It’s never easy to spot the best musicians in the world unless it’s in hindsight. While it would be easy to think that an act like The Beatles was met with universal acclaim from the moment they started, there were still numerous music executives who thought the Fab Four were nothing but a bunch of teenagers who caught a lucky break. It’s one thing to be derogatory towards rock bands, but even David Gilmour wasn’t diplomatic when talking about his contributions to Pink Floyd.
Then again, Gilmour was never in the trenches with Floyd. In the band’s early days, the warped guitar parts from frontman Syd Barrett became the perfect soundtrack to the psychedelic movement, singing about the pleasures that could happen through expanding one’s mind and going outside oneself to voyage to new lands.
Once Barrett began going off the deep end with substances, though, the band saw their frontman start to crack up. In an attempt to fill out the guitar sound, Gilmour was brought in as a secondary guitar player on their sophomore release, A Saucerful of Secrets, which would become the final album to feature Barrett in any capacity.
Now that Floyd was in the hands of Roger Waters, the band set about carving out a new path completely separate from their psychedelic roots. While ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’ still had its roots in far-out concepts, it wasn’t until they made albums like Meddle that they saw what they were capable of, bringing them to a peak with 1973’s Dark Side of the Moon.
Throughout every subsequent album, Gilmour would turn in one phenomenal solo after the next, taking his roots of blues music and channelling them into something more cosmic than anyone could have imagined. While the solos to tracks like ‘Money’ and ‘Mother’ from The Wall are dripping with emotion, Gilmour still thought his techniques throughout the band’s career were below average.
When speaking about his approach to the guitar, Gilmour admitted that he was never that great at articulating what he was trying to say, explaining, “My technique is laughable at times. I have developed a style of my own, which creeps around. I don’t have to have too much technique for it. I’ve developed the parts of my technique that are useful to me. I’ll never be a very fast guitar player. I don’t know what to say about my style. There’s always a melodic intent in there.”
Even though Gilmour may have been harsh on his contributions to the band, the critical part of his sound comes from that melodic intent. While most of his solos stay within the standard blues scales that many guitarists pick up on early, Gilmour is a master at speaking through his instrument, making for solos where his instrument sounds like it’s crying out in pain.
The greatest strength of Gilmour’s playing lies in his bends, creating a distinct wailing sound that feels like he’s channelling every bit of pain he’s ever experienced and putting it into the song. While Waters may have written lyrics that showed the dour side of the music industry, Gilmour was a master at keeping humanity at the centre of every Pink Floyd classic.
