David Gilmour

David Gilmour is the guitarist of Pink Floyd, and his sound is one of the most studied in rock: long, singing sustain, slow vibrato, big clean tones and a lead voice built from fuzz stacked with boost. His gear choices have been tracked in detail by historians and by the builders who worked on his rigs, and several of the pedals he made famous, from the Big Muff to the Colorsound Power Boost, are still sold today in versions aimed squarely at players chasing his tones¹².

His rig has always been more than a row of pedals on the floor. From 1976 onward his boards were custom-built by Pete Cornish as remote controls for switching systems and racks, letting him call up combinations of effects from a floor unit while the signal chain lived in the wings³⁴. That approach, plus Hiwatt amps and rotary speakers, is the backbone of the sound heard on Pink Floyd's records from the mid 1970s through the 1994 Division Bell tour.

The sound he is known for

Gilmour's playing is identified with sustain and phrasing rather than speed, and the gear behind it has stayed remarkably consistent. His tech Phil Taylor said his distortion choice "is nearly always EH Big Muff, BK Butler Tube Driver, and, in the earlier days, a Fuzz Face or a Colorsound Overdriver"⁷. In an Electro-Harmonix interview he put it more simply:

Before the Big Muff he used Fuzz Face pedals extensively from the time he joined Pink Floyd in 1968 through the 1970s, and they can be heard on Meddle, Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and the Live at Pompeii film; he stopped using them in the 1980s⁹. He also found some of his most unusual sounds by accident: he plugged his wah-wah pedal in backwards and worked his tone knob to create the seagull cries in "Echoes" as heard in Live at Pompeii¹⁰. On "Pigs (Three Different Ones)" from 1977's Animals he recorded with a Heil Talk Box for the first time, mimicking grunting pigs on his Stratocaster¹¹.

His guitars have shifted over the years. He started with a Telecaster and now also plays a Les Paul, including a Gold Top with P90 pickups seen in a late eighties Pink Floyd performance of "The Wall"³. His Stratocasters carry EMG active pickups with a dedicated Mid control and a Bass-Treble boost³, and his strings are custom GHS sets: .010, .012, .016, .028, .038 and .048 on the Strat, and .010.5 to .050 on the P90 Les Paul³.

Pink Floyd's peak era: Hiwatt and Colorsound Power Boost

On stage, Gilmour used and still uses only Hiwatt amplification with 4x12" WEM speaker cabinets³. In the studio he takes a different approach, running several amps at once: an old tweed Bassman together with a Leslie 760 rotary speaker, and a small 50 watt Hiwatt combo with Fane speakers³. As he put it in a 1996 Guitar Shop interview:

The other constant of the 1970s was the Colorsound Power Boost, a British boost pedal he used extensively during that decade, from 1972 onwards²¹². The pedal's association with his tones from that era is a large part of why it is still reproduced today²¹³. A trick Gilmour particularly enjoys is using the Power Boost to enhance the Big Muff's sustain and presence¹², which is the core of his lead sound: fuzz into a clean, loud amp, with boost pushing the fuzz harder.

His first Cornish board, drawn up on March 7, 1976, shows the shape of that era's rig⁴:

• Dallas Arbiter Fuzz Face, which Dave "really liked a lot"
• A Cornish Custom Fuzz
• MXR Phase 100 phaser
• Uni-Vibe
• A CryBaby wah with a reverse switch to reverse the travel
• MXR Dynacomp compressor
• An MXR noise gate
• Three outputs, each with its own on/off switch, so any combination of three amps (Hiwatt, Marshall or Yamaha) could be on at once⁴

In 1977 the tone circuit was moved to just before the volume pedal and a treble and bass boost was added, which Cornish believes was a Colorsound unit, placed between the Uni-Vibe and the wah⁴. By 1978 his rig had grown to something like 20 different pedals, including phasers, fuzzes, tube distortions, delays, reverbs and echoes, among them the Italian Binson Echorec delay units³.

Remote-controlled pedalboards and racks

Gilmour started playing with a remote-controlled pedalboard and programmable racks in 1975³, and his skill, developed together with Pete Cornish, was to build a pedalboard that works as a remote control for the whole system³. The routing on the first board began with an input selector for two guitars, then a strobo tuner feed, then a master bypass before the effects⁴. Gilmour described how he used it in a 1978 interview:

He always uses a volume pedal on stage, and in some of his larger rigs he had a volume bypass switch or master mute on his floor switcher to kill the sound between songs¹⁴. The second Pink Floyd board carried just one CryBaby, fitted out as a volume pedal, because Cornish had standardized the CryBaby body for pedal controllers⁴. To keep noise down in these high-gain rigs he used regulated power supplies, line drivers and occasionally noiseless pickups, and noise gates in a few instances, more to prevent buzz and interference from the lighting rigs of the time¹⁴.

The scale of the system kept growing. By 1996 Gilmour's Cornish rack had 24 send-and-returns, recently expanded by eight more so he could play the Dark Side of the Moon material¹⁵. The 1994 Pulse tour rig, routed through a Pete Cornish Routing Unit, shows how far this went¹⁶:

The Lexicon PCM-70 handles his reverbs and sits at the end of the chain, and an Alembic FB-2 bass preamp is always the first link in his signal chain, feeding a splitter³.

The Big Muff and boost behind his solo sustain

The Big Muff was Gilmour's go-to fuzz unit for the majority of his career¹⁷. His tech Phil Taylor introduced him to the pedal in 1974, though regular use is believed to have started around 1975 or 1976⁶. A V2 "Ram's Head" Big Muff was reportedly his most used Big Muff, in both Pink Floyd and his solo recordings⁶, and his most famous solos with it are in "Comfortably Numb"⁹⁶. That pedal, his 1974 Ram's Head known as the "DG ORIGINAL", was seen on top of his 1976 pedalboard in late 1976 and used throughout the January to March 1977 In the Flesh tour; in 1976 Pete Cornish replaced its pots, added an internal buffer and fitted Fuzz Face knobs, and its red LED is an after-market modification⁷⁶. According to Phil Taylor, that #1 Big Muff "has often been preferred for most things" over all the others Gilmour owned, and he owned several V1 and V2 Big Muffs for studio and touring use⁶.

Big Muffs appeared across nearly every era that followed: the Animals and In the Flesh tour, his first solo record and tour, The Wall studio recordings and tour, The Final Cut, Momentary Lapse of Reason and its 1987 tour leg, Division Bell, and the On an Island recordings and 2006 tour⁶. They are heard all over Animals, The Wall, The Final Cut, and the Delicate Sound of Thunder (1988) and Live at Pompeii (2016) concert albums and videos¹⁸.

For the Division Bell album in 1993/94 and the tour that followed, he used a Civil War model Russian Big Muff¹⁹. The core of his signature Pulse solo sound, much sought after among Gilmour enthusiasts, was that Civil War Big Muff lightly driven and blended with a BK Butler Tube Driver for a slight gain boost and coloring, into a Fender Strat fitted with EMG-SA active pickups using the mid boost from the SPC tone control circuit¹⁹. He often blended the Civil War Muff with a Tube Driver⁹.

The Cornish fuzzes in his racks were mostly alternates. A Cornish P-2 was in his 1989 and 1990 Pink Floyd pedal boards, confirmed by the signal chain router visible in those concerts, and on the 1994 tour it was probably there as a backup for the Sovtek Big Muff, since signal chains indicate it was not used for the main tour⁷. A Cornish P-1 was built into his 1976 pedalboard and used briefly for the 2006 On an Island tour, sometimes for a few songs like "Comfortably Numb"⁷. The exception was the 2005 Pink Floyd Live 8 reunion, where he used a Cornish G-2 as the main distortion for the "Money" and "Comfortably Numb" solos, a departure from the Big Muff⁷. The Cornish P-2 distortion was first used by David around 1993 and has been his primary overdrive and distortion pedal since then⁹.

Rotary speakers and phasing

Rotating speaker cabinets have been part of Gilmour's sound since 1971-72²⁰, and he has embraced rotary speakers regularly since 1969²¹. He used a Leslie 147 on "The Narrow Way" from 1969's Ummagumma²², and for 1973's Dark Side of the Moon it is variously reported that he used either a Maestro, a Leslie 900, or a Univox Uni-Vibe pedal, or perhaps all three²². For modulation he is probably most famously associated with the Electro-Harmonix Electric Mistress flanger²¹.

The rotary sound became central to his biggest solo. He adopted the Yamaha RA-200 rotating speaker, combined with his Hiwatt amps, for Animals in 1977 and The Wall in 1979, specifically on the solo in "Comfortably Numb"²². He was still using the Yamaha cabinets at the end of the 1970s, along with Alembic F-2B valve preamps that powered them²³. His setup ran the signal to both a rotary speaker and a regular guitar amp, and he mixed the two signals together on recordings and on stage, a trick also associated with his distinct recorded sound²⁴²⁵.

For The Division Bell he used a vintage Gibson Maestro Rover RO-1, which he used in the studio for the album²⁶, and when Pink Floyd toured the album he took along three sets of custom rotating-speaker cabinets called Doppolas, built from Maestro Rovers by his techs Phil Taylor and Paul Leader, using a pair of similar rotating 6″ speakers with concert-worthy 100-watt drivers²². The Dawner Prince Pulse, a rotary pedal, is based on those Doppola cabinets and on the Maestro Rover he used in the studio for the album²⁶. As MusicRadar noted, the Division Bell tones that inspired the Pulse are not a Leslie-simulating sound; it has more of an open character²⁶.

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