The Guitar Plugged · Guitarist Index
David Gilmour
Pink Floyd
1967–present
Rock · Progressive · Blues
The master of the long note — space, sustain and perfect note choice.
Main guitar
1969 Fender Stratocaster ('The Black Strat')
Signature sound
Hiwatt clean headroom, Big Muff fuzz, delay and endless sustain
Era
1967–present
Influence
96 / 100
Genre
Rock / Progressive / Blues
Why they matter
The master of the long note — space, sustain and perfect note choice.
Gilmour built a career on the opposite instinct to most virtuosos: he plays slowly and lets notes finish. In a Pink Floyd arrangement — where space is the whole point — that restraint became the band's emotional centre.
His tone is a study in headroom. Hiwatt amplifiers set clean, with distortion supplied by pedals (Big Muff, Colorsound Power Boost, later a Tube Driver), then wrapped in analogue delay timed to the track. Because the amp stays clean, his fuzz remains articulate at extreme sustain instead of collapsing into fizz.
The bends are the fingerprint: enormous, slow, and always arriving exactly in tune, with vibrato that starts only after the target pitch is reached.
The sound
Hiwatt clean headroom, Big Muff fuzz, delay and endless sustain
Comfortably Numb (second solo)
Big Muff into clean Hiwatt headroom with long delay — sustain that never turns to mush, and bends that define the melody.
Shine On You Crazy Diamond
Four notes with enormous space around them; the tone is mostly compressor, clean amp and room.
Time (solo)
Slightly grittier, more aggressive fuzz with a Uni-Vibe shimmer underneath.
Money
Dry, snappy Strat bridge tone that cuts through a 7/4 groove without excess gain.
Recreate the sound
Want this tone on your rig?
ToneMD translates David Gilmour's sound into settings for the amp, modeler or plugin you already own.
Prescribe my tonePowered by ToneMD
Style & technique
How you recognise the playing
Slow, wide bends
Whole and multi-step bends played deliberately, with vibrato added at the top rather than during the bend.
Space as phrasing
Long silences between phrases, letting delay repeats and the band's ambience fill the gaps.
Lap steel and slide
Open-tuned lap steel used for the widescreen slide themes on 'One of These Days' and 'High Hopes'.
Compressed sustain
Compression plus fuzz plus clean amp headroom to make single notes hold for bars at a time.
The rig
Instruments, amplification and effects
- 1969 'Black Strat'
- 1954 Fender Stratocaster #0001
- Gibson Les Paul goldtop
- Jedson lap steel
- Martin D-35
- Hiwatt DR103 with WEM cabinets
- Fender Twin Reverb (studio)
- Alembic F-2B preamp
- Electro-Harmonix Big Muff
- Colorsound Power Boost
- Chandler / Binson Echorec and later MXR Digital Delay
- Uni-Vibe
- MXR Dyna Comp
- Fender single-coils; a Seymour Duncan SSL-5 in the Black Strat bridge
- Doppola rotating speakers
- Delay times matched to song tempo as a compositional device
Essential listening
Where to start
- 011973
Time
Pink Floyd · The Dark Side of the Moon
- 021973
Money
Pink Floyd · The Dark Side of the Moon
- 031975
Shine On You Crazy Diamond
Pink Floyd · Wish You Were Here
- 041979
Comfortably Numb
Pink Floyd · The Wall
- 051987
Sorrow
Pink Floyd · A Momentary Lapse of Reason
- 061994
High Hopes
Pink Floyd · The Division Bell
Career landmarks
The moments that mattered
'Comfortably Numb'
Routinely voted the greatest guitar solo ever recorded; assembled from multiple takes but performed live with equal conviction for forty years.
The Black Strat
A heavily modified 1969 Stratocaster that became one of the most documented guitars in history.
Live at Pompeii
An empty amphitheatre performance that showed how much of Pink Floyd's power came from restraint.
The legacy
Lineage
Influenced
Adjacent players
More from the archive
The player who turned amplifier noise into a musical language.
The virtuoso who rewrote the vocabulary of rock guitar.
Session-hardened producer who built rock guitar as an architecture, not a solo.
The player who translated Chicago blues into British rock volume.
The restless technician who kept reinventing what an electric guitar could be.
The Texas force of nature who dragged the blues back into the mainstream.