“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.”
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