As they say: When in Rome, do as the Romans do!) 

A favorite of Pink Floyd since the Syd Barrett era, Echorecs utilize a revolving magnetic drum rather than tape to produce delay effects.

Listen out for David Gilmour’s brilliant electric guitar solo that kicks in around 4:27. Here he makes great use of a Fuzz Face fitted with silicon BC108 transistors. These fuzzes produce a characteristically smooth yet gritty distortion sound. 

Though Gilmour previously enjoyed using a Fuzz Face fitted with the original-style germanium NKT275 transistors he switched to silicon in 1971. With more high-end gain silicon fuzzes tend to bite through a band mix more easily, hence germanium fuzzes are often described as ‘warmer’ sounding.

During the solo, Gilmour’s famous late ‘60s Fender Stratocaster known as the ‘Black Strat’ is clearly visible, albeit in a more original form. Over the years, Gilmour continuously modified this guitar. 

While the instrument retained a black (over Sunburst) finish the neck was changed on several occasions, the body was routed for a Kahler vibrato and XLR output, and the original pickups were replaced.

Originally released in 1972, Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii has seen numerous rereleases over the years. In 2017, David Gilmour released his Live at Pompeii album and film having revisited the location to perform the previous year – this time with an audience present.

Click here to buy Pink Floyd – Live at Pompeii (Director's Cut).

This week in 1967, Pink Floyd released their landmark debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Other monumental debuts that year include The Doors’ and The Grateful Dead’s eponymous long-players, along with Janis Joplin’s Big Brother & the Holding Company and Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced albums.

Politically and culturally, it was the dawn of a new era, with music taking center stage in the countercultural movement on both sides of the pond. And while psychedelic rock fueled the soundtrack to the Summer of Love, not everybody was on board.

In this 1967 clip from the BBC show The Look of The Week, presenter Hans Keller introduces Pink Floyd as “a bit boring” before grilling Syd Barrett and Roger Waters about their band’s use of loud guitar amps. “I want to ask one fundamental question: Why has it all got to be so terribly loud?” he enquires, bristling with irritation.

"For me, frankly, it’s too loud. I just can’t bear it. I happen to have grown up in the string quartet which is a bit softer,” says Keller, at which point Barrett and Waters share a knowing look.

“That’s the way we like it. And we didn’t grow up with a string quartet,” counters Waters. “I guess that could be one of the reasons why it is loud. It doesn’t sound terribly loud to us.”

“Yes. Actually, not everybody who hasn’t grown up in a string quartet turns into a loud pop group. So, your reason is not altogether convincing,” argues Keller.

Keller’s summary of Pink Floyd ends with more of a psychoanalytical diagnosis than an introduction to one of the world’s most influential rock bands. “My verdict is that it is a little bit of a regression to childhood,” he concludes. “But, after all, why not?”

Why not, indeed?

Get The Piper at the Gates of Dawn here.