Techniques of the heroes: David Gilmour

Okay, as far as techniques of the heroes go this one is a big one. Let’s face it; David Gilmour is one of the most technical players out there in terms of note placement and song arrangement. This guy’s guitar hero is the legendary Jeff Beck; he wrote a track that was voted to have the best guitar solo ever written in it and is none other than the lead guitarist of Pink Floyd.

As before, this first part of this mini-series will go over his basic attitude to playing and what scales/arpeggios/chords/etc he’s using most of the time. In the next lesson I will take a dive and show you how to play his ‘voted the best’ solo from comfortably numb.

First off is the the simple to explain stuff. David Gilmour’s guitar tone is quite thin and throaty in comparison to most modern guitarists. This is because most modern rock guitarists will switch back and forth between playing rhythm and lead quite a bit, whereas with David Gilmour, he generally uses his guitar to express the melody currently at work in the music he’s playing. He does play rhythm don’t get me wrong, but mostly he writes very complicated music, probably in the classical stave form (you know, the one with five line and those funny dots and circles all over it?). This means he has a very good idea of what sound is being expressed at a particular moment and so he will often do his best to follow this sound as closely as possible, which gives his guitar solos much more ‘feel’ than if he were to constantly stray from the music the band is playing.

In terms of equipment, don’t even try it. David Gilmour has used probably some of the most expensive equipment in the world in his rig. He once actually bought a £800000 house for his roadie so that his roadie would give him a Stratocaster that had the serial number 000001 on it. If you want to get his tone though, I would recommend using a fender Stratocaster as a must, and he does use compression pedals in his live guitar rig. Generally speaking David Gilmour doesn’t use much in terms of distortion, and I would almost certainly say that he gets his distortion tone from his pedals as well, as he will switch between clean and lead sounds quite a bit during a show, often during the same song if it’s something like ‘shine on you crazy diamond’. Switching between channels on an amplifier can lead to problems with volume control, so using a distortion pedal through a clean channel would seem to be the way he does it in my opinion, considering how little ‘hiss’ or ‘background gain’ is produced by his equipment.

Now, onto the scales David Gilmour uses. Well he’s used practically all of them, but there are two scales that I think he uses quite often.

These scales are all going to be in the key of E and written in tab form.

P.S. (when I write it like this – blah/moreblah – it means that this scale can be called one thing or another, and the only real difference is simply the name, which changes depending on how you are using it)

The natural minor scale/The Aeolian Mode

E||------------------|------------------||------------------|-----------10---12-|
B||------------------|------------------||---------------10-|-12---13-----------|
G||------------------|-----------7----9-||-9----11---12-----|-------------------|
D||----------------7-|-9----10----------||------------------|-------------------|
A||-7----9----10-----|------------------||------------------|-------------------|
E||------------------|------------------||------------------|-------------------|

The minor Pentatonic Blues scale

E||------------------|------------------||------------------|-----------10---12-|
B||------------------|------------------||---------------10-|-11---12-----------|
G||------------------|-----------7----9-||-9----11---12-----|-------------------|
D||----------------7-|--8----9----------||------------------|-------------------|
A||-7----9----10-----|------------------||------------------|-------------------|
E||------------------|------------------||------------------|-------------------|

Don’t worry about the ‘pentatonic’ bit; it’s just a flashy Italian sounding word that means ‘5 sounds’, as the original scale had 5 notes in it.

Now, you will probably be aware that there are happy parts in some Pink Floyd music as well as some of his solo work, even though these scales don’t sound that happy. David Gilmour is using different scales at these points to get a happier sound, but for the most part Pink Floyd is known for having a moody overtone to their music and his best solos seem t be his more moody ones to me, so I thought that I’d focus on that.

So what elements should you focus on to start sounding like him?

Well, listening to stuff from The Division Bell, Dark Side of The Moon, The Wall and About Face, David Gilmour comes across as a player who follows the drummer quite a bit so his guitar solos sound ‘thicker’; in other words, he is playing in time with the drums a lot so that the drums contribute to his sound as well. If he plays a guitar solo that follows the drums as closely as possible, then it sounds more planned out and structured than if he were to stray away from the drum beats often. To practice this, set up a metronome (or just stick on a backing track from youtube if you can’t be arsed getting a metronome) and then see if you can get as many of your notes on the drum, beats as possible. Once you’ve learnt when the drum beats are coming, play some notes that don’t land on the drum beats and see if you can anticipate when the next drum-beat coming and hit a note that lands on that. This is practicing how to play both in sync and out of sync with the other instruments in a band, and for a lead guitarist this is an essential skill.

A classic example of this is during his guitar solo on the track Time off Dark Side of The Moon. If you listen closely, you can hear that he is hitting very specific notes at very specific times during the solo. He hits notes right at the end of the bars during this solo, right as the chord changes (when you can tell that the music has changed slightly). This makes gives his guitar playing much more feel as it sounds like playing much closer to what the rest of the band is playing. If you want to blend this style of playing into your own, then look closely at what chords you are playing. During the guitar solo of ‘time’, he almost always end a phrase with a note from whatever chord he’s playing over or a note from an arpeggio built from that chord (don’t worry if you don’t know what an arpeggios is, just picking a note from the chord works just as well). This will give him much power behind his notes than if he were to just play ‘around’ the chords. David Gilmour is essentially using the chords as part of his solo as well, which means that he’s bringing all the musicians on stage to bear rather than just himself as a guitarist and it’s one of his most effective techniques for making very high quality solos without playing that many notes.

So what do I need to know to get started before I try and play “Comfortably Numb”?

You need to understand that you can’t simply play the notes in a scale and expect every note to sound as good as the next. You need to play the scale that you are going to be using over and over again until you can understand what each note ‘feels’ like. For example, some notes in a really sad scale may actually sound like they’re not that sad compared to other notes, or you may find some quite tense sounding notes in a really happy scale.

Take another look at the minor pentatonic blues scale I just showed you:

E||------------------|------------------||------------------|-----------10---12-|
B||------------------|------------------||---------------10-|-11---12-----------|
G||------------------|-----------7----9-||-9----11---12-----|-------------------|
D||----------------7-|--8----9----------||------------------|-------------------|
A||-7----9----10-----|------------------||------------------|-------------------|
E||------------------|------------------||------------------|-------------------|

That’s pretty much it for this first part of the lesson, but I will upload the next lesson, which will contain tips on how to play ‘comfortably numb’ and ‘keep talking’, as soon as possible.

I hope that this lesson has helped some of you out there.

Take care guys and I’ll see you next time!