A Conversation in the Studio

There are few guitarists whose playing feels as inevitable as David Gilmour's — as though the notes he chooses couldn't possibly have been any other notes. And yet, sitting in his UK studio with music educator and YouTube phenomenon Rick Beato, the Pink Floyd co-founder reveals a truth that is at once humbling and exhilarating: almost none of it was deliberate. The techniques, the tones, the chord choices that have defined a generation of listeners were, more often than not, happy accidents that stuck.

This extended conversation — the follow-up to a brief meeting in New York City at the close of Gilmour's most recent world tour — is the kind of interview that rarely happens. Two musicians, a handful of guitars, and no agenda beyond honest curiosity. What emerges is a portrait of one of rock's greatest voices not as a mythological figure, but as a working craftsman who still doesn't entirely know how he does what he does.

The Two-Finger Secret and the Chord That Started Everything

Beato noticed it almost immediately when Gilmour picked up a guitar: where most players would use a single fingertip to fret a single string, Gilmour routinely uses one finger — most often the index — to cover two strings simultaneously. It's an idiosyncratic technique that quietly unlocks some of his most distinctive voicings.

"I honestly cannot tell you the moment," Gilmour says with a shrug. "There must have been a difficult chord at some point in my life that required more fingers than I had. And so that one finger, particularly that one, doubles up on two quite a lot of the time. But it actually makes it easier to grab things — it leaves other fingers open to do other things. It's so automatic. I haven't got a clue what I do or how it happens."

The relevance of this quirk becomes immediately apparent when the conversation turns to "Dogs," the sprawling, 17-minute centerpiece of Pink Floyd's 1977 album Animals. That opening chord — an E minor with a seventh and a ninth — is notoriously difficult to grab cleanly. Gilmour demonstrates, and the two-finger technique explains everything.

"There must have been a difficult chord at some point in my life that required more fingers than I had. It's so automatic. I haven't got a clue what I do or how it happens." — David Gilmour

"The band called it 'Difficult Dave,'" Gilmour laughs, recalling how the tune gestated as far back as the 1960s before eventually finding its way onto the record following a session at Capitol Tower in Hollywood. The second chord in the sequence — a C sus4 — flows into a B9 sus4, a progression Gilmour links to a broader instinct he shares with the Who's Pete Townshend: the desire to move a chord while leaving one note suspended, clinging in place like a held breath.

"Other people, notably Pete Townshend, were often looking for a way of moving a chord but leaving a note clinging in there," he says. "Which is beautiful."

Remarkably, Gilmour reveals that when he originally conceived the strumming feel for what would become "Dogs," he was thinking of something entirely different. "I remember thinking at the time I was trying to get a strumming thing a bit like 'Nights in White Satin,' believe it or not." He pauses, almost in disbelief at his own admission. "I can now listen to it and I can't see any connection whatsoever. But I remember thinking that."

Progressive Rock? Gilmour Isn't Buying It

The label "progressive rock" has followed Pink Floyd for decades, and Gilmour remains as unmoved by it today as he presumably was in his twenties. "I've never talked about progressive rock or thought that we were — whatever progressive rock is," he says flatly.

When Beato offers a definition — songs with unusual chord progressions, odd time signatures, long arrangements — Gilmour concedes the technical point but rejects the tribal identity. "I think we were doing it long before the term progressive rock," he says. "And I think I was probably a grumpy old man in my twenties. 'Nah, that's not us.' The whole idea of labeling — it's become more essential in this day and age, but I'm not keen on it."

Jimi Hendrix, a Club in South Kensington, and the Pursuit of Sustain

Long before he joined Pink Floyd, a young and perpetually broke David Gilmour was haunting a South Kensington club called Blazes, drawn by the fact that membership cost just £5 and granted free entry several nights a week. One evening, the room was packed — Beatles, Rolling Stones, the whole London scene — there to watch Brian Auger and the Trinity with vocalist Julie Driscoll. Then something unexpected happened.

"A kid came in with a guitar case, got up on the stage, opened his guitar case and put it on the wrong way round," Gilmour recalls. "Plugged into an amp and started — and the entire place was just jaws dropped. It was absolutely extraordinary."

The kid was Jimi Hendrix. The next morning, Gilmour went out to find records by this guitarist and came up empty — Hendrix simply didn't have a UK release yet. But the impression was indelible, and it fundamentally redirected Gilmour's relationship with his instrument, particularly his pursuit of sustain.

"As soon as Jimi Hendrix came along, I thought — I want a slice of that." — David Gilmour

That quest for sustain eventually led to a fortuitous encounter on a 1968 US tour, when the guitarist from Blue Cheer simply handed Gilmour a Fuzz Face pedal backstage in Seattle. "Nice guys they seemed to be," he says. "Anyway, the guitar player came up and gave me a Fuzz Face, which I used for years and years and years." It joined a fuzzbox his parents had mailed him as a 21st birthday gift while he was living with his band in Paris — a gift so unlikely that Beato can barely believe it. "David, nobody's parents send them a fuzzbox," he laughs. Gilmour grins: "Maybe I asked them for one."

The High-String Guitar and the Birth of 'Comfortably Numb'

Of all the revelations in this conversation, perhaps the most illuminating concerns the unusual guitar tuning at the heart of one of rock's most beloved songs. Gilmour explains that the idea came not from his own experimentation, but from a conversation with Willie Wilson, the drummer in the Sutherland Brothers and Quiver.

Wilson mentioned offhandedly that producer Bruce Welch had asked the band to double-track an acoustic guitar with one strung entirely with high strings. "My ear sort of pricked up," Gilmour says. "I thought, 'What? What do you mean?' He said, 'Yes, I think he called it high-strung tuning.' But Willie is a drummer, so he wouldn't really have known how the guitar was tuned or what strings were on it."

Gilmour went home and began experimenting. The result — his personal variation on Nashville tuning — sees the top two strings remain standard, while the G, D, and A strings are tuned up an octave, and the bottom E string raised a full two octaves, placing it in the same register as the high E string. The effect is shimmering, harp-like, and acoustically complex in ways that a standard guitar cannot replicate.

"When you get this tuning, you soon realize that you can do a full strum all the way down," he explains, demonstrating a D chord that rings with an unexpected ninth floating naturally within it. "Those chords on that particular tuning do suggest melodies."

That suggestion of melody is precisely what arranger Michael Kamen latched onto. Gilmour notes that Kamen heard the moving inner voices of those high-string chords and built the orchestral countermelody of "Comfortably Numb" directly from them — the descending string line that has moved listeners to tears for over four decades.

One Take, One Solo, and a Four-Track Demo That Changed Everything

The first guitar solo in "Comfortably Numb" — the one that opens the song's emotional centre before Roger Waters' second verse — is widely admired, though it tends to be overshadowed in conversation by the transcendent outro solo. Gilmour's account of its origins is quietly staggering.

The Wall was recorded using a Teac four-track machine running simultaneously with the main multitrack, carrying a click track, rough demos, and count-ins to guide the band through the song's architecture. That four-track template always carried an early guitar solo for the first break. "That solo is a very early thing," Gilmour says, "and I don't think it changed at all."

"They're a moment, you know, and the moment is often very accidental. Sometimes the moment isn't accidental — sometimes you work for ages. But that particular first solo in 'Comfortably Numb' pretty much was a one-off thing." — David Gilmour

As for the outro solo — the one that reliably reduces audiences to reverent silence — Gilmour admits something that will surprise even devoted fans: he has never learned it. "There are a lot of guys who can play that solo," he says, "but I can't play it. Not like that. To me, it's just different every time. Why would I want to do it the same?" There are, he acknowledges, structural cues he uses to signal endings and transitions to the band, but the melodic content between those cues is genuinely improvised each night.

The wordless vocal demo that preceded the song's lyrics is also addressed — a melody so complete that it was essentially unchanged when words finally arrived. "It's exactly the same melody," Gilmour confirms. The words he had originally written were eventually set aside, with Roger Waters crafting the lyrics that made it to record. Waters also requested a key change to suit his vocal range and, crucially, asked for four additional bars at the end of the chorus — for which Gilmour borrowed and inverted a descending line from elsewhere in the song to create the "I have become comfortably numb" hook.

Vibrato, Pinch Harmonics, and the Mechanics of an Unmistakable Voice

Why is David Gilmour so difficult to imitate? The question has puzzled guitarists for decades. Beato puts it directly, noting that despite legions of devoted students — including, memorably, a 13-year-old girl on YouTube whose cover was "not half bad, actually" — there are no true Gilmour clones.

Gilmour's answer is characteristically modest. "Everyone's fingers are different. You have your muscle memory, the things you do, and you have your inherent musical taste that's leading you to the next place you're going. And it's inexplicable. Everyone is different. Some are more different than others."

Part of the signature, it emerges, is his vibrato bar technique — refined over decades from the Shadows-influenced whammy work of his early career into something almost subliminal. "I liked to think that I refined it a lot and took it down to almost inaudible," he says. In combination with a long, warm delay, even the subtlest movement of the bar creates the sensation of a vast acoustic space opening up beneath the note.

The pinch harmonics that punctuate his playing — most famously in the opening notes of the "Comfortably Numb" outro — are another accidental discovery. "I suspect it must have happened accidentally at first," he admits. He holds his pick unusually, with nearly as much thumb and finger contact as pick surface, which means harmonics can emerge without conscious intent. "Sometimes I don't even notice when I do it. I try to stop myself doing it too much because it's a bit corny, really." He says it with a smile.

The VCS3, a Garden Shed, and the World's First Sequencer

No conversation with Gilmour would be complete without some exploration of the electronic frontier that Pink Floyd helped define, and here the studio interview takes a wonderfully tangential turn. Gilmour produces a compact, briefcase-sized instrument: a portable version of the EMS VCS3 synthesizer, built by the machine's creator, Peter Zinovieff, who had promised Gilmour he would one day reduce his garden-shed full of equipment into something portable.

The VCS3 contains what Gilmour describes as one of the earliest sequencers he is aware of — a simple eight-step recorder that, once activated, loops a short melodic fragment through the synthesizer's three oscillators. Gilmour demonstrates, coaxing a pulsing, alien sequence from the machine before running it through a Hiwatt amplifier — the same approach used in the studio, where everything was recorded out in the room rather than direct.

"Those big crunchy notes — three oscillators all tuned to a note — and you press the attack button, it goes boom," he says. The Hiwatt, he explains, compresses and focuses the sound into the midrange, stripping out the extreme highs and lows that would otherwise make the synthesizer sound merely expensive rather than viscerally present. It is, in miniature, a perfect illustration of Gilmour's entire aesthetic philosophy: find the thing that feels real, and trust it.

Old Wood, New Guitars, and the Quest for Perfection

Gilmour is thoughtful on the question of whether a guitar's age matters — more so for acoustics than electrics, he believes. "An acoustic guitar that's been bashed around for 30 years — all those pieces of different varieties of wood, which have all got different vibrational qualities, the glue and the slats that hold it all together inside — I think they gradually become one over years," he says. He jokes that he occasionally fantasises about handing a brand-new guitar to a folk musician with a request to strum it solidly for a couple of years before returning it.

His relationship with the Fender Stratocaster replicas modelled on his famous Black Strat was similarly exacting. His long-time guitar tech Phil Taylor drove Fender's team to the edge with detailed specifications covering pickup output levels, neck curvature, body wood, and weight. "I didn't want a £20,000 super duper perfect model and a £2,000 one that looks the same," Gilmour says. "I wanted them to be absolutely perfect and be a reasonable price. That was a struggle, but we got there."

What Comes Next

For all the retrospection in this conversation, Gilmour is also looking forward. He plays lead guitar sparingly between tours — his daily practice is devoted more to strumming and songwriting than to soloing — and acknowledges that returning to performance shape takes longer than most people would expect. "You think you're in shape a long before you are," he says drily.

But there is new music coming. "I'm working on a record," he confirms. "It's in its early stages." When pressed on timing, he offers a cautious "maybe next year" — which, depending on when you're reading this, could mean 2026. For listeners who have spent years with Rattle That Lock and his 2024 album Luck and Strange, the prospect of another Gilmour record, shaped by all the accumulated wisdom and continued curiosity on display in this interview, is reason enough for quiet celebration.

As the cameras stopped rolling and Gilmour set down his guitar, Beato remarked that the afternoon had been extraordinary. It had. Not because Gilmour said anything particularly designed to impress, but because he said things that were true — about accident and instinct, about wood and wire, about the strange alchemy of a moment that becomes a recording that becomes, eventually, a piece of someone else's life. That, perhaps more than any technique or technology, is what makes David Gilmour irreplaceable.