David Gilmour has spoken about coming to terms with his lack of speed, echoing recent sentiments shared by Oasis guitarist Noel Gallagher that lightning-quick shredding isn’t necessarily the pinnacle of talent.
The Pink Floyd guitarist released his latest solo record, Luck and Strange, earlier this year, believing it to be his best body of work side The Dark Side of the Moon. It’s full of the slow and purposeful soloing he’d built his reputation on, and he’s revealed that his playing style was influenced by his limitations on the electric guitar.
“I wasn’t gifted with enormous speed on the guitar,” he says in a new interview with 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.”
Accepting he would never be an elite-level fretboard gymnast, he looked to more guitarists with musical voices, like The Shadows’ Stratocaster-loving Hank Marvin, for inspiration.
“Back in the ’60s, Hank was just playing a tune, I think I come from there,” he believes. “I just want to play a nice tune!”
His answer was prompted by Beato talking about a phenomenon he’s seen on his YouTube channel that he’s coined ‘The Gilmour Effect’.
Whenever he has a superstar shredder guest on the channel, he receives an influx of comments from fans saying they prefer Gilmour’s more “lyrical” approach to guitar playing, as opposed to incendiary speed.
It highlights the taste divide that cuts through the guitar community. While one person prefers Eddie Van Halen’s pyrotechnics, another hails Eric ‘Slowhand’ Clapton’s more drawn-out vocabulary instead.
With Gilmour sitting firmly in the latter camp — even if it was through necessity at first — he looked to his vibrato technique, both with his fingers and whammy bar, to enhance the flavor of his soloing.
“That's a natural thing that has naturally developed over a long career,” he confesses. “I do both, and I have no idea what I'm doing at any given moment, they're both working, hopefully, in cooperation with each other.
“I'm quite fussy about overeager vibrato,” he extends. “Sometimes a little thing gives it a little extra tone or, I hate to say the word refinement [laughs].”
However, there are caveats to his playing. Live, Gilmour has found that adrenaline can take over.
“When you’re racked up to 150 dB and you’re leaning against that wall of sound on stage,” he says, “the tunes can change,” before adding “I often think, ‘God I’m just going on too long here… time to stop!’” when asked about embracing longer solo sections.
“I’ve no idea of how long these things go on for,” he adds with a wry smile. “I just sort of play until I think, ‘Oh maybe we’ll end now.’”
Last week, Noel Gallagher admitted that his son had called him out for not being able to shred like other guitarists, with the Oasis man returning with a typically priceless answer.
He also opened up on his limited theoretical grasp of the instrument saying: “I’ve got no control over the music I make.”
Yet both artists, despite their pitfalls, have found astounding success. It evidences how superlative shredding skills and studious music knowledge are just two ingredients that can help an artist’s success, rather than define it.
Meanwhile, Gilmour has dismissed sentimentality when it comes to his guitars. His iconic Black Stratocaster became the most expensive guitar sold at auction when it went for $4 million in 2019, but he's admitted there are a few guitars he'd never sell.
