Seven decades since it rolled off the production line in Fullerton, California – and whatever your personal tastes – you’d have to agree that Leo Fender’s deathless doublecut is the quintessential electric guitar.

It’s the shape a kid would draw if you handed them a crayon. It’s the model you’d show to a visiting glow-fingered alien curious about humanoid rock ‘n’ roll.

To sling a Strat is to experience the ultimate collision of tone and ergonomics.

Respect to the Telecaster (born three years earlier, in 1951), but it’s a caveman’s club next to Leo’s next great lightbulb moment.

Sleek as a surfboard, contoured to the body like a well-cut suit, with stellar access and the first bulletproof tremolo system. Sonically unique, with an unmistakable singlecoil ‘cluck’ that could be fattened, starved, or stacked via a cluster of idiot-proof dials and a five-way selector (from the mid-’70s on).

Back then, in 1954, the Strat seemed to come from the future, and even now, if you pause and consider it afresh, it still does.

But the Fender Stratocaster would just be a glorified carpentry project without the players who danced across its neck and gave it life. Here we celebrate 25 of the very best Strat-o-masters, from the worlds of blues, rock, funk, disco, prog, shred, grunge, metal, and beyond.

Buddy Holly

It’s December 1, 1957. Buddy Holly is performing That’ll Be The Day on his Ed Sullivan Show debut, and the great American public is seeing the Fender Stratocaster in action for the first time.

He might look like a librarian on uppers, but the Texan bandleader’s piston-pump rhythm work is not to be sniffed at, and to a generation that has known nothing but horn bands, that hard, biting jangle is a clarion call announcing that things will be different from now on.

Jimi Hendrix

Admittedly, the defining image of the Strat’s greatest Sixties ambassador sees him torching the damn thing onstage at 1967’s Monterey Pop Festival. But the instrument’s real pyrotechnics happened before Jimi lit the match.

Exploring the outer limits of its mischief-ready sonic scope and easily abused tremolo, he couldn’t have conjured the same black-magic cacophony – or the beauty of Little Wing – from any other model. Jimi’s trademark flip ‘n’ restring, meanwhile, was an audio-visual WTF that only cemented the impression he’d just stepped off a spaceship into Swinging London.

Hank Marvin

You Americans don’t know how lucky you are. It wasn’t until 1959 – a full five years after US production began – that Shadows bandleader Cliff Richard bought and gifted to his guitarist what is believed to be the first Strat on British shores (a Fiesta Red stunner with gold hardware). Those gorgeous, glassy, plaintive melodies on Apache and Wonderful Land wouldn’t have shimmered the same on anything else.

Jeff Beck

Sure, a Telecaster (in the Yardbirds) and Les Paul (on Blow By Blow) were fine for the punch-your-lights-out early stuff. But when Beck really found his voice and fell into his signature techniques – the volume swells and whale-song whammy tickles, exemplified by Where Were You – only the Fender doublecut could get the job done.

“What is it about the Strat that I love so much?” he mused in an interview with Malcolm Gerrie of Sky Arts. “Its endless color…”

Eric Clapton

Like Beck, EC played ’em all, from his Yardbirds Tele, through the revved-up Les Paul of the Bluesbreakers, to the SG-fueled ‘woman’ tone showcased on Cream’s Disraeli Gears. But like so many Sixties galacticos, as the decade turned, he was drawn to the Strat, retooling a clutch of second-hand models bought from a Nashville music store into the fabled Blackie mongrel that drove everything from Cocaine to Wonderful Tonight.

“I felt like Blackie had become part of me,” Clapton once told Guitar Player. “A guitar like that comes along maybe once in a lifetime.”

David Gilmour

Compared to his ’70s-gunslinger peers, the Pink Floyd man didn’t play too many notes. But the sweetness of his phrasing, twinned with the haunting, bell-like quality of his ’69 Black Strat, meant each one was a symphony (revisit the shivering four-note starburst of Shine On You Crazy Diamond Part II).

That Black Strat was just recently auctioned from the private collection of late Indianapolis Colts boss Jim Irsay for $14.5 million, making it officially the world’s most valuable guitar.

Stevie Ray Vaughan

The Texas bluesman picked up his early-’60s Strat – known as both Number One and First Wife – from an Austin music store in 1974. As a man who played so hard he had to perform DIY on his own tattered fingers, the instrument probably deserved its retirement in 1990 – while SRV’s tragic death that August meant he never saw Fender’s signature replica launch two years later at NAMM.

Ritchie Blackmore

Deep Purple’s dark wizard got his wings on a Gibson ES-335, but a fateful 1969 encounter with Eric Clapton’s roadie changed everything (“He brought a Strat, so I said to him, ‘Do you want to sell that guitar?’”).

In a 2024 GW interview, Blackmore told us he tracked Smoke On The Water on a mongrel, before summing up the Strat’s pragmatic magic: “It’s a way of paying the bills. It also happens to be an incredible guitar.”

Nile Rodgers

Just for a moment, consider how many unfathomable millions of dollars must have flowed through the Chic legend’s ‘Hitmaker’ Strat.

Seeing action with everyone from David Bowie to Madonna, the sonic character of its unusually light alder body is perfect for Rodgers’ muted hits and zingy chord fragments. But he might never have picked it up from a Miami pawn shop in ’73 were it not for the curt advice of wingman/bassist Bernard Edwards (“Get a Strat, motherf***er!”)

Yngwie Malmsteen

Before the Scandi shredder broke out with 1984’s Rising Force, ‘scallops’ were something you gagged on at posh dinner parties.

Inspired by a 16th century lute with carved-out frets, Malmsteen recalled that “people thought I was crazy” when they saw his teenage handiwork. But there was no arguing with the added velocity of scalloping, which made this already-lightning-fast player even speedier, like strapping rockets on Usain Bolt’s sneakers. Only Clapton was offered a Fender signature Strat before him (but Malmsteen’s ’88 model was the first to feature his signature on the headstock).

Dave Murray and Janick Gers

Given all that demon iconography, you’d expect Iron Maiden’s three-guitar frontline to reach for something macabre from the B.C. Rich brochure. In fact, the British metallers’ gallop is largely underpinned by a pair of workhorse Strats, with Janick Gers favoring a Seymour Duncan JB JR-bolstered model and Dave Murray driving a pair of Hot Rails (Adrian Smith is more of a dabbler, mostly wedded to his Jackson San Dimas).

Tom DeLonge

The Blink-182 man has bounced between Fender and Gibson his whole career, and lately seems sworn to his signature Starcaster. But after retiring the iconic early “Sticker Strat”, the Enema Of The State period saw DeLonge punch out parts like All The Small Things on a pastel-hued Custom Shop Strat with a lonely Seymour Duncan Invader bridge ’bucker (it was released in 2001 as a production guitar).

Albert Hammond Jr

Beset by bowel-tuned nu-metal, it felt like we hadn’t seen a Strat in years when The Strokes broke out with 2001’s Is This It.

While Nick Valensi was all studied cool on an Epiphone Riviera, his corkscrew-curled wingman hammered thrillingly at a high-strapped 1985 reissue of a ’72 Strat (that instrument was also behind the feral, Freddie King-inspired solo on Last Nite).

Billy Corgan

Alt-rock will forever be associated with a sticker-coated Jazzmaster, but look closer and the Strat appeared in the hands of everyone from Kurt Cobain (at the ’92 Reading Festival) to Mike McCready (the out-of-phase shimmer on Yellow Ledbetter). Amongst these, Corgan was arguably the greatest virtuoso and most committed Strat-o-phile.

In his words, the Smashing Pumpkins leader “walked into a Guitar Center one day and, off the wall, bought an Eric Clapton ’57 reissue. That became the main guitar for Siamese and Mellon Collie, and launched a thousand ships of people chasing that sound.”

Mark Knopfler

Before he settled back into the molten Les Paul solos of Brothers In Arms, the Dire Straits leader was the fastest gun on London’s post-punk scene, revered for the quicksilver bob ‘n’ weave outro to 1978’s Sultans Of Swing.

Tellingly, the red ’61 he played it on (supposedly something of a partscaster) was one of the few models that Knopfler chose to ring-fence from his 2024 guitar auction.

Bonnie Raitt

The Californian slide goddess and 13-time Grammy winner picked up her first Strat on the street following a 1969 gig – immediately falling for the often-neglected third position. “It’s all about that middle pickup,” says Raitt. “You just can’t beat it.”

Eric Johnson

The Cliffs Of Dover virtuoso could easily have followed his G3 brethren into an Ibanez endorsement. But Johnson is a Strat diehard with a very specific wishlist, insisting that models from ’54, ’57, and ’58 are best (“I think Fender had a shipment of wood that was real special”) and adding an offbeat f-hole to his 2018 signature thinline.

Cory Wong

Funk belongs on a Strat – don’t argue – and Wong’s kinetic grooves with Vulfpeck have moved more feet than anyone on the modern scene. He’s proved price isn’t everything with his dedication to his teenage Highway One model – also the inspiration for his 2021 signature model – and should really be taking a salary as Fender brand ambassador.

Wong was led to the aforementioned Highway One Strat by his father, who – Wong said in a 2023 Guitar World interview – told him, “‘Listen! You love the Chili Peppers, you love Stevie Ray Vaughan. Look at Jeff Beck, look at Jimi Hendrix, look at Stevie Ray and Eric Johnson.’ He gave me this lineage of the Stratocaster and basically said: Look at all the things this guitar is capable of.’”

H.E.R.

The Strat’s generation-leaping appeal is underlined by Gabriella Sarmiento Wilson, whose breakout 2021 album, Back Of My Mind, bends the backbone of vintage R&B into bold new shapes.

“The Strat is an iconic guitar, just because of the look and shape,” says the 28-year-old Californian (who got her own signature model in 2020). “But the tone, the heaviness… to me, it’s the unicorn. It’s classic, but it’s new at the same time.”

Rory Gallagher

Bought on credit in 1963, and beaten like a dog through the ’70s and ’80s, the Irishman’s ’61 looked set for a quiet retirement. Instead, it now enjoys an afterlife as a blues-rock Excalibur, loaned out to wide-eyed fanboys like Joe Bonamassa.

“I’m thinking, ‘I’m gonna take so much shit for this’,” recalled the US bluesman of test-driving Rory’s doublecut at London’s Hammersmith Apollo in 2011. “Because everyone on the Internet will go, ‘Who do you think you are?’ But anybody would have done it…”

The Edge

U2’s sonic maverick has built up quite a rack since 1980’s Boy (you could argue he’s equally associated with the Explorer). But hands-down the most neck-tingling moment of any show is the delay-drenched jewelry box tinkle of Where The Streets Have No Name, and for that, a Strat on the middle pickup is non-negotiable.

Mdou Moctar

If your first guitar had been built from driftwood, bicycle cables, and the keys used to open sardine tins, you’d be glad to get on a Strat too. The desert-blues figurehead’s only stipulation is that the strings on his American Professional left-hander are at least two years old.

Steve Lacy

Every time you think you’ve got the Strat all figured out, a twenty-something gunslinger comes along and flips it on its head.

Take the Californian alt-R&B phenom, who splits his licks between solo work, The Internet, and a billion guest-spots with everyone from Vampire Weekend to Tyler, The Creator. Then there’s Lacy’s rulebook-shredding People Pleaser signature Strat – complete with an onboard fuzz circuit.

Ry Cooder

There’s a case that the Californian slide man barely qualifies as a Strat player. His trademark ‘Coodercasters’, after all, are so heavily modded that Leo Fender would barely recognize them as his children. But Cooder demands inclusion for his beyond-spellbinding, desert-baked, and dust-blown tone.

Buddy Guy

When the great Louisiana bluesman headed north in ’57, he assured his ailing mother he’d return from Chicago at the wheel of a polka-dot Cadillac. Guy couldn’t keep that promise, but made amends by commissioning his spotted Fender signature model.

He’s never strayed from the Strat, and even on the brink of his nineties, used it to dig out a gorgeous fingerstyle blues in the credits scene of last year’s Oscar-winning Sinners.

Johnny Marr’s cleaning out his closet and the world’s wealthiest music fans are warming up their credit cards for yet another hot-ticket celebrity guitar auction. Why does this keep happening? Answering that very question through the medium of – as one fan describes it – “a snarky faux interview”… it’s Fret Buzz!

Lend us a dollar – Johnny Marr is auctioning his guitar collection in September.

My pleasure. So you’re good for the other $199,000?

Excuse me?

As befits an indie-guitar god, Johnny’s instruments are quite expensive. For instance, there’s a $200,000 estimate for his fabled 1960 ES-355.

Hmmm. Anything in my budget?

How about $106,000 for the ’82 Rickenbacker 330 Jetglo played on This Charming Man?

Heaven knows I’m miserable now.

Well, we told you they’re expensive. Basically, if you put your hand in the air anywhere near Christie’s auction house in London, you’ll accidentally default on your mortgage for a road-soiled wah pedal.

Has Johnny fallen on hard times?

Don’t worry about Johnny. He’s doing very nicely. He’s just offloading a few dozen guitars because he “didn’t like the idea of my studio space becoming a museum”.

First-world problems…

Anyway, Johnny is famously a charming man, and the proceeds will go to various charities, including the Guide Dogs For The Blind Association.

Wow. Those guide dogs are going to be loaded. Will they all get gold collars?

That’s not how animal charities work.

How did this auction craze start, anyway?

Back in 1999, Eric Clapton sold his first batch, including the ’57 Brownie Strat. Since then, it’s gone gangbusters. In March, David Gilmour’s Black Strat regained the title of World’s Most Expensive Guitar, fetching $14.6m.

But aren’t these just ordinary production guitars that happened to be played by talented people?

Johnny reckons there’s more to it: “I once asked this acupuncturist if guitars had chi – a life force. He said, ‘Yeah, your guitars have got chi in.’ I was like, ‘I knew it!’”

Why don’t manufacturers just put in the chi at the factory?

Chi doesn’t work like that. It’s more of a spiritual thing. It’s under your fingernails.

Who has $14.6m, anyway?

Oh, all sorts of people. Tech bros. Russian princes. Centuries-old dynasties of European vampires. Regular folks, y’know?

Are you being sarcastic?

Yeah. People get annoyed by celebrity guitar auctions. But also excited. And jealous too. It’s hard to read the room sometimes.

Why the resentment?

It’s the notion of rock’s most cherished guitars being held captive in the iceberg basements of Silicon Valley, their voices forever silenced – except that one time Jeff Bezos took out Kurt’s Jag-Stang for a halting attempt at Come As You Are.

Isn’t that a simplistic view of auction buyers?

Yeah, maybe. Last year, Christie’s specialist Amelia Walker told GW that “at the Mark Knopfler sale, I remember seeing people in tears. It’s absolutely driven by the emotional connection.” She also points out that many guitars head to public museums – while the benefits for charity are undeniable.

Anyway, isn’t the guitar press partially responsible for stoking up this circus with its feverish coverage of celebrity guitar auctions?

Hey, don’t hate the player, hate the game.

Back to Johnny’s auction. Please, please, please, let me get what I want?

The best we can do is a ‘Comet Sparkle’ edition of Johnny’s signature Jaguar for $11,000. And that’s assuming you don’t get into a bidding war with a Big Oil CEO who was very sensitive at school.

Most of us guitarists are perpetually chasing ways to raise our game. That is part of the fun, after all. But sometimes what we seek is already freely available, without studying music theory, learning scale/arpeggio shapes or drilling picking exercises.

I’m talking about the rhythm of what we play, which is arguably 50 per cent (if not more) of what makes phrases appealing and memorable.

If we feel we should be working harder, this is when we’re most at risk of overplaying, filling all the gaps and overcomplicating things (take it from someone who’s done it). Sometimes what feels good to play doesn’t translate to what sounds good to the listener, who may not play guitar or be wowed by rippling arpeggios.

If we listen closely to the greats, especially in this genre, you can hear that not only do they leave spaces, but when they do play, there’s a rhythmic signature to their phrasing.

For example, Clapton in Crossroads, Gilmour in Comfortably Numb and Peter Green in Black Magic Woman all have their own take on how they approach rhythms in the phrasing, giving a uniqueness while using the very same pentatonic shapes.

One thing that isn’t demonstrated explicitly here is the spaces in between. That would certainly be easy to transcribe (and read!), but ultimately not particularly helpful, so do bear in mind that even these examples are a concentrated version of what you might want to play in a real-life musical scenario.

The four phrases were played separately, but could be joined up to make a solo if you prefer. That being said, the fourth example is really an alternative take on Example 1, or perhaps a suggestion of how you might continue onwards in a similar style. I hope these examples are useful and enjoyable. See you next time!

Example 1

A quick rake leads into a contrasting held bend, giving a sense of space to start. Bar 2 then features some repeated triplets – feel free to pull back and play these late, you’ll know when you’ve gone too far.

Note the quarter-tone bends in bars 2 and 3. These are very subtle but add so much in terms of attitude. The final phrase crosses bars 3 and 4 – it’s a smooth bend/release leading to a quick flurry, similar in essence to the introductory phrase.

Example 2

Keeping with the triplet theme to start, this example then takes a leaf out of Peter Green’s book, especially in bar 3 where the rhythmic groupings feel as though they’re floating independently of the beat.

They aren’t really in this case, though the last four semiquavers do pull back in tempo noticeably.

This shouldn’t be set in stone, keep experimenting – you can always dial it back if you think you’ve lost the feel. The pre-bend with fast vibrato in bar 3 is another detail worth spending some time on.

Example 3

This rhythmic idea is similar to some of Eric Clapton’s phrasing during his solos in Crossroads. The rhythmic groupings are quite funky and you will want to use down- and upstrokes to aid with this.

Use this idea as a basis for further experimentation, rather than conforming precisely to any rhythm. There are no rules, but you can pick up some hints from watching the video. Also, watch for details such as quarter-tone bends, staccato/short notes and vibrato.

Example 4

An alternative opening phrase, or a suggestion for how things might continue, this example draws on David Gilmour’s phrasing from the solos in Comfortably Numb, Another Brick In The Wall (Pt 2) and Have A Cigar.

As with Example 3, it’s questionable how useful it would be to duplicate this exactly. This is more of a ‘feel’ thing, based around choppy/staccato or muted up- and downstrokes.

We finish with a classic pentatonic lick, the last note of which (D) holds, adding a slow quarter-tone bend after crossing into bar 4.

Hear it here

Eric Clapton – Crossroads

One of the details which makes Eric’s playing so appealing is his use of rhythm. Check out the solos in Crossroads and you can hear him experimenting – and really pulling against the beat at times. He can also be heard (in a more restrained manner) on the Bluesbreakers (‘Beano’) album a few years earlier.

More recently, he revisited this approach in Bad Love. Like anything, the rhythm is just a part of the picture, so often isn’t as blatant as some of the examples.

Albert Collins – Truckin' With Albert Collins

The Iceman himself, Albert used an unusual F minor tuning (low to high: F C F Ab C F) often with a capo at the 5th to 7th fret, which contributed to his sound, but that need not concern us too much here. All the same, check out Frosty from the 1969 album Truckin’ With Albert Collins.

On that same album, see if you can sit comfortably with the lilt between the guitar and brass on Tremble! Finally, have a listen to his playing alongside Gary Moore on his cover of Too Tired.

Peter Green – The Pious Bird of Good Omen

Peter’s manipulation of rhythms is perhaps the most subtle of the players cited here, but his rhythmic groupings on Black Magic Woman, Supernatural and Need Your Love So Bad demonstrate a free flowing ‘push and pull’ against the beat, with some unexpected pentatonic flurries that sound easier to play than they actually are.

All are great demonstrations of the use of space, plus you can hear the intention behind each and every note.

• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

At just 32, Matthieu Lucas has managed to build something extraordinary.

The entrepreneur, guitarist, and music enthusiast has painstakingly chipped away at building the emporium that is Matt’s Guitar Shop from the ground up, attracting A-list clients from all four corners of the globe.

The journey was far from plain sailing. However, judging by the caliber of artist guitars gracing every inch of the walls in this slice of musical paradise – tucked away on an unassuming street in Paris – it has well and truly paid off.

“It was not easy because you just show up at a store, and you look like a baby, and somehow, you start talking big dollars to very reputable dealers or collectors, and some of them were like, ‘How is this possible… this guy is selling drugs somewhere,’” he quips, as he recalls the early days of his ambitious venture.

However, it’s perhaps Lucas’ marketing prowess and ethos – that even the most prestigious of guitars are meant to be played on stage – that has transformed him into the go-to guy for artist guitars, with players such as Marcus King, Craig Ross, Billie Joe Armstrong, Myles Kennedy, and Yungblud all getting in on the action.

“I was very inspired by banks and huge associations buying Stradivarius [violins] very early on and lending them to musicians on tour playing classical music,” Lucas says.

“Guitars need to be shared with the world. That's my theory. That's why we lend ours on stage all the time, and that's always going to raise the value. They're really artifacts of a very specific period when the guitar revolutionized everything.”

What inspired you to start Matt’s Guitar Shop in the first place?

It’s been a little bit more than 10 years, actually. Time flies! [However], it all started when I was 15 years old.

I was not really interested in music or guitar in general. I was just playing video games with a friend of mine. His father showed up in the room and he said, “Guys, you need to listen to AC/DC.” And then I said, "Okay, [I’ll] give this guy five minutes with his old band and then I'm going to be finished with him.”

And we listened, and Angus Young was really the guy who penetrated my brain, and my passion for guitar started there. Six months later, I was seeing AC/DC in a stadium and buying an SG copy, and that started it all. And then I just wanted to buy more and more guitars because I started to discover bands.

Step by step, I went to Paris guitar stores. I was hanging out in a store called Guitar Store in Paris, and the guy was nice to me, and he let me discover the world of guitar sales – buying, selling… the daily life of a guitar shop.

I was already buying and selling privately. So it [Matt’s Guitar Shop] started in an apartment in Paris – a very small apartment. Three years, maybe four years later, we had the opportunity to get the place here, and that was it.

What were some of the initial challenges, especially as a young businessman?

They really put you in boxes initially, and that was not easy, but step by step, we met people that trusted me, and I knew who I wanted to work with over time.

I don’t come from a musical family myself. So I was mainly listening to those guys in my headphones when I was younger. I was listening to Lenny [Kravitz] and Craig [Ross] quite a lot because I have deep respect for that duo and what they represent.

One day, I show up at Rudy's Music [in New York], and Rudy just traded me one of Craig’s main touring guitars, which was his 1964 ES-345.

I didn't have the money back then, so I said, ‘Give me three months. I'm going to buy and sell in France, and I'm going to come back and pick it up.’ And my friend, who was with me at this time, told me, ‘Are you crazy? This guitar is way too much money.’

It was a time when social media was different. I just sent a message to Craig on Facebook, and two weeks passed by, and I was like, ‘Okay, this guy is busy. He's never going to reach me.’ And, suddenly, my phone is popping off, and Craig Ross just answered me, and he was so kind. [He was like,] this guy is 22 or 23 years old, he just made a huge purchase for himself, compared to his capacity.

So when I bought this guitar, we met at L'Olympia in Paris, and we got that connection going. So, for me, just meeting him was great because Craig really proves that you can’t buy class. I met Lenny later, but with Craig, it's been like 10 years and I still have that connection with him.

Which artists’ guitars command the most demand and attention?

It's quite mixed. We have John Frusciante's 1961 [ES-]335 that he played on stage. We have, of course, Paul Kossoff's 1955 “Black Beauty”, which was also used by Eric Clapton during Cream because they used to trade guitars quite a lot.

I’ve had this guitar for almost 10 years now, and I don't regret buying it. Another interesting one is Steve Lukather’s 1951 Esquire. We [also] have AC/DC's Cliff Williams’ bass – we have number three, which was toured all around the world for four years with AC/DC.

How has your vision for the showroom evolved, compared to when you first opened the doors?

When I started this business with artists’ guitars, I had two kinds of people: the people who believed in it and the people who were laughing at me.

Now, I was very proud when I was assisting at the [Jim Irsay] auction in New York City because I think that the guitar changed the world, and that the guitar will still be listened to in 1,000 years, and all those guys will be gone, and what's left is the music and their instrument. [When you buy that guitar,] you are the owner of their legacy.

So we feel kind of amazed at the shop every day because I really believed in that market when it was not fancy.

What made the Jim Irsay auction different?

Everybody was waiting for that auction. That was, after all, the greatest collection [that ever existed] of artists’ guitars.

People are starting to understand that there are good aspects to buying a guitar – whether it's for the investment or whether you're a guitar player – but if you choose wisely, those guitars will never go down [in price] because there is always somebody richer than you who wants to have that guitar.

Why have the Jim Irsay guitars leapt in value in such a short time span?

It depends on the auction house you're dealing with, the place you're buying the guitar from, and the marketing around that.

Marketing is key when you want to sell a pricey instrument like that, and I think Christie’s did a great job. They went everywhere, and when you're doing that, you just attract the best buyers because they don't have any doubt about what they're buying.

Everything went through the roof because those buyers were brought together by Christie’s in one room. They could have been telephone bidders. They could be room bidders, or internet bidders, but they were all together in one room for this collection, which was exceptional.

I see that with the shop. I don't have a single customer older than 60, and usually my customers are between 25 and 50, so it's a new generation who just discovered the world of guitars, and those people are working hard to get those guitars.

When you put them in one room, I can guarantee you that you will see new world records. If Jimmy Page's “Number One” was in that room that day, that would be between 20 and 30 million [dollars] easy.

But who are these people? What are their backgrounds?

I can give you an example of one person I know: Bobby Tseitli in Chicago. Bobby is a good friend of mine – those guys are really amazing, and they're putting together a collection called Family Guitars.

I knew they wanted [Jerry Garcia’s] “Tiger” so much. I gave him a huge hug when he bought that guitar, and I can guarantee you that this guy probably cried like a baby in his room sleeping next to the guitar that night, and that everybody in the room was feeling amazed because he was bidding with all his heart. The night after, Derek [Trucks] played it on stage. I mean, what's better than that?

I think we should be thankful for those guys who believe in the market and make it dynamic because they're not only buying guitars; they are making the shows more attractive. Everybody in the room will remember the day they saw Jerry Garcia's guitar in the hands of Derek Trucks. [In terms of the buyers’ backgrounds], I never ask too much unless they talk about themselves.

For sure, at Christie’s, we saw hedge fund guys, tech guys, cryptocurrency guys… so it's new money, in a good way, not in a bad way. From what I can tell, we have more and more young people who are just working hard, and they could be in tech, they could be in sports, whatever… we have so many kinds of buyers, and that's the beauty of this job.

Do you think we're going to see David Gilmour’s Strat one on stage anytime soon?

I know by name the guy who bought it. I don't know him personally. If he reads the interview, [I would say] I think you should put that guitar on stage. But I hope all those guitars [from that auction] are going to be on stage soon.

How do most of these clients find you?

Social media helps. You put the guitars on stage, and people are always filming. The audience recognizes the guitar, and I get texts or messages on Instagram.

So, I think it's a win-win-win because the crowd is winning because they get to see a very special guitar that day. Marketing-wise it's great for the shop, and it's also great for the artist because when this is going to the press, the tour is gonna get some marketing.

When Marcus King was touring in Paris 10 years ago, he was playing in clubs [in front of] 20 people, and we were there already, and now he's more famous, of course. And he still loves to play that Paul Kosoff guitar. Every time he’s in Paris, he plays that guitar on stage, and it's one of his favorite guitars to play.

What trends are you noticing in the types of guitars that command the highest prices in today's market?

When I started, nobody really wanted a guitar from Green Day, for example. Now, I’m getting asked more often.

I think it's a generation thing – Green Day are getting bigger because the older they get, the bigger their legacy. When the band is getting older, their fans are also getting older, and they have more capacity to buy the items of their dreams. When artists pass away, sometimes you get a bit emotional. So, of course, people are missing them so much that they want their guitars.

But I would be curious to have one of those big “dinosaur” guitars on stage [at an auction]. After the success of the Gibson Keith Richards signature, [I would be curious to have] one of Keith's guitars going on stage, the black [ES-]355, the “Micawber” Tele... or Jimmy Page's guitars or Brian May's guitar or Paul McCartney's bass – those legendary guitars that are still used by them.

I think we would be surprised by the price they fetch because records are made to be broken and are made to be set higher every time. And again, it wouldn't surprise me in the near future if we see a guitar [sell for] between $20 and $30-40 million.

Do you see any risks or misconceptions for new buyers entering the vintage guitar market, especially those treating it as an investment?

I would suggest that you check the provenance of the instruments. You have to choose wisely. If you're advised wisely and if you decide to buy the guitar at the right price, that's great.

To give you an example, when I bought Steve Jones' guitar, I knew there were rumors of Steve selling the original one 14 times to different people.

So we checked the mother-of-pearl inlays. We checked all the dings and marks. We scanned the pictures of the guitar today, and we matched those mother-of-pearl inlays. When [there are] three matches, then you know.

Beyond the monetary value, what makes a guitar collectible?

The more provenance you have and the more history you have with the guitar [the better]. For example, if Keith Richards just played one guitar one time on the sofa two minutes backstage and signed it, that doesn't really make sense to me. But what matters to me is if he played it on stage. Why did he choose that particular one for his personal collection? Was there a reason sound-wise?

I don't agree with comments on the internet that say that, ‘Oh well, David Gilmour modified the Black Strat like 700 times over time…’ [If you want a pristine guitar,] then just buy a vintage guitar. Don't even look at an artist guitar.

I understand that it doesn’t make sense for some people to buy a $15 million guitar, but I think the more modifications it has, the more personal the instrument becomes – and that’s what makes its value even higher.

There's been a lot of criticism over the amounts spent at the Jim Irsay auction. What would you say to people who feel that collectible guitar prices have lost touch with reality?

I think we are living in a world where records are made to be broken.

I would get [that comment] from the perspective of somebody earning a medium salary. That's understandable, because for some people, it's just hard to feed their children, and then you see on the news that somebody just bought David Gilmour's guitar for $15 million.

But I would say it has been like this forever, in sports, the arts… let's not even talk about the football world. I think the world is discovering guitars with these auctions, with these pieces of history, [and] with the new players as well. The rich will always be richer. We can't control that. If they want the David Gilmour Strat for $50 million one day, that's it.

What's been your proudest moment of seeing one of your guitars being played on stage?

I lent Myles Kennedy Jeff Buckley's guitar on stage in Paris a few years ago. That was the final show I assisted before Covid, but that was a moment because it was at L'Olympia [in Paris].

It was full of symbolism. We were preparing for that day for four months. Myles was the perfect guy to sing Hallelujah on stage with the very guitar that Jeff recorded the song with. I still get chills talking about it.

[Another standout moment was when] I saw Craig Ross playing [Jeff Beck’s] Yardburst in Paris.

If I told my young self, [who was] listening to Lenny Kravitz and Craig Ross, that one day I would have Jeff Beck's guitar and then Craig would play it on tour, especially in Paris, my hometown, I wouldn't believe it. It was really a full-circle moment.

• Learn more about Matt's Guitar Shop.

Some guitar greats like to live in the spotlight and others prefer to fly under the radar. Rick Fenn of 10cc is among the latter, though the staggering list of achievements across his five decade-long career is impressive and expansive in equal measure.

As a songwriter, collaborator, and session man he’s worked closely with everyone from Pink Floyd founder Nick Mason and ABBA star Agnetha Fältskog to Peter Green, Rick Wakeman, Mike Oldfield, and Cliff Richard. You could say the musical connection between him and a whole entourage of chart-topping legends runs very deep indeed.

This year he’s keeping busy with 10cc, who have dates stretching across the UK and Europe all the way past Christmas, including a sold-out show at London’s prestigious Royal Albert Hall. Best known for world-conquering hits like I’m Not In Love, Dreadlock Holiday, and Rubber Bullets, the band have already graced the stage of the venue several times – and their next visit is shaping up to be another highlight in the diary.

“There’s something about standing on that stage,” Fenn says. “Especially now they’ve fixed the acoustics, because it used to be shit. The sound is great in there now and it’s a really thrilling place to play. Quite possibly the best in the world.”

He adds: “We’re a happy band at the moment. Not quite bigger than ever, but slowly creeping back up to where we used to be. And while the old boomers have been coming out to see us, it’s also been gratifying to see some younger faces in the audience.”

Having played lead guitar in the band for the last five decades, his role is an unusually eclectic one. It requires him to cover a range of styles, from the groovy hard rock of The Wall Street Shuffle and the soaring leads in I’m Mandy Fly Me to the staccato funk of Art For Art’s Sake, and, of course, the syncopated reggae of Dreadlock Holiday.

If variety is the spice of life, Fenn could very well have one of the most enviable jobs in the music industry.

“I don’t think there are many gigs out there that are as enjoyable for a guitar player,” he says. “And considering how long I’ve been playing these songs, I haven’t gotten bored of them. I get a lot of elbow room – there are so many different styles and techniques.”

What kind of gear will you be using on this upcoming tour?

I’m a pretty simple soul. My main guitar was made by Roger Giffin, who has a really impressive track record, having built instruments for Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, Mark Knopfler, and David Gilmour.

I used to play Les Pauls, but I was looking for a good Strat-style guitar in 1978. Roger was working for Doug Chandler’s guitar shop in London; Doug lent me one of the guitars Roger had made and it sounded great. I didn’t like the finish, though, so Roger made me another one.

It sounded and played so well, it’s been my main guitar ever since. It’s astonishing how well it holds tune, partly thanks to the Kahler trem. A guy called Dave Storey created those things and I was one of the players who helped him with the early designs. He made me a number of them – it’s the same one that’s been on this guitar for 40 years. It just keeps on delivering.

What kind of amps are you plugging into?

For the last 20 years I’ve been using a TC Electronics Nova system. I think they’ve stopped making them now, for some reason. Those get fed into a couple of Fender Hot Rods, which are wonderfully broad-spectrum, uncolored amps. I just use the clean sound and then the TC does everything else, from echoes and reverbs to this soft stereo chorus running across all my sounds, which has served me very well.

You paired up with Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason in 1985 for a string of albums. What’s he like to work with?

Nick is such a lovely, unassuming guy with zero pretensions. Eric Stewart from 10cc introduced us at a party when Nick was looking for someone to work with, and 48 hours later I had some music ready for the Profiles album. It all happened quickly.

I hadn’t gotten my confidence up as a writer, but because Nick was in such an influential position, we could do whatever we wanted. I had this fresh and unpolluted creative drive, which he was great at letting me run away with. He had this wonderful London studio called Britannia Row, and I had a home studio with a 16-track Fostex. A lot of my original recordings on those machines found their way onto the albums. It was a happy combination.

David Gilmour sang on the lead single Lie For A Lie. As a guitar player, you must have been pretty happy about his involvement.

I was so chuffed when he contributed to that song. I didn’t spend much time with him, but I remember shooting the video. Interestingly, Another Brick In The Wall had topped the charts quite recently and Moonlight Shadow – which I did with Mike Oldfield – had done really well too.

I found myself standing at a microphone singing my song next to David Gilmour. It was like this moment where I felt like I’d arrived! It’s similar to what Eric Stewart told me about working with Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder. We’re talking serious royalty there!

You co-wrote the song Family Man with Mike Oldfield, which became a big hit for you, and then the following year for Hall & Oates.

I was actually the family man in the lyrics. There are a lot of temptations on the road, so they would call me that. I teamed up with Mike in 1983 when he wanted to have a tight band where everybody was in on it. It was a nice time to hook up with him. Our first gig was in Barcelona in front of 600,000 people, which was mad.

Family Man was a riff of mine from a jam session. Though it wasn’t particularly important within the song, it was the thing we all jammed around. It’s very simple; there’s only two chords to it.

Me, Mike, and our keyboard player wrote it, but we shared everything with the band magnanimously. I didn’t even know about the Hall & Oates version until it stormed the American charts and I heard it on the radio. You could say that song has been good to me!

You also recorded with Peter Green at one point. Given his reputation as one of the more elusive and reclusive musicians of his era, how did that work out?

When I was a teenager he was one of my greatest heroes, along with Hendrix, Clapton, and Beck. Peter had such a glorious touch thanks to his wonderful simplicity. But then he went off the rails and became a gravedigger.

I worked with him in 1978 when I got a call from a manager who was trying to drag him out of obscurity. They set him up at a house in London and we jammed daily. But Peter was away with the fairies, cranking the reverb all the way up on his amp.

Little came out of it, but we must have recorded something because parts ended up on an album. I was on Spotify not long ago and found this solo I played. Beck maintained his level of excellence through the years, if not extending it. Peter didn’t manage to hold onto that special thing he had. It was a curious little interlude working with him.

Speaking of Clapton, you also worked with Jack Bruce at one point.

In terms of the people I worshipped back in my school days, Cream were at the top. So it’s bizarre that I ended up playing with Jack Bruce – even though what I did with him was pretty obscure, when he was going into more of a jazz direction. But it was still a wonderful phenomenon.

When I was around 20 my favorite band were Yes. So it’s a curiosity that I ended up playing with Rick Wakeman. And much later, his son Adam [Ozzy Osbourne/Black Sabbath] – who I literally met as a baby – ended up doing some 10cc gigs. My working life has been punctuated by these improbable serendipities.

Then there’s your work with Agnetha Fältskog, Cliff Richard, John Wetton, and more.

I did Agnetha’s eighth solo album, recorded at Polar Studios, where I also taught her how to play chess – that’s one of my distinctions! With Cliff, we worked in the studio a couple of times. John Wetton passing away in 2017 was a tough loss.

So a lot of these collaborations came by pure chance?

10cc were roaring at the end of the '70s, Dreadlock Holiday was number one in the charts around the world, but then Eric Stewart had a shocking car accident which cost him an eye, an ear, and a lot of confidence. We got put on ice for a while and because of the breaks I ended up meeting and playing with other musicians.

Everyone was connected – you’d play with one person and get recommended for something else. There were long periods of inactivity, like most of the '90s, which is when I started composing more. Nick Mason and I had a company making commercials. We did one for the Super Bowl, which was quite a big deal. It launched me into that world.

We’d write these funky commercials for cigarettes, cars, and things that felt cool. By the time I moved to Australia, I was quite burnt out because it’s quite a lonely profession.

Finally, which of your solos would you say captures you at your best?

One that often gets mentioned by 10cc fans is the solo from the song Don’t Ask. I remember being happy with how it came out. But my favorite is on an album I did with Pete Howarth from The Hollies. The first song we wrote together was written for and named after a documentary called No Man’s Land. It ended up on the album And Still I Fly. That, for me, was my best moment as a lead guitarist.

• 10cc are on tour now.

Last week, the Jim Irsay Collection auction set a new gold standard for high-profile guitar auctions.

David Gilmour's Black Strat went under the hammer for a record-shattering $14.6 million, with Jerry Garcia's “Tiger” guitar hot on its heels, selling for $11,560,000. These two white whales were followed by Kurt Cobain’s Smells Like Teen Spirit Mustang and Eric Clapton’s MTV Unplugged Martin, which fetched $6,907,000 and $4,101,000, respectively.

And, in a market where the prices of these mythical guitars only seem to be rising, the question on every guitar aficionado's lips is: what instruments could overtake the “Black Strat” one day?

“When a band is getting older, their fans also are getting older, [and] they have more capacity to buy the items of their dreams,” explains Matthieu Lucas, guitar market expert and owner of Paris emporium Matt's Guitar Shop – when asked this million-dollar question.

“So the price of the items is also growing. When, of course, some artists are passing away, people are missing them so much that they want their guitars. That's the only connection they can have with them anymore.

“But I would be curious to have one of those big dinosaur guitars on stage... after the success of the Gibson signature, one of Keith Richards' guitars going on stage, like the black ES-355, the “Micawber” Tele, or Jimmy Page's guitars, or Brian May's [Red Special] guitar, or Paul McCartney's [Höfner 500/1] bass.”

Lucas is, of course, referring to the legendary guitars that these rock giants are still using to this day.

“I think we would be surprised by the price they fetch, because I think records are made to be broken and are made to be set higher every time. It wouldn't surprise me in the near future if we see a guitar [sold for] between 20 and 30, 40 million [dollars]. That wouldn't surprise me at all.”

As for the one guitar Lucas speculates would have actually gone for this price last Thursday, well, there's one in particular... “If Jimmy Page's “No. 1” Les Paul was in that room that day, that would be between 20 and 30 million [dollars] easy for sure,” he asserts.

Guitar World's full interview with Matthieu Lucas from Matt's Guitar Shop will be published in the coming weeks.

The cream of the crop of Jim Irsay's collection of instruments and music memorabilia alone raked in a total of $84,091,350 from 44 lots – smashing all pre-auction estimates along the way. Guitar World’s Jackson Maxwell reported live from the auction floor, witnessing these historic sales.

Last Thursday (March 12), I found myself in the ritzy confines of Christie’s auction house in Rockefeller Plaza in New York City. My assignment? To provide a play-by-play of what was likely to be the biggest guitar auction of all time, as the musical instrument and memorabilia collection of the late Indianapolis Colts owner and CEO Jim Irsay went under the hammer.

Though a record-breaking sale wasn’t a sure thing, any doubt on my end was erased on my arrival. The public rooms in the auction house had been subsumed by Irsay’s pop culture treasure trove. I’d read and reported on the collection many times before, but seeing the scale of it in person was incredible – room after room; multiple floors.

To give you an idea of the breadth of his acquisitions over the years – from handwritten Dylan lyrics, to the original typewriter scroll manuscript of On The Road – the auctioning of all the lots took four days.

That evening, it was the cream of the crop of Irsay’s music and literature-related possessions – including what’s now confirmed beyond doubt to be the most valuable collection of guitars ever held by a private individual – that was going under the hammer.

Those in the room who were aware of the sale that was set to occur were buzzing. At one point, before seating for the event began, facing away from the closed doors to the auction room, I suddenly saw eyes light up and phones fly out of pockets.

Turning around, I saw white-gloved attendants carrying the stars of the show to the front of the auction room: Kurt Cobain’s Smells Like Teen Spirit Fender Mustang, Jerry Garcia’s “Tiger” guitar, and David Gilmour’s Black Strat.

I’m ever a cynic, but I was taken aback by the aura – as the youth would say – of the instruments; enough that my moment’s hesitation cost me the paparazzi shot I wanted to get of the scene.

Once the proceedings got underway, it was clear that the bidders felt the same way – the estimated value of the guitars kept getting cleared by wider and wider margins.

Two John Lennon-used guitars, a Rickenbacker and a Gretsch, from the Beatles’ early-mid period, sold for $1.27 million apiece, over the top end of their estimated value. The 1964 Gibson SG George Harrison used extensively with the Beatles from 1966-1968 sold for roughly twice its estimate at $2.27 million. Eric Clapton’s iconic “The Fool” SG, so emblematic of the psychedelic era, sold for roughly three times its predicted price at $3 million.

My task was to liveblog the proceedings, so I had little time to ruminate on what those prices meant. It felt like Monopoly money – random numbers I just had to peck into my article.

And then came the white whale: David Gilmour’s Black Strat. The one-time record holder for the most expensive guitar ever sold at auction – for $3.975 million in 2019, in the very same room I was in now – it was valued at between $2 and $4 million.

It cleared its previous sale price quickly as bidding started: not a huge surprise. And then the bidding just kept going. And going. And going. $6 million – there goes the previous record, shelled out for Kurt Cobain’s MTV Unplugged Martin D-18E in 2020. $8 million. $9 million. Even some of the auction house employees near me in the press area – never mind the attendees – were stunned by this point.

By the time bidding hit $10 million, I went so far as to abandon my blogging duties, close my laptop to take it all in, and capture what I knew was history on video.

As the price climbed ever-higher, a distant voice in the back of my mind was telling me to be disgusted – ‘It’s a guitar! This is absurd!’ And yet I was ooohing and aaahing, too, smiling and laughing in wonder as 10 minutes of bidding went to 15, and then 20. Finally, at $14.6 million, the hammer went down and I burst into applause like everyone else.

Incredibly, that Everest-summiting-like bidding war was followed by another; this one a scrap for Jerry Garcia’s “Tiger” guitar. A $1 – $2 million estimate, another extended bidding exchange – and a sale priced way beyond expectations, at $11.6 million. Again caught up in it all, I got the perfect capture of the magic moment. Listen to the crowd!

When Kurt Cobain’s Smells Like Teen Spirit Mustang became the third guitar of the evening to pass the former record holder – which Irsay felt wasn’t worth the princely sum that was paid for it – it was almost an afterthought; still some applause, but not the shock and awe heard earlier in the evening.

Given the figures from previous lots and the fact that that particular guitar had sold for $4.55 million just three years earlier – it wasn’t as much of an estimate-obliterator as the Gilmour and Garcia instruments.

And that’s food for thought. David Gilmour is, of course, still going strong, while Jerry Garcia has been gone for 30 years, but these legendary guitars of the classic rock pantheon, in particular, continue to capture people’s imaginations and smash through the ceiling of their predicted value.

The $14.5 million sale represents a stunning epoch in the value of the guitar. It puts the Black Strat in the neighborhood of many of the most expensive Stradivarius violins ever sold; are there vintage instruments any more “serious” and respected than those?

I thought I was way too cynical and skeptical to get caught up in the fuss of watching people proverbially tossing millions of dollars into the air like graduation caps, but there was something about being in the presence of that guitar in particular.

In the middle of all that frenzied bidding, I thought of sitting in front of my parents’ small TV as a youngster, seeing the master wrangle a sublime take on the Comfortably Numb solo out of that jet-black six-string. ‘Huh. Maybe if I did have a spare $14 million left over after helping those less fortunate…’

It was the night when the records fell – 23 of them in total – when all pre-auction estimates were smashed, and quite possibly the market for vintage guitars with player kudos will never be the same again.

The Jim Irsay Collection: Hall of Fame auction, hosted at Christie’s in New York, was truly a historic event, with all 44 lots sold and a cool $84,091,350 changing hands – a record for a guitar auction. By close of play, those figures saw Christie’s exceed its sales estimate by 373 per cent.

After 21 minutes of intense bidding – received like a Federer vs Nadal rally at the Arthur Ashe Stadium – the world had a new most-expensive guitar, and to the surprise of no one in the weeks leading up to the auction, it was David Gilmour’s Black Strat, the heavily modified Stratocaster that “he grew tired of” and sold, but not before tracking Comfortably Numb and Shine on You Crazy Diamond with it, anointing it as the ne plus ultra of Pink Floyd guitars.

The hammer came down at $14,550,000. For that kind of money, here’s hoping they threw in a guitar strap and a fresh set of D’Addario NYXL 10s.

But it did not take long for jaws – and records – to fall once more. Inside the hall, there were some Amex Platinum credit cards going uncomfortably numb as the bidding heated up for Jerry Garcia’s custom-built Tiger, the electric guitar that was six years in the making, comprised of the finest tone woods known to humanity, and the Grateful Dead icon’s most-celebrated guitar.

It set another record for a Garcia-owned guitar – and needless to say, for a guitar built by Doug Irwin, selling for $11,560,000.

Of course this was the sort of night that someone would spend the best part of seven million bucks on a left-handed student-model Fender guitar that is the definition of player grade.

Yes, Kurt Cobain’s 1969 Competition Mustang from the Smells Like Teenage Spirit video fetched a record (for a Cobain guitar) $6,907,000. It was previously the world's most expensive guitar, and so, on the night, its record was broken three times.

Julien Pradels, president, Christie’s Americas, said the night was a testimony to Irsay’s curation of the most important guitars, musical instruments and pop-cultural ephemera in history.

This wasn’t just guitars breaking records; we had Ringo Starr’s Beatles logo Ed Sullivan Show Ludwig drum head going for $2,881,000; Bob Dylan’s handwritten lyrics sheet for The Times They Are a Changin’ sold for $2,515,000… Someone paid over one-and-a-half million dollars for a saddle!

“Lot after lot we felt like we were making history,” said Pradels. “The Irsay sale did justice to the brilliance of the collector, and of the monumental pieces he brought together, iconic objects that tell the story of our culture and our times. The Irsay Collection is singular, but Christie’s will have other amazing sales in this space moving forward.”

There was the record sale for any guitar owned by a woman, as Janis Joplin’s Gibson J-45 acoustic guitar went for $381,000.

There was a new record set for a Gibson guitar, as Eric Clapton’s The Fool SG sold for $3,003,000, while his 1939 Martin 000-42 – i.e. the one from MTV Unplugged, “See if you can spot this one…” and all that – changed hands for a whopping $4,101,000.

It was an expensive night to be a Beatlemaniac with deep pockets. Brace for more records: George Harrison’s Gibson SG Standard mopped up $2,271,000; John Lennon’s Broadwood piano (okay, that’s not a guitar) sold for $3,247,000.

Even when the lots were not making world records they were destroying pre-auction estimates.

Many exceptional guitars were sold for eye-watering sums, such as John Lennon’s 1964 Rickenbacker Model 1996 and his 1963 Gretsch 6120 Chet Atkins, with both going for $1,270,000.

Prince’s Custom ‘Yellow Cloud’ seems a bargain at $635,000, and that seems to be the going rate for iconic “shape” electrics as The Edge’s korina Explorer, a backup on U2’s Joshua Tree tour, went for the same price.

Harrison’s Bisgby-equipped Maton Mastersound, which older readers might remember seeing onstage when the Beatles played the UK in the summer of ’63, sold for $279,400 – and please let it have been Josh Homme who bought it, because that would look just the thing on a QOTSA stage.

The 1966 prototype Vox Kensington semi-hollow guitar, once owned by the Beatles, would look crazy on any stage with its tulip-inspired body shape and arcane electronics – and at $609,600 it would legit be crazy to take it on any stage, or out of the house for that matter.

Would this even be a history-making auction without a Johnny Cash guitar? Of course not. The Man in Black’s 1956 Martin D-21 fetched $215,900, and with its battered top and vibe off the charts, that, legitimately, feels like a good buy.

And so it went on, Paul McCartney’s Yamaha BB-1200 (an underrated bass guitar) sold for $228,600. Oh, and another David Gilmour guitar breaking the multi-million-dollar mark with his Wish You Were Here 1969 Martin D-35 going for $2,393,000. A lot of money, but you can be damn sure that it’ll make your Em7 and open G chords sound godly.

Last, but by no means least, one of the coolest guitar-related items to be auctioned in opening salvo from the Jim Irsay’s über collection is taken from the Grateful Dead’s ‘Wall of Sound,’ the 600-watt/300-watts-per-channel McIntosh MC2300 power amp nicknamed Budman. It sold for $381,000. That’d add a little punch to your backline.

So there you have it. As a wise man who is known to collect the odd guitar (to play them too), always says, “A guitar is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it.”

But that's not all from Jim Irsay Collection. There will be a further three epic auctions, with the Icons of Popular Culture going live today, (March 13), The Jim Irsay Collection: Icons of Music going live on March 14, while the Jim Irsay Collection: Online, which is live from March 3 to 17.

See Christie's for more details.

The Jim Irsay Collection: what sold and for how much?

• David Gilmour Black Strat – $14,550,000
• Jerry Garcia Tiger – $11,560,000
• Kurt Cobain Smells Like Teen Spirit Mustang – $6,907,000
• Eric Clapton’s MTV Unplugged Martin 000-42 – $4,101,000
• Eric Clapton’s Gibson SG “The Fool” – $3,003,000
• David Gilmour’s Wish You Were Here Martin D-35 – $2,393,000
• George Harrison’s 1964 Gibson SG Standard – $2,271,000
• John Lennon’s 1964 Rickenbacker Model 1996 – $1,270,000
• John Lennon’s 1963 Gretsch 6120 Chet Atkins – $1,270,000
• The Beatles' 1966 Vox Kensington prototype – $609,600
• Prince’s Custom ‘Yellow Cloud’ Electric – $635,000
• The Edge's 1976 korina Gibson Explorer – $635,000
• George Harrison's Maton 'Mastersound' – $279,400
• Johnny Cash's 1956 Martin D-21 – $215,900
• Gibson circa 1954 Les Paul Custom prototype – $152,400

During his lifetime, the late Indianapolis Colts owner and CEO Jim Irsay used his considerable wealth to amass the most valuable private guitar collection in the world.

Three of the 10 most expensive guitars ever sold at auction – including Kurt Cobain’s Smells Like Teen Spirit Mustang and David Gilmour’s Black Fender Stratocaster, numbers 2 and 3 on that respective list – belonged to Irsay, and the value of his whole collection has been estimated at a billion dollars.

After his death last May, questions swirled as to what would become of the collection, given that Irsay was adamant that even the most valuable guitars in it be played onstage, and not merely sit encased in glass.

Earlier this year, though, it was revealed that the whole thing – the jewels included – would go under the hammer at Christie's auction house in New York. As the auction unfolded today (Thursday, March 12), we were live on the floor.

The big question on our minds was, inevitably, will we see the great big record – the $6 million shelled out for Kurt Cobain’s MTV Unplugged Martin D-18E in 2020 – fall?

Did it ever! The previous record holder now finds itself in 4th place.

On top once again is David Gilmour's Black Strat. Having set the record as the most expensive guitar ever sold at auction back in 2019, for a measly $3.975 million, the Black Strat reclaimed its record once again with authority, selling for an astonishing $14.5 million.

Also going for eight figures was Jerry Garcia's “Tiger” guitar, which fetched $11.5 million. Kurt Cobain's Smells Like Teen Spirit Fender Mustang, previously #2 on the list with a selling price of $4.55 million, went for a cool $6.9 million.

Read on for our live report from the floor, as it happened, and check out our full overview of the auction here.

The room's filled up since this writer took this photo. Recognize those guitars up there in the front?

No blockbuster guitar sales yet, but we've just seen one of Ringo Starr's drum kits sell for north of $2 million!

Owned by John Lennon and used by him for the Beatles' 1964 Christmas show – then later gifted to Ringo Starr – this 1964 Rickenbacker has become the first mega guitar sale of the auction, with a sale price of $1.27 million.

Aaaaand the 1964 Gibson SG pictured below – used extensively by George Harrison from 1966-1968 – has said, “hold my beer!” $2.27 million! This was well over its estimate. Will that be a theme as the evening goes on?

Though not the most valuable guitar in the lot, this custom, prototype guitar made by Vox for the Beatles in 1966 is certainly one of the most unique. Someone's just parted ways with just about $600k to grab it.

One of the most iconic guitars of the 1960s, Eric Clapton’s The Fool SG, has just sold for a whopping $3 million, after a massive bidding war. This is also far above its estimate. One of the most significant six-strings in the lot, it will forever be associated with Slowhand's tenure in Cream.

So, I'm not supposed to curse, but holy shit. David Gilmour's Black Strat, the guitar most synonymous with the Pink Floyd legend, has just sold for $14.5 million, after 21 minutes of bidding. This more than doubles – destroys, really – the previous record for the most expensive guitar ever sold at auction.

Well, the excitement from the Black Strat sale lasted about 10 minutes. Jerry Garcia's “Tiger” guitar has also obliterated the pre-auction record mark, selling for $11.5 million. Two guitars have more than doubled, or come close to doubling, the previous record for the most expensive guitar ever sold at auction, in less than 15 minutes.

It almost doesn't feel noteworthy at this point, but the $6 million flat high water mark set by Kurt Cobain's MTV Unplugged Martin D-18E six years ago has been eclipsed a third time – by the Nirvana man's Smells Like Teen Spirit Mustang, previously the second most expensive guitar ever sold at auction. It's fetched $6.9 million.

The Martin 000-42 Eric Clapton used for his beloved, enormously successful MTV Unplugged performance has also fetched a princely sum: $4.1 million. Classic rock-affiliated six-strings in particular have blown well past their estimated values this evening.

And that about wraps this sucker up, in terms of blockbuster guitars. We figured going in that this would be the biggest guitar auction of all time, and truly, nothing else comes within the zip code of this sale. For the first time (at least publicly), we've seen individual guitars sell for eight figures. We only hope that some (all, ideally) of the new owners of these instruments follow in the footsteps of their previous owner in not keeping them permanently behind glass.

Until then, we uh, need to completely re-write our list of the most expensive guitars ever sold at auction...

This is not the first time that Christie’s has played host to David Gilmour’s feted ‘Black Strat’ – the guitar he used on The Dark Side Of The Moon, Wish You Were Here, countless epochal live shows, and on Comfortably Numb.

Indeed, the first time many people heard of Jim Irsay was when he bought the Black Strat at auction at Christie’s on 20 June 2019 for $3,975,000, setting a new record for a guitar.

“No-one quite anticipated the amount of excitement it would cause among both fans and collectors – who are often the same people,” Amelia Walker recalls. “I think we had something like 19 unique bidders on that guitar, many of whom carried on bidding to a very, very high level.

“For so many people, [the Black Strat] is the [centrepiece] of the Irsay Collection and is David Gilmour’s calling card – its look is so distinct. I’ve spoken to a lot of people about it and so many of them think it will make more this time around, which is really interesting.”

It began life as a Fender 1968 to ’69 alder body Strat with a black finish painted over sunburst and originally featured a late-’60s maple neck with large headstock and 21 frets.

A switch to a rosewood neck occurred during its most famous studio stints, however, and it was in this configuration that it appeared on The Dark Side Of The Moon and Wish You Were Here.

The neck swaps didn’t end there and at one point it even had a Charvel neck fitted. At present, the Black Strat is fitted with a 1983 ’57 reissue C-shape maple Fender neck with 7.25-inch radius fingerboard and 21 vintage-style frets.

The black scratchplate that gives the guitar its iconic look was fitted in 1974 and is not a factory part as Fender didn’t make them to this spec at that point. Sensibly, and like almost every vintage Strat not in collector-grade condition, the original three-way pickup selector was swapped out for a five-way as late as 1985.

Meanwhile, the neck and middle pickups date from 1971, while the bridge pickup is a Seymour Duncan custom-wound SSL-1C, installed in 1979, which replaced a DiMarzio FS-1 that represented one of Gilmour’s early attempts to get more beef out of the notoriously thin-sounding Strat bridge pickup position.

There are further electronics mods in the form of a mini-toggle just below the pots to allow the neck pickup to be switched in independently for a somewhat Jazzmaster-like tone.

Some mods of the past have been reversed, such as routing for an XLR socket on the edge of the body and a visibly refilled cavity where a Kahler vibrato was fitted – and, in fact, it was this mod that caused the Black Strat to be retired, for a time, from Gilmour’s go-to guitars.

“It seemed to deaden the sound somewhat,” Gilmour’s long-term tech Phil Taylor told Guitarist in 2015. “It just fell out of David’s favour when the new ’57 reissue Strats came out. So David agreed to loan the Black Strat to the Hard Rock Cafe.” It did return to service later, but that, as they say, is another story.

• Christie’s will auction The Jim Irsay Collection: Hall of Fame, including the iconic guitars in this feature and others, plus some of the most important cultural objects of the 20th century, on the evening of 12 March. For more information on the four-part sale series, visit Christie's.
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

Many famous guitar collections are simply impressive – but some go far beyond that. So far, in fact, that they become as culturally important as anything found in a museum and raise questions about the role private guitar collections play in preserving pillars of modern culture.

Jim Irsay, who died last year, was that kind of collector. The catalogue of his collection reads like a roadmap of American pop culture and includes everything from the original paper-roll manuscript of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road to Miles Davis’s Martin trumpet and, of course, some of the most important guitars the world has ever seen.

“As a very wealthy individual, Jim Irsay had the means to collect so many iconic objects, which most of us can only dream of,” says Amelia Walker, who is specialist head of the Private & Iconic Collections at Christie’s.

“But I think he was genuinely just a really nice guy who loved guitars, loved music, and felt a responsibility to look after these things and steward them onto their next home. I think he was aware that you can’t be buried with these things – you are but the temporary custodian of them.

“So I think his main aim was to bring them together and let people access them, and he did a lot of touring exhibitions. He got the instruments played by The Jim Irsay Band, and Kenny Wayne Shepherd played the Black Strat. So I think he was very open to sharing them. And because he was also a player, I think he knew that, where the instrument’s condition allowed, these things should be played – they should be loved and warmed up and all of that sort of thing.

“While he was definitely somebody who had them behind glass in his office – which I think is every guitarist’s worst anticipation of what happens at auction – he did also play them.”

Eleanor Jane, founder and editor of Eleven magazine and the book Superstar Guitars, concurs, recalling her time documenting Jim Irsay’s instruments in a similar light.

“His office was like a museum – but one in which you were encouraged to interact with the artefacts,” she recalls. “I photographed the guitars up close and personal – a phenomenal collection of hitmaker after hitmaker. After the photoshoot, Mr Irsay arranged for a private concert for me and the team, demonstrating the most iconic guitars and flying in some of the best musicians around to perform and jam, including Kenny Wayne Shepherd.

“He even drove in Hunter S Thompson’s iconic ‘Red Shark’ car as an incredible backdrop for the event. This turned out to be the first of many, much larger, free concerts and exhibitions across the USA, in which Mr Irsay brought in artists such as Billy Gibbons and Tom Bukovac to perform, allowing thousands of fans an experience of a lifetime.”

All very commendable, but surely a collection of this calibre represents, in the final analysis, a cultural commonwealth of the kind that typically belongs in museums. Now that it’s all up for sale, is it likely that major pieces from the collection will end up in public hands again?

“Well, it’s interesting – and I’ve had the same conversations with people here in LA and in London,” says Amelia Walker. “You looked around the room at just a few of the highlights that we had and it was sort of like a museum exhibition, rather than an auction, because each of those items is an amazing item on its own individual merit, like you would see in a museum celebrating the best of the best of whatever category – and so it is museum-quality.

“People have all sorts of different thoughts and feelings about where collections such as this should end up, and I imagine there will be some participation from institutions.

“But people also forget that museums don’t have any money and it’s often down to generous philanthropic donations that they get pieces like this, like The Met collection donation from Dirk Ziff, which is one of the most incredible philanthropic donations ever, in this world [of iconic guitars].

“So it’ll be interesting to see who bids on these items. I suspect it will be a huge, varied mixture of guitarists, collectors, museums and investors.”

Indeed, the authenticators behind high-profile sales of this kind have to employ the sort of forensic approach normally reserved for academics.

With many of the modifications made to famous guitars taking place over decades on dim backstage workbenches or even at the hands of DIY-oriented players themselves, how do latter-day specialists determine what changes have been made (and when) in order to establish provenance?

Sometimes techs keep methodical, detailed notes over the years, but that kind of evidence is rare when it comes to fully confirming the backstory of iconic guitars.

“It’s a really good question and it keeps me up at night a lot of the time,” Walker says. “But we do our utmost to talk to every single person who’s touched that instrument, in terms of the techs, the roadies, the restorers, the dealers. Obviously, with the Black Strat, Phil Taylor wrote a whole book about it, so he was very, very involved, so we’ve obviously spoken to him recently.

“We do everything we can to get to the bottom of modifications, and we’re really lucky to be able to call up people like Seymour Duncan and ask, ‘Do you remember doing this? Is that what happened?’ And most of the time, people are so kind and generous with their recollections or their records, and it’s part of our due diligence process.

“But we do have to include a caveat that we will never be able to fully list every modification that would have happened since 1970, for example. This was a big issue with the Jeff Beck sale because they were Fenders [Beck’s Strats] and he continually swapped necks around and continually swapped the pickups around, and did it himself without telling his techs most of the time.

“I had such a nightmare trying to marry things up. We have a very clear line that we try to be spot-on with everything, but we cannot possibly list the full modifications, and part of being a touring and recording artist’s instrument is being modified for their needs. So that’s what we do. Basically, we go to pretty extreme lengths to try to get to the bottom of everything.”

• Christie’s will auction The Jim Irsay Collection: Hall Of Fame, including the iconic guitars in this feature and others, plus some of the most important cultural objects of the 20th century, on the evening of 12 March. For more information on the four-part sale series, visit Christie's
• Photographer and editor Eleanor Jane’s new book, The Guitar Chronicles, is due to be released on 17 September via Welbeck.
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

Jim Irsay’s guitar haul is widely regarded to be the finest publicized collection in existence, featuring a sizeable chunk of the most famous instruments of the 20th century, including Kurt Cobain’s Smells Like Teen Spirit Mustang, David Gilmour’s Black Strat and Eric Clapton ‘The Fool’ SG, alongside a host of Beatles kit.

Following Irsay’s passing last year, it was confirmed that the collection would be sold via Christie’s in London and the first 50 lots – including the aforementioned Mustang, Black Strat and The Fool SG – are going under the hammer this March.

Now our UK sister publication Guitarist has been granted an exclusive look at three of Jim Irsay’s most treasured electric guitars from this historic collection, before they are potentially split up following the sale.

“Jim Irsay was so proud of having acquired this guitar. It was like the jewel in the crown of his collection,” Christie's Amelia Walker explains in the clip above.

“It was the most expensive guitar ever when it sold in 2019, and it was something that he loved for everything it represented about music, David Gilmour's creativity, and what he produced.”

Like most of his guitars, Irsay didn’t want them to be locked away in class cases like ancient relics. He regularly loaned them out for performances. For instance, Kenny Wayne Shepherd performed Comfortably Numb on the Black Strat and told Guitar World that he had to adapt to the instrument because it remained set up to Gilmour’s liking. Irsay wouldn't have it altered.

Three years after buying the Black Strat, Irsay broke his own record when Cobain's Mustang went under the hammer in New York.

“It was used to record much of Nevermind, and In Utero, and by all accounts, it was one of his most prized possessions,” says Walker.

“It’s unusual, because he [Cobain] couldn’t find many left-handed vintage guitars and [it was used to record] a generational anthem. Jim Irsay loved it; he recognized its importance in the canon of American music.”

The Fool SG, meanwhile, is a guitar slightly less known in the wider public consciousness, but no less historic. It was built in 1964 and given its kaleidoscopic paint job by the Dutch design collective The Fool, which gave it its name.

After that, Clapton wielded it at the height of Cream's monumental success, making it a totem of the Summer of Love in 1967 and the guitar on which he mastered his iconic ‘woman’ tone, before ending up in the hands of producer/guitarist Todd Rundgren.

“It's the embodiment of psychedelia; it’s mad, beautiful, and colorful,” Walker continues. “It’s a moment in time, and it’s where that whole inimitable Eric Clapton [image] was created.”

Indeed, Clapton/Cream classics, like Crossroads and Sunshine of Your Love, were born from this guitar's dizzying color palette – both tonally and aesthetically – meaning its comparatively humble $1.27M sale in 2023 could very well be usurped in March.

Irsay reportedly once turned down an offer of $1 billion for the collection, deemed by many the world’s finest of its kind, but turned it down. They meant more to him than their weighted price tags alone.

Indeed, of the world’s most expensive guitars, Irsay had won two of the top three – Kurt Cobain’s Smells Like Teen Spirit Fender Mustang ($4.55M) and David Gilmour’s Black Strat ($3.975M) – and famously said that the chart-topping guitar, Cobain’s MTV Unplugged Marted D-18, wasn’t worth the $6 million figure it sold for.

Irsay's favorite guitar? Well it remains unconfirmed, but it’s thought to be the one he purchased for £1M in 2013 after it was discovered in a woman's attic.

Christie's has just announced the details of the historic sale of the Jim Irsay Collection. Widely regarded as the greatest guitar collection on Earth, it will be auctioned off in a series of sales in 2026.

Compiled over decades by the late billionaire businessman and owner/CEO of the Indianapolis Colts, the Jim Irsay Collection has achieved a mythical status, as it includes some of the most famous acoustic and electric guitars to ever exist.

“Jim Irsay was an incredible collector with an eye for rare treasures tied to the most important moments in our collective history,” explains Christie's Americas President, Julien Pradels.

“It is a privilege to offer this renowned collection at Christie's, giving collectors and visitors a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to view, be inspired by, and bid on these objects.”

The first live sale is set to feature around 50 lots, comprising some of the most sought-after treasures in the collection

Highlights include David Gilmour's “Black Strat,” Kurt Cobain's Smells Like Teen Spirit 1966 Fender Mustang, Jerry Garcia's “Tiger” guitar, John Lennon's 1963 Gretsch Chet Atkins 6120, George Harrison's stage-played Gibson SG, and Eric Clapton's MTV Unplugged 1939 Martin 000-42.

The once-in-a-generation auction will kick off with almost 400 items, tracing pivotal moments in music, film, sports, pop culture, and, of course, guitar, history, over four auctions from March 3 to March 18 – alongside a free, public exhibition at Christie's New York from March 6 to March 12.

For more information, head to Christie's.

Best of 2025: Over the holiday season, GW is shining the spotlight on some of its biggest stories of the year.

As a gun for hire, Snowy White has worked with Pink Floyd, Peter Green and Joan Armatrading, to name a few; and he was also a paid-up member of Thin Lizzy, appearing on 1980’s Chinatown and 1981’s Renegade.

He embarked on a prolific solo career with 1983’s solo debut White Flames – featuring signature track Bird of Paradise, and became touring guitarist with Roger Waters before retiring from live work in 2019.

You worked with Peter Green on his 1979 album In the Skies. What was that experience like?

“Peter rang me one day and said, ‘I’m doing an album for a small record company that my brother is involved in. Can I use you and your band?’ So we went into a studio and basically just jammed.

“He was in a good mood and it was a fun session. He was playing rhythm stuff and asked me to play lead, but I said, ‘Pete, it’s your album – you play some lead.’ In the end we both did a bit of each.”

“Of course, I was very happy to be doing it. I’d known him for a few years and I didn’t think he’d ever record again. He took away the tracks and worked on them, then we went to The Who's studio in Battersea, London, and recorded the tracks again.

“I’d put in some of my ideas, but unfortunately, in the end, I wasn't credited with any songwriting. That was a pity. But I didn't make a fuss – I figured Peter was still pretty fragile and unsure about dealing with the business side of things, so I let it pass.”

Your 1994 album Highway To The Sun featured David Gilmour and Gary Moore. What was it like working with them?

“I only asked them because the record company thought a few well-known names would be a good selling point. I didn’t really mind either way! But it was very nice of them to agree to appear – Chris Rea also.

“Gary came to the studio and I just asked him to blow over the end of a slow blues. With Dave’s contribution, I took the tapes to his boat studio and said, ‘It’s a really simple track; just do a few takes and I'll sort it out later.’ He used his Whammy pedal, which I hadn't heard before. I chose the best bits when I mixed it.

“It was all pretty simple, really. I guess the obvious difference is that I was telling them what I wanted, as opposed to the other way round.”

Which do you prefer: being in a band or being a solo artist?

“I’m not very good at playing other guitarists' parts, so I had to work quite hard to make it sound okay. It was occasionally a bit hairy, but I learned many years ago how to bluff my way through. It occasionally came in very handy; I didn’t come unstuck very often.

“Both situations have plusses and minuses. For instance, the nicest thing about being in Roger’s band – apart from being involved in all those great shows – was that all I had to do was walk on stage, pick up my already-tuned guitar and start playing. And we went all over the world for 13 years, so I saw a lot of places that I would never have got to on my own.

“In contrast, when I was touring Europe with my own band, The White Flames – firstly in the ‘90s, and then later, in between tours with Roger – I was doing almost everything. I was driving, booking hotels, sorting out travel, collecting the money, dealing with the various hassles, and then going onstage and doing the gig.

“But the reward for that was that I was up on stage doing my own thing with musicians that were really loyal and helpful, and, more importantly, good-humoured, whatever happened, whatever went wrong. There was a lot of energy around and a lot of respect.

“Later on, we had some great guys as our crew, who took on most of those touring jobs, so I was able to relax a bit more. My favourite memories from my whole career are from those days – the three of us and couple of crew, travelling around Europe, having the energy to deal with everything that goes on, and still having plenty of energy left onstage.

“We had some great times together. So, I guess the answer is that I’ve been happy that I could do both; but doing small gigs with my own band far outweighs the big stadium tours.”

In 1995 you released a compilation album called Goldtop, a reference to your famed Les Paul.

“I went on holiday to Sweden with a friend and met a lovely Swedish girl, so I stayed there for over a year. I joined a three-piece band, The Train, and the drummer had a friend who was selling his Les Paul Goldtop. I had a go and liked it, so I bought it.

“I have to admit that I don’t know much about guitars – I’m not really interested in the way they work or the different makes and models. I just liked that Les Paul; and as it turned out, it was the only guitar I had for many years.

“I played it nearly every day, and later, when I had to use different guitars for the various bands I was with, I still used my old Les Paul whenever I could. I kept it for 45 years, finally letting it go about five years ago.”

How has your guitar playing has evolved over the years?

“It was a slow process, but as time went by my playing became more confident. Quite a few years ago I started to feel that I had nothing to prove any longer. I think I became able to choose better notes and spaces, just pleasing myself, really.”

Looking back on Bird of Paradise, how important was that track and album for your career?

“Obviously having a successful single means you get heard by more people. But in the case of Bird of Paradise, many people saw me as a ballad singer who happened to play a bit of decent guitar.

“As it was my first solo album, I wasn’t really expecting much from it – certainly not a hit single. I was pretty uncomfortable with the whole idea of being in that area of pop music, and I soon discovered that it wasn’t for me.

“I soon went back to the blues, forming Snowy White’s Blues Agency. But Bird of Paradise opened some doors though, and I’m grateful for that.”

What’s your current gear setup?

“I used to have a very simple setup – just my guitar into a Vox AC30 via a [Boss] Blues Driver pedal and a [Electro-Harmonix] Holy Grail reverb. But I don’t have a setup any longer; I haven’t done a live show since June 7, 2019.

“These days my fingers don’t do exactly what my brain tells them to do, so I preferred to retire from live shows rather than put on a second-rate performance.”

So what’s next for you?

“I’m still recording albums, but apart from that I’m not really very active in the music business any longer. I’m very happy to spend most of my time at home. In fact, right now, I never want to get on a plane again!

“But you never know what might transpire in the future. We’ll see what fate has in store.”

• Unfinished Business is out now.

It really doesn’t matter what genre of music you prefer to play, if you’re reading this you probably own a delay pedal, if not several of them.

Of course, there are always exceptions – some players swear by only reverb and some might not even dial in any ambience whatsoever. But for the most part, delay pedals sit among the most valuable of tools out there for guitarists.

Which is also why there are so many different types of delay: from analog and bucket-brigade to digital, ping-pong, reverse, and tape. Each of these will have a defining quality to its repeats, even if the functionality and concept is by and large the same.

One type of delay that’s rich in musical history, though arguably lesser-known compared to the usual suspects, is the Echorec drum echo, launched by Italian company Binson in the mid-50s. It was designed to be a portable replacement for the plate reverbs and echo chambers typically found in larger recording studios, using an analog magnetic drum recorder instead of a tape loop.

One of the first famous users was Hank Marvin from English rock and roll originals The Shadows. It then ended up in the hands of The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and The Who – though there's one guitar player who is more entwined with Echorec history than anyone else, Pink Floyd legend David Gilmour.

The Echorec’s distinct effect and tube-powered preamp can be heard on classic tracks like Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Time, and Echoes, as well as early cuts like Set The Controls For The Heart of the Sun, A Saucerful of Secrets, and Careful With That Axe, Eugene.

That helps explain why it’s a sound that’s still being used all these years later. It’s rooted in nostalgia and history, with a tonal characteristic that sets it apart from other types of delay.

There are a fair few companies recreating this famous effect in pedal form, but if there’s one Echorec-style delay to rule them all right now, it’s the Boonar by Croatian audio experts Dawner Prince.

With players like John Mayer, Steve Lukather, Chris Buck, and Richard Fortus – as well as, yes, even David Gilmour himself – often spotted using the pedal, we thought we’d rope in Dawner Prince CEO Zoran Kraljevic to help explain some of the intricacies behind the design.

“The main difference between a drum and tape echo lies in how the delay effect is generated,” reveals Kraljevic.

“A tape echo records and repeats the signal onto magnetic tape in a loop. The distance between the record and playback heads, along with the tape speed, determines the delay time. The sound is warm, with gentle modulation and gradual degradation over time.

“Drum echo, on the other hand, uses a rotating magnetic drum instead. The signal is recorded magnetically onto the surface of the drum, which contains a number of playback heads mounted around it. The drum system is more reliable than tape, and the metallic ‘memory’ medium provides a cleaner, hi-fi-quality sound.”

This innovation from an engineering perspective helped cement the Echorec’s status as one of the first delay units to definitively define the sound of an era.

In that sense, it was more than an effect, because players like David Gilmour and Hank Marvin were using it to sculpt entire soundscapes and create layers of space and emotion, rather than just adding a few simple repeats here and there.

As for the resurgence in popularity among today’s players, Kraljevic believes the appeal lies with those looking for something more “alive” than pristine digital delays, with an unmistakable “bubbling echo swell”.

It’s particularly popular among musicians working within more abstract realms, from psychedelic and stoner to post and prog rock players – guitarists looking for a certain kind of tonal coloration, rhythmic atmosphere, and increased dimension.

Designing the Boonar, however, was no mean feat, explains Kraljevic. This was mainly because of the rarity of original units and the costs involved with sourcing one. As fate would have it, he designed the first Boonar without even having spent time with a real Echorec.

“All I had were a pair of decent PC speakers, my ears, and a few good YouTube demos which I listened to countless times,” he confesses, later admitting he eventually did manage to A/B his design against an original and was very impressed with the results.

Another challenge was capturing all the characteristics that defined the sound and finding a way to faithfully reproduce them with DSP technology.

“The Echorec is an instrument in itself,” he notes. “Its echo is complex and multidimensional – something in between an echo and a reverb. It swells and grows rather than simply decaying.

“It’s not just a regular delay that repeats the input signal; it has movement, depth, and a musical texture that responds to how you play. There are so many tiny details that make up the bigger picture.”

Naturally, seeing his product end up in the hands of many guitar legends has been a source of great personal pride for the Dawner Prince owner. But getting the seal of approval from David Gilmour himself was, in many ways, one of the greatest achievements of his life and career to date.

“That was a turning point for both me and my company,” Kraljevic admits. “It came as confirmation that I’d created something authentic, placing our one-room workshop onto the world map of pedal manufacturers.

“I got a call from David’s longtime technician, Phil Taylor, who told me that David really liked the pedal and planned to use it, but there were a few small things that could be improved. I tweaked the design and released a firmware update that incorporated those final adjustments.”

The Pink Floyd mastermind was also involved in the testing phase of the higher-end Boonar Tube Deluxe, released in 2024. It features vacuum tubes, full MIDI control, and studio-grade outputs.

“It was my homage to the Binson Echorec 2 T7E,” Kraljevic explains. “Phil suggested some practical features like the ability to store/recall presets and a screen for the delay time, which David considered to be important.

“I was lucky to have the world’s greatest Echorec expert involved in the final testing phase. It was a real pleasure working with him. I feel privileged and proud to see the Boonar Tube Deluxe in both his studio and tour racks.”

For Rick Beato, sitting with David Gilmour and being surrounded by some of the electric guitars, amps, and effects that were used to create some of his most iconic Pink Floyd tones was a pinch-me moment. It doesn’t get any better.

The musician/producer turned YouTube star has welcomed scores of the greatest players in the world to his show. But, as he admits in a recent video interview with Guitar Player, having Gilmour sitting there beside him, playing through his Fender Stratocaster (not the Black Strat, that was sold at auction) was particularly surreal.

“Oh, I mean, that was unbelievable,” says Beato. “Because he has all the original [gear]. He’s playing through all the original gear that he used on these famous records.

“When you hear that Binson [Echorec] and he’s demonstrating his whammy bar and everything, it’s just, like, wow! And it sounds pristine. It was going through, like, five different amplifiers right near me.”

Just think of some of the famous players who have been on the Rick Beato Show, and the guitars they brought with them. But would you want to play your hero’s guitar?

Beato says he's had the chance and every time he has declined. Gilmour never asked him if he wanted to play his guitar, but if he had, Beato would have said no.

“Never. I try and never touch anyone’s instruments,” he says. “Even if they do [offer], I’m like, I don’t want [to]. I’ve had people hand me things.”

And it turns out these “things” he's been handed are pretty cool. Even with such a policy, there must have been a bit of Beato that wanted to see how Peter Frampton’s legendary Phenix would play.

“I had Peter Frampton, the first time I met him, he handed me his black Les Paul and I handed it right back to him,” says Beato. “Larry Carlton handed me his [Gibson ES-] 335. I handed it right back to him. ‘I’m not going to play this.’ I’ve had so many people hand me their guitars, and I’m like, ‘No, thank you.’”

It’s not the guitars that wow Beato, it’s the players. That's why he'd rather prefer his guests play their gear, rather than spend the time playing it himself – seeing these guitarists up close with the equipment they used to make their music gives him an all-new appreciation of what makes them special.

That is certainly the case players such as Neal Schon from Journey, his latest guest.

“I’ve watched Neal play a thousand times but you can’t tell what people are doing unless you’re right next to them,” says Beato. “Like his right hand? I can’t… He showed me how he holds the pick, and how he picks and everything, and he kinds of uses it at an angle, but he is so relaxed.”

Elsewhere in his recent interview with Beato, Schon recalled the time Albert King yelled at him for picking up his Gibson Flying V. In a separate conversation, Beato also explained why he stopped playing solos for 25 years – and why it was good for his playing.

Learning scales and patterns is perhaps one of the less exciting aspects of guitar playing – and, arguably, many of our heroes didn’t approach their playing in this way, either.

However, consider the process of writing and recording material, and rehearsing then touring, which obviously involves playing those same tunes night after night. This in itself can teach us so much about what works and what doesn’t, simply through an intense process of trial and error.

If the old adage about one gig being worth a dozen rehearsals holds true, what are the benefits of a long tour? It’s true to say that many professional musicians (myself included) come off tour able to play the set blindfolded, but feeling a bit rusty on anything else… However, this is temporary and the longterm gains are clear. But where does this leave everyone else?

It’s possible to transform your playing without repeatedly going through the album/tour cycle, but it does take discipline to play and practise every single day and perhaps record yourself (in private – studio quality is not necessary!) then listen back with as objective an ear as possible. Yes, we are often our own harshest critics, but you can make this work for you by taking notes and deciding on positive steps to improve in any weak areas.

This brings us neatly back to the idea of learning scales and patterns, with the emphasis on the latter. A slow minor blues like the example solo gives us plenty of time to think about note choice and phrasing. Some of the ideas in the examples are derived from chord tones or chord extensions.

But, if you prefer, they could also be regarded as embellished pentatonic/blues scale licks. Play these, or similar ideas, often enough and they will become part of your vocabulary. Hope you enjoy and see you next time!

Example 1

In the pickup to this first phrase, I’m spelling out part of an E minor scale, though you could also say it’s an E minor triad (G B E) with an F# added before the G on beat 1 of bar 1. This gives us more detail than sticking solely to the pentatonic scale.

The change to A minor then B minor in bar 2 is followed with an ear for their respective triads (A C E and B D F#) but without needing to change position on the fretboard.

Oddly enough, the last two bars feature more movement between positions over a static chord, playing a similar idea over two octaves using the E minor pentatonic scale.

Example 2

Shifting to A minor, this second phrase targets the 9th (B) in what would otherwise be a regular minor pentatonic phrase, albeit sliding between shapes 1 and 2.

The brief excursions to C and D don’t really ask anything too specific of us in terms of note choice, though perhaps it is worth experimenting with C and D triads? The next main chord is E minor.

Nothing too fancy going on here, but there is a bend from F# to G in bar 3, emphasising the 9th in the key of E minor. Watch out for sneaky staccato notes!

Example 3

Switching to the bridge pickup for dramatic effect, this final example is perhaps the most obviously pentatonic, switching between shapes 4, 1 and 2. Somehow, the unembellished pentatonic sounds ‘tougher’ for this rise in dynamic…

That’s where we stay, being pretty and melodic sidelined in favour of a few more flourishes, before a short chromatic run up to B at the end. We don’t always need to spell out each chord, but it’s good to know what’s going on harmonically so we can pick and choose.

Allow yourself a bit of leeway for timing; this is transcribed as faithfully as possible but need not be set in stone.

Hear it here

John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers – A Hard Road

After Eric Clapton had recorded the infamous ‘Beano’ album and moved on to form Cream, there was a vacancy to fill. Enter Peter Green. On this 1967 release, he shows himself very able to channel the spirit of Clapton on tracks such as The Stumble and Another Kinda Love.

However, on The Super-Natural we really hear him coming into his own, having a profound influence on Carlos Santana, Gary Moore and many others in the process.

Santana – Abraxas

Released in 1969, this second album from the band features a cover of Peter Green’s Black Magic Woman, alongside the well-known tracks Samba Pa Ti and Oye Cómo Va.

In fact, we could probably have cited any of Santana’s albums here, as his distinctive playing remains the centrepiece of his music, combining American and Mexican influences, while frequently using pentatonic lines but just as often adding melody via chord tones, arpeggios and long held notes.

Pink Floyd – The Dark Side Of The Moon

David Gilmour is a very obvious name to put out there when thinking of melodic-blues-influenced players. Like Santana, you could approach any of the Pink Floyd or later solo material and find lots of examples.

Of particular interest here, though, is how he fits his blues-based style into tracks such as Time and Any Colour You Like where he trades licks against himself in stereo. Money contains some more obviously bluesy licks, though still with lots of memorable melodic lines.

• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

The greatest guitar collection on Earth is set to be sold next spring when artefacts from the late Jim Irsay – widely considered to be one of the most renowned gear collectors of his time – go up for auction.

For guitar fans, Irsay’s collection needs no introduction. It’s not a stretch to say it’s perhaps the most culturally significant and historically important assortment of guitars to ever be curated. The list of guitars included in the collection reads like the stock inventory of a museum.

It includes many of rock and pop’s most famous electric guitars, many of which Irsay purchased himself at auction for multi-million dollar deals over the years. Highlights include (but certainly are not limited to) Kurt Cobain’s Smells Like Teen Spirit Mustang, David Gilmour’s Black Fender Stratocaster, Jerry Garcia’s Tiger and the Strat Bob Dylan used to ‘go electric’ at the Newport Folk Festival.

That’s before we mention The Fool SG, which once belonged to Eric Clapton and Todd Rundgren, and John Lennon’s Gretsch 6120 Country Gentleman. Oh, and Irsay’s collection also features instruments and guitars once played and owned by Prince, Eddie Van Halen, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, George Harrison, Paul McCartney and more.

Such is the cultural significance of Irsay’s collection that he was once offered $1,000,000,000 (yes, one billion dollars) by a “middle east element” as part of a deal that would see it be relocated to Dubai.

Irsay held on to it, though, and in August this year he put his world-famous guitar collection on public display. In a bid to keep the legacy of each guitar alive, he was also prone to lending a few of his prized possessions to big-name players for live performances.

Now, in light of Irsay’s passing – and in a move that answers everybody’s queries as to what will happen to his collection – the entire thing will be offered at Christie’s New York in a series of auctions beginning in March 2026.

“Christie’s is honored to offer this magnificent collection, so lovingly compiled, maintained, and shared by legendary collector Jim Irsay over decades,” says Julien Pradels, president of the Christie’s Americans region.

“These extraordinary objects will be made available to passionate collectors around the globe, who have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to own a piece of history, and provide this exquisite collection its next chapter.”

Given that a handful of the Irsay-owned guitars are already auction record-breakers in their own right, it feels very safe to say that this particular auction will set a new world record for guitar auction sales that will most likely never be beaten.

Gilmour’s Black Strat, for example, was picked up for $3,975,000. Irsay forked out $4,550,000 for the Smells Like Teen Spirit Mustang. The Fool SG set him back $1,270,000.

These are all now going to make their way to new collectors, and given the caliber of guitars included in the auction, expect individuals with very deep pockets to spend big when the event rolls around next year.

Simply, it promises to be the biggest guitar auction event of all time.

Head over to Christie's to find out more in the meantime.

Irsay passed away in May this year, and was honored by his football team Indianpolis Colts with a memorial Stratocaster.

Most Pink Floyd fans were aggrieved when the highly fruitful Gilmour–Waters partnership – the one that gave the world albums like Wish You Were Here and The Dark Side of the Moon – came to an end.

And while David Gilmour and drummer Nick Mason still own the name, and the band still owns the publishing rights, the two have “absolutely no intention” of reviving Floyd.

This is partly due to the fact that Gilmour and Waters still seem to be on no-speaking terms.

As reported by The Telegraph, in February 2023, Polly Samson, Gilmour's wife, wrote on X that Waters is “anti-Semitic to your rotten core. Also a Putin apologist and a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching, misogynistic, sick-with-envy megalomaniac” – to which Gilmour added, “Every word demonstrably true.”

From his end, Waters “refutes entirely” Samson’s “incendiary and wildly inaccurate portrayal”. In a new interview with The Telegraph, Samson explains her reasoning behind making that comment in the first place.

“The reason I did it was because Pink Floyd are quite a faceless band. Everywhere I went, there’s a chance that people thought I was married to the one who said things like that. And it wasn’t a great feeling.”

She continues, “If they knew you’re married to someone from Pink Floyd, half the time people were giving me quite strange looks and it was really uncomfortable and I just wanted to draw a line and make it clear that these were not views held by me or the person I was married to.”

So is there ever a world in which Gilmour reunites with Waters, for one last time? “Nothing,” he tells journalist James Hall. “There is no possible way that I would do that.”

And for those nostalgic for Pink Floyd's heyday, Pink Floyd at Pompeii – MCMLXXII, the newly restored version of the band's groundbreaking Live At Pompeii film, was released earlier this year.

David Gilmour may have written two iconic guitar solos for Comfortably Numb, but when it comes to playing it live, he says he’s “never learned” one of them.

His comments relate to the track's second showing. It's near-faultless on the record. But, like a true artist, Gilmour isn’t one for repeating things robotically. Instead, his approach is far more intuitive – he plays what he feels on the night.

“I'm not thinking about the audience and what they want, to be honest,” he admits to Rick Beato (via Guitar Player). “I just like it starting the way it starts, and the rest of it is so ingrained in me that the various parts of it are going to find their way into what I'm doing.

“But I've never learned it. Yeah, I've never learned that guitar solo.”

This is a stylistic decision that Gilmour has decided to take. It might not go down well with all Pink Floyd fans, but as far as the guitarist is concerned, there will be a large faction of fans who would prefer a more natural display of his soloing skills.

“I mean, there are a lot of guys who can play that. But I don't play it,” he laughs. “It's different every time. Why would I want to do it the same? Would it be more popular with the people listening if I did it exactly like the record? Or do they prefer that I just wander off into whatever feels like the right thing at the time? I don't know.

“I suspect they like they prefer it to be real, and to be happening, you know?”

Indeed, Gilmour, who confessed that he prefers a “vocal” style of lead playing due to the fact that he can’t shred, has always been feel over firepower. But that’s not to say what he plays each night is completely removed from the version that starred on 1979’s epic concept record, The Wall.

“There are cues within it, which I use to tell the band, 'We're going to end,' or, ‘We're going to do this,’” he explains. “And so, they crop up as being the same every time, pretty much.”

Granted, it’s Comfortably Numb’s first solo that gets most of the plaudits, which gives Gilmour more room to maneuver second time around.

Back in October, Gilmour handled the track’s lead lines while simultaneously battling his Jimi Hendrix guitar strap, which broke mid-solo.

Elsewhere, Gilmour has addressed what it was like the first time he saw Jimi Hendrix play, and what happened when one of his Animals' solos got erased forever.

Have you ever written an awesome guitar part that, for one reason or another, disappeared into the ether? Well, in David Gilmour's case, it was one of his solos on Dogs, from 1977's Animals. Of course, keen-eared Pink Floyd fans would know that this song has a number, of solos – one of which was mistakenly deleted during those sessions.

“On Dogs, the original solo did get erased,” Gilmour confirms in his latest interview with Rick Beato. “We had the whole first half of the song. Then we had a middle breakdown bit, which became all that weird stuff, and that was filled with white two-inch leader tape [used to separate cues on tape].

“And then eventually the rest of the song was tagged on there while we were thinking about and working out what to do with it. And there was something on the first half that we wanted to erase, and Roger [Waters] and Nick [Mason] put it into “erase,” and then forgot it was in “erase,” and it went right through the leader tape by two minutes, and then took away my second guitar solo.”

While the actual, recorded solo was – in Gilmour's own words – “completely erased, gone, forever, done,” the guitar part wasn't, as thankfully, he had it saved elsewhere.

“Luckily, I do take mixes home and I'd taken a mix of that home, so I had to go and recreate it from my rough mix. [However] you never quite feel 100% satisfied, though every note has been learned and rehearsed and played, you need to think, ‘Oh, there's something about the feel that had before that it's gone forever.’”

As for Animals, there was another guitarist who played a role in the making of that album. With the birth of his first child, Gilmour wasn't as involved as usual, and discussions were held about employing another guitarist on tour. As legend has it, Snowy White swooped in and was offered a gig as a touring guitarist. However, what he didn't expect was an invite to play a solo on record.

“It was just after they offered me the gig that I recorded the solo for Pigs on the Wing,” White recalled in a Guitar World interview. “David [Gilmour] and I went back into the control room, and he said to Roger [Waters], 'Snowy has agreed to take the gig,' and Roger said, 'Well, while you're here, you might as well play something.'

“So, Roger swivels around and puts on Pigs on the Wing,” White continues. “And then he said, 'Why don't you do a solo in the middle? Go ahead and pick up any of those guitars out there and have a go at it.' So, I picked up this white Strat, plugged it in, fiddled about, and then did the solo in one take. I know one take sounds impressive, but honestly, I got lucky that I did such a nice one right away.”

In the same Rick Beato interview, Gilmour looks back on the first time he saw Hendrix play – in the company of the Beatles and Rolling Stones.

Jimi Hendrix is one of the most influential guitarists to ever have lived, and his playing has inspired just about everyone who has ever picked up the electric guitar.

That goes for pros, too, with seasoned veterans and emerging guitar stars alike – from Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page to Melanie Faye and Mateus Asato – all citing Hendrix as a key influence.

David Gilmour is another guitar legend to have been shaped by Hendrix. In fact, Hendrix was such an informative force on his own playing that Gilmour remembers the first time he ever heard him play.

Speaking to Rick Beato, Gilmour remembers, "When I was living in London and I was completely broke – and this was long before I joined Pink Floyd – there was a club in South Kensington called Blazes.

“If you were a member of that club, and it cost five pounds or something to be a member, you could go free from Monday to Thursday, or Tuesday to Thursday, so I'd go there quite a lot, because it was free.

“One night, I went in there, and it was rammed with people, all the Beatles and all the Stones were in there. I thought, 'This is a bit unusual.' 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, plugged into an amp and started. The entire place was just jaws dropped. It was absolutely extraordinary.”

Gilmour wasted no time in trying to track down more of this mystery guitar player’s music, though he hit a bit of a sticking point: Hendrix was so early on in his career that his music wasn’t available.

As Gilmour remembers, “I went out the next day trying to find records by this character, Jimi Hendrix, and those James Hendricks of Hendrix, Lambert and Ross he didn't exist.”

He clearly knew he’d witnessed something special, though, and it wasn’t long before the world had cottoned on to the fact they were witnessing the rise of one guitar’s true pioneers and innovators.

“As soon as Jimi Hendrix came along, I thought, ‘Yes, Jimi, I want a slice of that,’” Gilmour says.

In a previous chat with Beato, Gilmour discussed the origins of his own guitar technique and style, which has since been held up as the gold standard for ‘feel’ playing.

Guy Pratt has had an over-four-decade career holding down the low-end for an awe-inspiring list of names, including Roxy Music, Bryan Ferry, Gary Moore, Michael Jackson, Debbie Harry... and the list goes on – not to mention his side hustle as a TV, film, and theater composer.

However, the bassist's career over the past 38 years has largely been taken up by David Gilmour, who handpicked him as his go-to bass player. Yet, this solid working relationship very nearly didn't happen.

“The first thing was, I was playing for Dream Academy, and David had produced them. He needed a support band for this one show in Birmingham,” he recounts in a new interview with Premier Guitar.

“He [Nick Laird-Clowes from Dream Academy] said, ‘David’s heard your playing. He thinks you’re amazing. He can’t wait to meet you’ – which of course was just bollocks. So we get up there in Birmingham. I’m terrified.”

But the meeting didn't turn out as planned… “I went in and just stood in his dressing room, and it was awful. We both stood there with nothing to say until one of us had to walk away. David, being the ranking officer, got to be the one who walked away. And that was the end of it.”

Thankfully, the awkward first meeting didn't sour the budding relationship, as Gilmour was still adamant about recruiting Pratt as his bassist. “I went on holiday to Thailand and I came back, and there’s all these messages from David.”

He continues, “The first one saying hi, he was doing an Amnesty International concert, the Secret Policeman’s Ball, and he wanted me to play with him and Kate Bush. And there’s another message and another message. ‘Hi Guy, just wondered, it’s next week you know.’ And then, of course, he had to get someone else. I’m like, ‘My god, that was my one shot.’”

That wasn't the be-all and end-all of Pratt's run-in with Gilmour, however. “A while later, David, Rick [Floyd keyboardist Richard Wright], and Nick were saying they were doing a new Pink Floyd album, and I didn’t think any more about it until I got a phone call from L.A.,” he recalls.

“It’s David going, ‘Hi. We’re putting Pink Floyd back together.’ He said, the tour was gonna be a year, and would I be interested and available? So I went, ‘Yes!’ And he said, ‘Oh, not working much, then?’ And that started our relationship of him ribbing me and me constantly falling for it. That’s been the hallmark of our relationship for the last 38 years.”

As for how he typically works with Gilmour, Pratt notes that what he always finds interesting when rehearsing with him is “what he [Gilmour] remembers from bass parts.”

He clarifies, “A lot of the music is so slow and so big and there’s so much space in it. Very often, it’s actually the length of the notes rather than how many notes you’re playing that matters more. With David, and this is something I get with the wisdom of years, every note does count.”

As he aptly points out, in Gilmour's music, “there’s no need for a sixteenth note on the bass anywhere in this music, ever.”

In other recent Guy Pratt news, the bass phenom has recently talked to Bass Player about what it was like to work on hits such as Madonna's Like a Prayer and Michael Jackson's Earth Song.

Snowy White is best known for the two albums he made with Thin Lizzy in the early ‘80s, Chinatown and Renegade. He also wrote himself into Pink Floyd folklore by participating in an Animals sessions – and the band’s live album, Is There Anybody Out There?

A host of solo albums soon followed, and by 1994 he was readying his sixth LP, Highway to the Sun. It's notable for its impressive cast of co-guitarists, with David Gilmour and Thin Lizzy alumni Gary Moore taking guest spots.

One could easily look at White’s resume and draw the conclusion that this was a case of him creating a fantasy line-up with some old friends for the thrill of it. Discussing the album in a new career-spanning interview with Guitar World, he paints a slightly different picture.

“I only asked them to play on my album because the record company thought a few well-known names would be a good selling point,” he confesses. “I didn't really mind either way. It was very nice of them to agree to appear.”

Slide guitar maestro Chris Rae also starred on the record alongside then Mike + the Mechanics frontman Paul Carrack. But it was Gilmour and Moore's spots that stole the spotlight.

Moore offers bags of flair during the latter stages of the nine-minuter Keep On Working, and Gilmour delivers his signature, slow but lyrical sensibilities on Love, Pain & Sorrow. From the first note, it's clear who is icing White's slinking groove there.

“Gary came to the studio where I was working to do his part,” White explains. “I just asked him to blow over the end of a slow blues.

“With Dave's contribution, I took the tapes to his boat studio, on the Thames near Hampton Court, and just said, 'It's a really simple track, just do a few takes and I'll sort it out later'.

“He used his whammy pedal, which I hadn't heard before. I chose the best bits when I mixed it. It was all pretty simple really. I guess the obvious difference is that I was telling them what I wanted as opposed to the other way around.”

Throughout his career, White has been in and out of bands, weaving solo records around stints with Pink Floyd, as well as in Phil Lynott and Roger Waters’ respective solo bands, and featuring on Peter Green's In The Skies among others.

“Both situations have their plusses and minuses,” he says, diplomatically, of the differences between being a solo artist and a band guy.

“For instance, the nicest thing about being in Roger’s band, apart from being involved in all those great shows, was that all I had to do was walk on stage, pick up my already-tuned guitar, and start playing...

“In contrast, when I was touring Europe with my own three-piece band, The White Flames, I was doing almost everything at first: driving, booking the hotels, sorting out the travel, collecting the money... But, the reward for doing that was that I was up on stage doing my own thing with musicians who were really loyal.”

White released his latest solo venture, Unfinished Business last year, and as the name attests, he's got plenty more music yet to write.

Renowned gear collector Jim Irsay, who spent millions assembling and exhibiting quite possibly the greatest collection of historically and culturally significant electric guitars, has died aged 65.

The entrepreneur and billionaire philanthropist became the CEO of NFL club Indianapolis Colts in 1997, and it was the club that broke the news of Irsay's passing, confirming he passed in his sleep while at home.

He became the youngest owner of an NFL team at 37 when he inherited the club following his father's passing, and while he's celebrated for his longtime custodianship of the Colts, his legacy and the mark he has left in the guitar world is just as notable.

Indeed, the legendary collection of world-changing instruments he collected over his lifetime is one of the most famous assortments of guitar gear ever curated – and in terms of cultural and financial value, it has no equal.

In July 2023, he was offered $1 billion for the collection, which would have seen it be relocated to Dubai – but Irsay stood fast and continued to exhibit the instruments to the public instead.

When you appraise just some of the instruments in The Jim Irsay Collection, it’s no surprise that such a lofty figure was proposed. It features David Gilmour’s Black Fender Stratocaster, Jerry Garcia’s Tiger, the ‘Bob Dylan goes electric’ Strat from his iconic Newport Folk Festival appearance, Kurt Cobain’s Smells Like Teen Spirit Fender Mustang, and many, many others.

Another of his distinguished buys was Eric Clapton’s psychedelic ‘The Fool’ SG, which Slowhand used religiously through his Cream days, particularly on Disraeli Gears. It’s also the guitar that Clapton cultivated his famous ‘woman’ tone on and was later owned and restored by Todd Rundgren. He bought the guitar at auction for over $1 million.

The Black Strat and Cobain’s Mustang are currently number two and three on the list of the most expensive guitars sold at auction, with only Cobain’s MTV Unplugged Martin D-18E – which went for an eye-watering $6.1 million in 2020 – topping the two legendary Fenders.

Vitally, Irsay didn’t buy the guitars to simply store in a vault. Oftentimes, he’d loan the guitars out for big-name stars to play and add to their legacy. Blues great Kenny Wayne Shepherd was one such recipient, and played Comfortably Numb on Gilmour’s Black Strat for a special showcase to kick off the Colts’ season in 2022.

The world-famous collection is currently on display at an exhibition hosted by Indiana University in Bloomington, which runs until September. Irsay wanted to exhibition to “highlight the history of the modern guitar.”

Later in his career, Irsay also formed the Jim Irsay band, billed as “a traveling museum of rock music.” It featured incredible talents including Buddy Guy, Billy Gibbons, and Kenny Wayne Shepherd, who played the historically significant electrics on stage.

Reacting to the news on Instagram, Kenny Wayne Shepherd said: “I really just don’t have the words right now to express the loss of such a special man. A social media tribute post won’t do him justice. Truly one of a kind. Love you, Jim. RIP.”

Irsay had struggled with health issues in his later years and consequently made fewer public appearances. But the collection of instruments and memorabilia he’s amassed – which also includes the $6.18 million acquisition of Muhammed Ali's Rumble in the Jungle championship belt – is quite the legacy to leave behind.

Pete Townshend may have had an illustrious career as part of a band – the Who – who, despite fraught internal relationships, managed to forever make their mark on rock 'n' roll history.

However, the veteran guitarist has recently admitted he's far from a natural collaborator – in fact, he was largely the Who's principal songwriter – and also revealed that performing is not something he particularly enjoys.

 ”Most musicians are not like me,” he tells Spain's RockFM. “Most musicians do two things that I don't really do or don't enjoy doing.

 ”One is they love performing. I don't love performing. I don't like being on a stage. I don't mind being on a stage. I don't hate it, but it doesn't fill my soul in the way that you see some performers, [where] just their soul is filled through being on the stage. That's not me.”

He continues, “For me, collaboration is something that I find very difficult. If I was in a studio, like with a really, really great musician, or with a group of really great musicians, I think I would find it very hard. I find it very difficult looking in the eyes of another musician. I find myself looking to my own energy to express myself.”

However, this doesn't necessarily mean he's not open to collaborating in other art forms. Townshend points to his recent work Quadrophenia, which is being turned into a ballet, as an example.

“I think one of the things about that is that that kind of degree of collaboration is an exploration of the human body, of dancing,” he ponders. “With music, I find myself wanting to stay in my box for a while. I've always made demos in my studio of songs that I want other people to record.”

Asked whether there's any musician who would tempt him into making an exception, he replies matter-of-factly, “After what I just said about collaboration, it's not what I would want to do.

 ”I'm playing with Roger [Daltrey] next week at the [Teenage Cancer Trust] shows at the Royal Albert Hall, and I think that's gonna be enough for me for this month…

“I mean, I loved working with David Gilmour on my White City album and we co-wrote together some songs, but that was an uneasy collaboration.

“I actually made it clear I'm not a natural collaborator. And I really enjoyed working with Eric Clapton back in 1973 when we did the Rainbow Concert together.”

“I think it's interesting ’cause so many musicians, so many new musicians that I really respect want to work with me,” he adds with a laugh. “And I wish I was more open to it. I could have fun with some of the greatest musicians in the world.”

Interestingly, Townshend did recently collaborate with up-and-coming Dutch artist Inge Lamboo – imprinting a quintessentially ’60s-style solo on her latest record.

Little did a young, impressionable Phil Manzanera know when he first crossed paths with David Gilmour in the ‘60s that the pair would strike up an enduring friendship, lasting over half a century and then some, that saw him work with the Pink Floyd legend on a score of albums.

The Roxy Music guitarist recently recounted some of those experiences with Guitar Player, detailing how those collaborations allowed him to understand the secrets of Gilmour’s heart-stirring guitar tone, and how it’s not all about the gear he used.

Manzanera was 16 when they first crossed paths, and would go on to form Roxy Music, the band with which he’d make his name – with the help of his red Gibson Firebird – several years later. All the while, he kept a close eye on Gilmour’s career as Pink Floyd became heavyweights in the progressive rock world.

While Roxy Music were working on their second album at London’s Air Studios, Manzanera encountered Chris Thomas, who was mixing The Dark Side of the Moon at the same time, prompting the pair to reconnect.

“I went in to the control room of Studio Two, and none of the Floyd were there,” he tells Guitar Player. “It was just Chris, and he played me the song Money. And when I heard the guitar solo, I thought, ‘Jesus, this is amazing!’

“So I sent David a telegram saying, ‘Remember me? I'm in a band now called Roxy Music.’”

It proved to be more than a fleeting meet-up, and Manzanera, now part of Gilmour’s inner circle, saw his talents blossom close hand.

“[Original Floyd guitarist] Syd Barrett was more off the wall, but David brought a sort of blues sensibility to Pink Floyd, and then had to do the experimental stuff as well, too,” he feels. “He evolved in his own way of creating weird and wonderful sounds.”

Gilmour turned to Manzanera to help produce his 2006 solo album, On an Island, and did likewise for Rattle That Lock nine years later. He even had a hand in Floyd’s final LP, The Endless River, and joined Gilmour's solo band for a short spell. Working with him so closely lifted the lid on where his sound comes from.

“One of the things about David's playing – and in some way it's a bit like me – is that while it seems to be about distortion and echo, it is actually about the way he plays the notes and bends them, along with the strength of his hands,” he says.

“And he's got a fantastic sense of tuning. He's very, very hot on tuning. So often when I was recording him, I would have a tuner right there with me to check on the tuning. But he would come in to listen to a take or something, and if a note wasn't bent or pulled or pushed to the right tuning, he'd want to redo it.”

He admits that such an intricate ear for pitch had its problematic moments, but it shows the sheer degree of accuracy that lives behind the emotiveness of his lead playing.

At one point while working together, Manzanera looked to relearn the main riff of the 1978 Roxy Music track K-Scope – which had recently been sampled and given a new vibe by Kanye West and Jay-Z – only for both guitarists to be left stumped by it.

After releasing his latest solo album, Luck and Strange last year, Gilmour has hinted that more music is in the works as he looks to continue momentum built from what he believes is his best album since Dark Side of the Moon.

In Pink Floyd at Pompeii – MCMLXXII – the newly restored version of the 1972 film directed by Adrian Maben – a clip of the band recording what would become The Dark Side of the Moon at Abbey Road Studios has been unearthed from the depths of the Floyd archives.

Perhaps most interesting are the band's thoughts on the criticisms they were receiving at the time – that they depended too much on their gear and new technologies.

In the clip, David Gilmour can be seen saying, “I don't think equipment could take over. We do rely on it a lot. I mean, we couldn't do what we do as we do it without it. We could still do a good, entertaining, musical show, I suppose, without it. But all those things are down to how you control them and whether you're controlling them, not the other way around.”

Roger Waters, on the other hand, ponders, “It's a danger that we could become slaves of all our equipment, and in the past, we have been.” However, he clarifies that it's just a question of using the tools “that are available, when they're available.”

“More and more now, there's all kinds of electronic goodies which are available [for] people like us to use.”

And in true Waters fashion, he doubles down on his argument, asserting, “It's like saying, ‘Give a man a Les Paul guitar, and he becomes Eric Clapton,’ and it's not true. ‘And give a man an amplifier and a synthesizer, and he doesn't become whoever.’ He doesn't become us.”

Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii was filmed in October 1971 and captures a band finally finding their footing after years of experimentation in the wake of the departure of their founder, Syd Barrett.

The movie has now been meticulously hand-restored, frame by frame, after being discovered in five dubiously labeled cans in the band’s own archive. Under its updated title, Pink Floyd at Pompeii – MCMLXXII, it is set to be released in cinemas worldwide starting April 24.

David Gilmour later returned to the Amphitheatre of Pompeii in 2016, where, for two nights only, he performed for just 3,000 lucky concertgoers – with a Live at Pompeii album and concert film released in 2017.

Over the course of his career, Phil Manzanera has written a healthy list of guitars riffs that have been sampled and covered by some hugely influential artists – but despite the prevalence of some of his work, the Roxy Music legend still needs to remind himself how to play his most famous hooks from time to time.

Case in point is the title track from 1978’s K-Scope, which was sampled in 2011 by Jay-Z and Kanye West for their track, No Church in the Wild. Featuring Frank Ocean and The-Dream, and lifted from the two rappers’ first collaborative record, Watch the Throne, it became a key entry in both of their respective discographies.

However, as Manzanera explains in a new video with Guitar World, when it came to relearning the part more than three decades after he first released it, the electric guitar veteran ran into a spot of bother – and not even Pink Floyd legend David Gilmour could help him out.

“It was sampled by Jay-Z and Kanye West, and slowed down by the brilliance of [producer and rapper] 88-Keys,” Manzanera says of the riff. “When I heard it, I couldn't believe it, because he had slowed it down, and so I had to try and relearn how to play it.”

The timing differences between the two takes are tangible. Manzanera’s original hook is high-octane and restless, whereas Jay-Z and Kanye West’s interpretation is a sultry slow groove that repackages the frantic twang as a laid-back beat.

You would think the slower tempo would aid in Manzanera’s attempt to refamiliarize himself with K-Scope, but it wasn’t that simple. In fact, it proved to be quite the challenge for both Manzanera and Gilmour, who were working together at the time.

“I think I've nailed it now, but it is my one riff which seems to have traveled a lot,” he goes on. “I was working with David Gilmour at the time, and I said, ‘I can't work out how to play this. Could you work out how to play it?’ And he tried. He couldn't either.”

The two guitar legends were ultimately saved by a younger player – a relative of Manzanera’s wife – who was able to show the Roxy Music legend how it was done.

“Eventually it was a young guy, the nephew of my wife, Claire, who taught me how to play it,” he concludes, before demonstrating the lick: “So you're holding an A chord at the top and you're sort of pulling off.”

Visit the Guitar World YouTube channel to watch the full interview as Phil Manzanera breaks down his favorite Roxy riffs and more.

Last year, Corey Feldman set the internet abuzz with his shredding – which was plagued by “fake playing” accusations, despite Feldman, Limp Bizkit's Fred Durst, and many internet sleuths insisting otherwise.

He even set the record straight with Guitar World, asserting, “If we’re able to reach millions – and I mean millions – of people with this stupid solo, then obviously we’re doing something right.”

Now, Feldman is opening up about his long road to recognition within the music industry – and how his 2010 Pink Floyd-esque album helped set him on a path to being taken seriously as an actor-turned-musician.

“I've been doing this for a very long time. I've been putting out music for 35 years, and it's been a very slow build,” he tells Billy Corgan on The Magnificent Others podcast.

“I like to say I'm an overnight success after 35 years [laughs] but, literally, nobody cared. And I was just making these songs for film soundtracks and putting out these little indie albums. I had a small little following and every show we played was sold out, but we could never play bigger than a 1,200-seater.”

In 2010, Feldman released Technology Analogy with his band, Corey Feldman's Truth Movement, which he describes as a “very poignant, very powerful album that's very similar to the sound of a Pink Floyd album.

“[It's] got that vibe. It's got that feel. In fact, we got Storm Thorgerson [the English art director and music video director who worked closely with Pink Floyd] as his last concept album piece of artwork.

But Feldman took the Floyd association a step further.

“To make it even further accentuated, I went to David Gilmour and went to Roger [Waters] and I got their blessings,” he reveals. “I gave them both a copy of the CD, [and] made sure that they weren't offended or mad at it.

“I really did everything I could to keep it as authentic as possible, as an extension, or a sister band, or whatever you want to think of it as, is some connection to my tribute to Pink Floyd without stealing from them in any way.

“And then after that, I think people kind of started to get like, ‘He's serious about music. He's not playing.’”

Last year, Feldman spoke to Guitar World about his deep admiration for Gilmour – and how his guitar idol even influences the gear he employs.

In a way, the origins of Pink Floyd's original live performances of The Wall in 1980 and 1981, at that time the most ambitious rock concerts ever staged – at least on the arena scale – are a bit ironic.

The concept of The Wall itself was meant to symbolize the great chasm Floyd's bassist and chief lyricist, Roger Waters, felt between himself and the band's fans – especially during the band's previous tours of enormous football stadiums.

Nonetheless, it could be argued that the The Wall tour only made it bigger. After all, what other band of that era could stage such a show? Complete with the absolute cream of the crop of visual and practical effects of the time, the production was hammered home with an enormous, literal wall.

In any case, the show was quite the spectacle, and added many new elements to the workload of not only the band's crew, but the band members themselves.

Reflecting on the experience in a 2000 interview with Guitar World, David Gilmour lauded the show as being “terrific fun,” adding that it was “really an achievement for everyone involved, particularly Roger.”

With that said, though, Gilmour also found himself playing a much more regimented role in the band's live shows than he had previously.

“I had to take on the role of music director and deal with a lot of musical details onstage so that Roger didn’t have to think about that,” he said. “It was really tough at first. Later on it got a little easier, once we all got into it.”

On the intricacies of his duties, the guitarist explained, “I had a huge cue sheet up on my amps, because we had all these cues coming up on monitors or on screen, and there were different DDL settings which I had to transmit with very primitive equipment to all the delay lines onstage. Very tricky.

“Except for the Comfortably Numb solo, there were virtually no moments where I could say, ‘Forget everything. Just play.’ You know?

“It was very rigid,” Gilmour went on. “On all the previous tours – Wish You Were Here, Dark Side of the Moon – there were moments that could be extended longer or made shorter if you liked. The Wall, quite reasonably, because it was a different kind of project, didn’t have that.”

The first nights of tours always bring kinks that need to be ironed out, hiccups that resolve themselves as the show gets rolling. The Wall, as Gilmour said, was no different, as he juggled with his many new music director-esque duties.

As if that weren't enough, though, the guitarist, his bandmates, and the crowd were all also treated to a, shall we say, fiery, surprise on opening night.

Speaking to Guitar World in 2000, Roger Waters remembers, “Andy Bown and Snowy [White, who served, respectively, as the band's bass and second guitar players on the tour] and those guys did their thing,” Waters recalls, “And then this drape went up to reveal us. Fireworks had gone off beforehand and one of the Roman candles had gotten into this drape and set light to it.

“I was singing away and I kept hearing this noise and I thought, ‘God, the P.A.’s going off.’ 'Cause I could hear this strange noise. Eventually I looked up and saw one of the riggers, a guy called Rocky, leap about six feet through the air, with no safety harness or anything on him, from one drape to another.

“He had a fire extinguisher in one hand and he was trying to put the thing out,” Waters continued. “And then lumps of burning drape the size of tennis balls started hitting the stage all around us. And the auditorium was beginning to fill up with smoke.”

As Waters tells it, it took a few minutes for all involved – absorbed as they were in the show – to fully comprehend what was happening.

“I stopped singing and just shouted ‘stop!’ through the PA,” Waters recounted. “Throughout rehearsals, the guys out at the mixing console were so used to me constantly yelling ‘stop’ – if something wasn’t right, you know. So when I did it during the actual show they must have all thought they were hallucinating. ’Cause they just carried on. So I shouted ‘stop!’ again. This time, they said, ‘Okay, he really does seem to be saying stop. I guess we have to.’

“I said, ‘Look, we’re going to have to lower this drape, because we’ve got a fire. Everything’s cool. We’ll put it out, go back five minutes and pick up from there.’ Which we did. But it was quite a hair-raising beginning to the first show.”

Having worked with a veritable list of musical legends – most of whom feature in his 2007 book My Bass And Other Animals, if he were stranded on a desert island with any of his previous employers, living or dead, who would bassist Guy Pratt choose to be stuck with? Surprisingly, his choice is immediate.

“Number one, David Gilmour – because he’s the most consummate musician l've ever met,” Pratt told Bass Player. “Number two would be Robert Palmer, because of everything about him: he lived his life on his own terms and he was the only person l've met who could say, ‘Listen to this Ozzy Osbourne track, it's amazing,’ and you would have to sit back and agree that he was absolutely right.”

With so much studio work behind him and a highly impressive list of credits, Pratt is the ideal man to ask about how he comes up with basslines in the studio.

“On a session you have to have ideas and come up with things immediately. So often you can be driving home from a session and you start thinking, ‘What if l'd played such and such?’ But that's a part of the job.”

Pratt, whose session resumé is among the most impressive in modern rock – he's worked with Madonna, Michael Jackson, Bryan Ferry, the Smiths, Tom Jones, Iggy Pop, Elton John, and many others – has also performed a comedy act in which he recounts anecdotes from his life as low-ender to the stars.

“I was trying to write a book about my experiences as a bass player, and it occurred to me that no-one had ever done a show from the hired hand's point of view. I had all this material, which is basically my life, so I thought if I didn't have a go at doing something comedic I'd never forgive myself.”

If he finds himself short on ideas, does he go back and listen to stuff that influences him, or does he just hope that something will develop the next day? “Yeah, that's basically it! Something usually pops out of the ether.”

How do you approach Pink Floyd and Roxy Music’s classic bass parts?

“With Floyd songs, I could reinterpret the bass parts in my own way if I wanted to, but I'm more interested in playing them so they sound right. David is happiest when I just play an old Fender Precision, but Precisions have no front end. That's why I have to play them with a pick.

“With Roxy Music, I mainly use Betsy, my 1964 Fender Jazz, because Bryan Ferry absolutely loves her. She's famous – she's pictured in The Bass Book as one of the reference Jazz Basses. I use a Music Man StingRay for Love Is the Drug, because I can get a really cutting top-end without using a pick.”

You've played on huge hits, including Madonna's Like a Prayer, and Michael Jackson's Earth Song. What was it like working on them?

“Like a Prayer was amazing – Madonna had tons of input. It was great to get away with such an insane performance: the whole middle and end section of the song is basically bass. It's a massive octave-pedal freakout, like a punk Pino Palladino. I used Spectors with Madonna, but nowadays I find them a bit hi-fi.

“Earth Song was another octave-pedal thing. I basically stole the bassline from Bad because I figured Michael would like it, but wouldn't know why!”

You've performed in many styles. Who were your primary influences on bass?

“As a kid I listened to John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin, Paul McCartney and the Beatles, and Andy Fraser of Free. Andy was very funky, and he used to do high chordal stuff, which – considering he played a Gibson – was extraordinary.

“I also loved John Entwistle's playing; the Who was the whole reason I got into rock ’n’ roll. I bought Betsy off him. Was I asked to join the band after he died? No, but apparently I was the next phone call.

“Also, James Jamerson is God, no doubt about it. So is Bernard Edwards; I worked with him on Robert Palmer's Riptide album when I was only 21. In fact, Bernard hired me; the credit on the album reads, ‘Bass: Bernard Edwards and Guy Pratt.’ That is my proudest credit.”

Saying that Tony Levin has had just an illustrious career would be an understatement. The esteemed bassist has played with everyone, from John Lennon to King Crimson, Peter Gabriel, and David Bowie.

Levin also played a significant role in Pink Floyd's legacy during a particularly precarious time for the band – the recording of 1987's A Momentary Lapse of Reason and the post-Roger Waters era.

“David Gilmour asked me to play bass on the album after Roger Waters famously left the band, thinking it was the end of them,” Levin tells Vulture. “I wasn’t part of any of the band’s intrigue and was thrilled to enter into the world of trying to play appropriately for a Pink Floyd context but also be somewhat myself.

“I brought out the Chapman Stick, an instrument I can play as a bass. It’s not the most common instrument, but I use it as one of my regular basses. I found David to be a fascinating guy and a real gentleman – a wonderful person to be with.”

Levin explains that while the sessions weren’t particularly hard, capturing the style Pink Floyd had honed over the years was challenging.

“I can remember one instance when I had a long vamp out and I played an extra few notes. I’m not talking about a fast bass riff here; I’m just talking about a couple notes,” he recalls.

“After the take, when we got together to listen, David smiled and said, ‘Tony, in Pink Floyd you don’t do that extra couple notes until far later.’ I had the right idea, but I did it too quickly. He was silently saying, ‘You don’t know that, but the rest of us do.’”

Levin also reveals that after a week or so of recording, the band approached him to tour with them. However, due to scheduling conflicts with Peter Gabriel’s tour, Levin was forced to decline.

“It was one of those big career decisions, perhaps even my biggest, where I went to stay with Peter. I’ve never regretted it, but I’m sure my career path would’ve been different had I spent that next year and a half doing Pink Floyd,” he concludes.

Tony Levin has recently wrapped up the 65-date BEAT tour alongside superstar guitar soloist Steve Vai, King Crimson guitarist and frontman Adrian Belew, and Tool drummer Danny Carey, celebrating the ’80s era of King Crimson.

Keeley Electronics and Sweetwater have teamed up for a budget-friendly series of basic effects pedals, delivering a bread-and-butter trio of $99 overdrive, fuzz, and reverb pedals.

Notably, this new release seemingly looks to be Keeley’s answer to similarly priced and comparatively spec’d stompboxes in the essential effects pedal market, including the Walrus Fundamental and JHS 3 Series.

As such, no-nonsense tones, sleek designs and simple controls underpin the new collaborative pedals, which are all made in the US.

The overdrive and fuzz offer a trio of tweakable dials, while the reverb’s two controls are augmented by a three-way mini switch for different voicings. A two-way switch can also be found on the OD for extra flavor.

Standard sizes and humble price tags make them all a viable pedalboard option for a multitude of players. Moreover, the trio – comprising the Super Bass Overdrive and Distortion, Suns Ultravoid Fuzz, and Soft Reverb – are all original designs that have been inspired by some previous Keeley creations.

For example, back in 2022, Robert Keeley unveiled the Moon Op Amp Fuzz – a fuzz box that references Keeley’s David Gilmour-inspired Dark Side of the Moon workstation. The all-new Suns Ultravoid pedal can ascribe some of its DNA back to that pedal, delivering a biting, sandpaper-smooth fuzz.

Keeley promises “tweaks and refinements” to the formula of its lunar predecessor, hinging off a reactive clipping LED that “launches every note into the stratosphere with a lively, harmonic-rich, and dynamic feel”. There are controls for Level, Filter, and Fuzz, with its redesigned tone stack tightening the low-end for a “sharper and more focused” sound.

It looks set to battle it out with Behringer's $65 Fuzz Bender, which promises the fuzz sounds of Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, and Pete Townshend in an ultra-affordable format.

For its overdrive pedal, the Sweetwater/Keeley tag team has built an amp-in-a-box based on a legendary – and tactfully unspecified – British tube amp, therefore promising to provide faux-plexi tones without breaking the bank. Spoiler: it's replicating a Marshall Super Bass, a 100-watt amp adored by Jimmy Page.

There’s plenty of dirt to be drawn from its Level, Tone, and Drive knobs for players chasing classic Marshall tones à la Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, and Jimi Hendrix, with a JFET-driven circuit working hard beneath its all-black housing.

Keeley is championing how its “amp-like sensitivity responds to your pick attack”, while a nifty toggle for Open Back and Closed Back amp emulations shouldn’t be sniffed at (especially for a double-figure outlay).

For its Soft Reverb, things are even simpler, with an emphasis on allowing players to effortlessly curate far-out, space-y soundscapes from the box with minimal knob fiddling.

Altering the positions of its Dwell and Level controls offers surprisingly versatile results, but its secret weapon is the mini switch. Here, Soft Focus (hence its name), Spring, and Plate reverb emulations are all on tap, making it a handy three-in-one.

“Whether you’re seeking an effortlessly controllable studio effect or eying the missing piece of your pedalboard puzzle, the Soft Reverb from Keeley is the ’verb for the job,” writes Keeley.

All three pedals can be prized exclusively from Sweetwater for $99 a pop.

Head to Sweetwater for the full specs.

Sophie Lloyd may not be the first person you think of when naming David Gilmour-influenced contemporary guitarists.

However, the shredder has recently revealed that the celebrated Pink Floyd guitarist, known for his feel-driven style, has played an important role in shifting her perspective on what makes an exceptional guitarist – and, with that, timeless solos.

“I was never really that into Pink Floyd growing up," she tells Guitar World in a new interview. “I knew Another Brick in the Wall and stuff, but I never really delved into them until I decided I wanted to do a shred version of Comfortably Numb on my YouTube channel.

"Before studying his playing, I was doing a lot of like, ‘Look at all the notes I can play, look how fast I can play!’ and there wasn't that much feel behind my music, I think.”

Delving deep into Gilmour's guitar parts for her shred cover served as a revelation for Lloyd. “That was a really pivotal point in my playing where I kind of switched from wanting to play all the notes and show everyone what I can do to like, ‘No, I want to serve the song,’” she admits.

“I want to create an emotion and a feeling and a story. That really came from him. Now I try to allow breathing space like he does, and create a sense of emotion.”

In a recent interview with Rick Beato, Gilmour did in fact dissect his lauded ‘feel’ playing technique, revealing that it all stemmed from the fact he “wasn’t gifted with enormous speed on the guitar.”

As for Lloyd, she’s gearing up for her debut US show on January 16 at LA's iconic Whisky A Go Go – setting her up for a busy year that includes a highly coveted slot at the UK's Download Festival.

Head to TicketWeb for tickets for her LA show, and to Sophie Lloyd for special VIP packages.

2024 Year in Review: Almost a decade on from his last studio album, the Pink Floyd veteran released his fifth solo full-length, Luck and Strange, in September, reminding us of his abilities as a master storyteller, melting minds one bluesy bend at a time.

The singer and guitarist went as far as saying it was his finest work since The Dark Side of the Moon.

As well as the Strats we’ve known him to play throughout his career, he also revealed he’d used a Gibson ES-335 for the solo on Dark and Velvet Nights, admitting he didn’t have “a huge history with Gibson guitars” and the recent acquisition was “a very, very different sort of guitar to what I’m used to.”

Elsewhere, in quite possibly the most surprising crossover of 2024, the guitarist guested on Body Count’s cover of Comfortably Numb, noodling the whole way through almost like a backing track.

Gilmour revealed he was originally approached by frontman Ice-T for permission to use the song and ended up offering to play on it.

“I like the new lyrics; they’re talking about the world we’re living in now, which is quite scary,” he later reflected.

What can we say about the guitar solo in 2024, besides the fact that 2025 is around the corner and, still, lead guitar remains relevant and vital? And by that we mean it still has the capacity to surprise us, to lift an arrangement, to maybe even change how we think of the instrument and what can be done on an electric guitar.

That’s what all of these solos have in common, even if they sound nothing alike. They are also as good as a fingerprint for knowing who is doing what. There is a lesson in that: a solo could have technical merit but it has to have something of yourself in it, just as the song does.

So, y’know, it’s all stuff to keep in mind when learning the rudiments and what you want to say with the notes in front of you. There are infinite possibilities. Knowing what we want to say is the first step…

10. Steve Cropper with Billy Gibbons and Brian May – Too Much Stress

Nominated by: Matthew Owen (Senior Staff Writer)

This magnificent coming together of three musical icons was convened the old-fashioned way, via email, an offer from producer Jon Tiven that Brian May politely declined. “Too much stress,” he said.

Well, that’s how the track got its name – and lyrics. When they came back and asked him again, how could May refuse? Anyhoo, he’s on this backbeat groover that speaks to the power of friendship, and the back and forth between Gibbons and May has the same energy as old pals catching up over some drinks, and that’s infectious.

9. Intervals – Mnemonic

Nominated by: Michael Astley-Brown (Editor-in-Chief)

Only Aaron Marshall has the sleight of hand – and agility of mind – to design a long-form instrumental around stop-go dynamics and still make it flow, a super-smooth musical fondue for the digital era. Crazy to think that the raw materials for this are electric guitar, drums and bass.

Marshall’s got this ability to stop the clock, giving tunes like this the room to execute his musical ideas unencumbered by physics. He makes time march to his tune. Maybe we should call him gravity.

8. Dream Theater – Night Terror

Nominated by: Amit Sharma (Guitar World contributor)

2024 was a great year for prog-metal guitarists looking for extra homework. Why? Because Dream Theater released the lead single from their 16th opus – notable for being their first with Mike Portnoy behind the kit in 15 years – and naturally it featured a slew of dazzling leads from John Petrucci.

There’s the fret-burning unison lines with keyboardist Jordan Rudess, the modulated taps and sweeps that follow shortly after and a half-time melodic section – the kind of thing he’s described to this writer as “standing on the mountaintop with your hair blowing in the wind and eagles flying around” – before the final chorus. Full marks from us. (AS)

7. Tetrarch – Live Not Fantasize

Nominated by: Michael Astley-Brown, Matt Parker (Features Editor)

And the award for Best WTF Solo goes to Diamond Rowe for Live Not Fantasize, which had judges examining the EverTune on her signature Jackson single-cut for evidence of foul play. There’s nothing we can see there. It’s the pedalboard, the pitch-shifting…

But wait, this solo was always going to be memorable, effects or not. It’s kind of got that Aristotelian three-act structure, and when the stompboxes are engaged, well, it’s like “Avengers, assemble!” and a textbook example of what a solo should do: power up the song.

6. Spiro Dussias – Python

Nominated by: Mike Dawes, Aaron Marshall (Intervals), Angel Vivaldi

Spiro Dussias is most definitely not sweating the technique on this bruising work of 21st-century metal, all-action, popping harmonics, until that solo emerges, covered in the vernix caseosa of glissando and vibrato, assuming motor skills in quicktime and giving us a decades-late echo of Marty Friedman at the apogee of his metal guitar shred exoticism – ie, the back end of Hangar 18.

In fact, Python sounds like Rust In Peace tuned down and condensed into a three-minute instrumental. No wonder Jackson used it to demo the American Series Soloist.

5. Joe Satriani and Steve Vai – The Sea of Emotion, Pt. 1

Nominated by: Noé Efira (hooded guitarist from the Paris Olympics closing ceremony)

Of course, artists have to look forward, but it would impoverish the human condition if they stopped digging deep into their past in search of connection.

That’s what electric guitar’s two great kings, Joe Satriani and Steve Vai, are doing here – teacher and student, friends since teenage years, taking their story back to the beginning to pool their virtuosity for ’70s-style celebration of friendship and belonging. It’s Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused as instrumental rock guitar.

4. Grace Bowers – Tell Me Why U Do That

Nominated by: Ellie Rogers (Guitar World contributor)

A good guitar solo might contain an impressive lick or two, but a great one will tell a story – and that’s exactly what Grace Bowers does in this extended call-and-response blues/funk throwdown from her debut album.

From the first fluid flourish, it feels as though Bowers might have mastered powers of expression far beyond her young years. But, as antagonistic licks give way to articulate jazz-inflected runs, inquiring hammer-on and pull-off passages and a finale of sweet guitarmonies, there is absolutely no doubt about it. (ER)

3. David Gilmour – A Single Spark

Nominated by: Chris Holt (Mike Campbell & the Dirty Knobs)

Rumor has it that many of his leads from 1973-1974 are still sustaining, suspended like satellites in the ether after a successful launch from a Binson Echorec and Big Muff, so maybe it’s a miracle David Gilmour found the bandwidth for this.

But then, Luck & Strange, the prog icon’s first studio album in nine years, is a work of small miracles. Here, Gilmour makes room in the heavens to write an elegy among the stars, big melodies so the world won’t miss ’em.

2. Mdou Moctar – Imouhar

Nominated by: Jason Narducy (Bob Mould), Janelle Borg (Staff Writer)

Imouhar belongs to a different era, a time when the relentless drive for efficiency – and human attention – had yet to place its vice-like grip around the throat of art.

This is like Santana’s Soul Sacrifice at Woodstock or Hendrix’s Machine Gun, an act of freeform radicalism, liberation masquerading as virtuosity, with Moctar reminding us of the reward that comes from choosing not to refine established techniques such as two-handed tapping to the point of ruthless mechanization. This is spectacular, imperfect, brilliant, electric, and human.

1. Matteo Mancuso – Paul Position

Nominated by: Matheus Canteri, Ellie Rogers

Cue the unmissable pun: Matteo Mancuso’s virtuosic homage to Paul Gilbert claims pole position in this year’s rundown of spectacular solos – and he scores extra cool points for performing the whole thing on a Bacci baritone guitar.

Taking to Instagram to introduce the track back in July, he teased that we “may recognize some of [Gilbert’s] signature licks on the solo section”, but it’s Mancuso’s own jaw-dropping signature fingerstyle techniques, his superhuman speed and knack for tasteful melodic touches that make this a truly peerless performance. (ER)

David Gilmour’s Black Stratocaster is one of the most iconic electric guitars of all time, but it was by no means the only notable Strat to have been owned by the Pink Floyd legend.

When Gilmour sold the Black Strat at auction back in 2019, he also put another one of his go-to Fenders under the hammer: a hugely sought-after, unusually styled Stratocaster from 1954, which bears the serial number ‘0001’.

The 0001 Strat is often overlooked by casual guitar fans in favor of the more recognizable Black model, but for Fender CEO Andy Mooney, the 0001 model – which had previously belonged to Leo Fender, Seymour Duncan, and Gilmour’s personal guitar tech, Phil Taylor – was the one for him.

In fact, as Mooney reveals in a new interview with Zak Kuhn, he once attempted to convince Gilmour to let Fender build a Custom Shop reissue of the elusive model – and even had plans to buy the original when it went up for auction.

However, when he eventually got his hands on the guitar he had been pining over for so many years, Mooney was left feeling rather underwhelmed by the whole experience.

Speaking of his guitar collection, Mooney explains, “The one I lusted after is a guitar that David Gilmour owned with the serial number 0001. I asked after I joined the company if he would be willing to give it to us to do faithful reproductions, as he did with his Black guitar from Dark Side of the Moon.

“He wasn't willing to do it, and then they went up for auction,” he adds. “He auctioned them all off. So, I actually got a chance to play that guitar, because it went on tour with his creme de la creme of his collection.

“I played it down at Christie’s Auction House in LA. The Black guitar is really something special, and then I played the 0001 and I was actually disappointed in it, relative to what I really thought it was. My expectations were a little too high.”

Nevertheless, Mooney’s heart was set on owning the 0001 Strat, so when the auction eventually rolled around, he went in with a pre-set budget with the hopes of acquiring his dream guitar.

“I had to have it,” Mooney goes on. “So I agreed a price with my wife, which was pretty darn high, and it went for double that. I think the same guy who bought the Black guitar paid about $1,000,005 for the 0001.”

While he might not have the real deal, Mooney does have the next best thing: a meticulous Custom Shop recreation, which has even been set up precisely the way he likes it.

“I went out and collected every photograph that had ever been taken off that guitar and gave it to the Custom Shop builders,” Mooney says. “And not only does it look exactly like 0001, now it plays exactly the way I want it. It's in my collection, but it's a little bit of a fake.

As mentioned, 0001 is often overlooked ahead of the Black Strat, but the white-finished, gold-hardware'd Strat was comfortably one of Gilmour's most prized and historic instruments.

It made its first appearance in live promo clips filmed for Gilmour's first solo album in 1978, and saw action during The Wall sessions – including the rhythm guitar on Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2).

Gilmour also used it to help record Paul McCartney's Back to the Egg Wings album, and played it live at London's Wembley Arena during a 50th anniversary celebration of the Fender Stratocaster in 2004.

In related Gilmour guitar news, the Pink Floyd icon recently revealed he can't tell the difference between his signature Fender and his original Black Strat.

David Gilmour’s Black Strat is one of the most recognized electric guitars in rock history – having been used to record the likes of Comfortably Numb and Wish You Were Here. The 2016 Fender Custom Shop signature reissue will set you back around $10,000 on the used market, but as an affordable alternative, I reckon you can get close enough with this Gilmour-inspired limited edition Fender Player Stratocaster, which is currently reduced to $549 – a saving of $150 – over at Guitar Center for Cyber Monday.

At its core, it’s simply a refinished Fender Player Strat, swapping out the usual white scratchplate for a fetching black alternative – though given Guitar Center acknowledges the “rock inspired look” in the listing, we’re pretty sure this is not an unintentional coincidence.

However, that is a superb base on which to build. Our Fender Player Stratocaster review saw the popular Fender model – one of the Big F’s biggest-sellers – awarded a full five stars, noting “This is a great place to start for those who want an authentic, yet upgraded Stratocaster”.

It utilizes a classic alder body, maple neck and maple fretboard combination, with an easy-playing C modern neck shape, 22 medium jumbo frets and a trio of Player Series Stratocaster pickups, alongside that all-important Fender two-point tremolo bridge.

There are a few of reasons I like this for the Black Strat role beyond the simple paint job. Firstly, I’ve played a Mexican Strat for 20 years as my main guitar – and, despite the obvious temptations encountered in my 15 years spent writing for guitar outlets – nothing else has hit the same spot for me.

Secondly, while the build quality out of Fender Mexico’s Ensenada facility has been excellent for decades now, the 2018 Player line represented a significant step forward on component quality – with new pickup magnets and upgraded hardware – and that is baked-in here.

The Player line has now been discontinued in favor of the Player IIs, meaning this is one of those small-but-pleasant windows where you can snap up a great build at a genuine discount.

Thirdly, while you won’t need to mod it to have an entirely gig-worthy guitar that plays brilliantly, it’s also not so pricey that I would feel bad drilling holes in it, or messing with the spec.

And that spirit of experimentation was largely the point of the original Gilmour Black Strat – famously picked up at Manny’s Music in NYC in 1970. Gilmour recently described his guitars as simply “the tools of my trade” to Guitar Player and he treats them as such.

Read the original’s Christie’s listing and you’ll see he swapped parts, cut off trem arms and even drilled in an XLR output – none of which stopped it becoming one of the most expensive guitars to sell at auction.

As such, I think if you really want to channel the spirit of Gilmour’s Strat, you don’t need a $10,000 reissue, you need to take a solid off-the-shelf build and make it a tool you can use – and this Guitar Center find fits that bill, nicely.

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David Gilmour’s electric guitar and acoustic guitar playing has captured the hearts and minds of generations of guitarists. So what exactly is the secret to his emotive, quasi-storytelling-like style?

According to Rick Beato, it’s the “David Gilmour effect”, which, as he elaborates in his interview with the Pink Floyd guitarist himself, “is not a guitar thing. It’s not a pedal”. Rather, it’s something entirely intangible, unique only to Gilmour himself.

From his end, Gilmour states that his preference for this style of playing stems from the fact that he “wasn’t gifted with enormous speed on the guitar”, despite trying very hard to develop this skill during the earlier years of his career.

“There were years when I was younger when I thought I could get that if I practiced enough, but it wasn’t ever really going to happen,” he says. “Some of the influences on me, like The Shadows, were just playing a tune.

“I think I come from there: I’m just playing a tune. But obviously, when you’re whacked up to 150 dBs and you’re leaning against that wall of sound onstage, the tunes change a bit.”

His ample use of bending and vibrato lends itself well to his playing style – with tasteful use of the whammy bar and some old-school finger vibrato sprinkled throughout his most iconic solos and songs, including Hey You [from 1979’s The Wall], Time [from 1973’s The Dark Side of the Moon], Marooned [from 1994’s The Division Bell], and Shine On You Crazy Diamond [1975’s Wish You Were Here], to name but a (very) mere few.

However, Gilmour claims his vibrato technique is “a natural thing that’s developed over a long career”, and that both his fingers and the whammy bar are “working, hopefully, in cooperation with each other”.

He adds: “There are moments when you get right up here somewhere [up the fretboard] and you’ve got a note and [I’m] quite fussy about over-eager vibrato from the guitar, and sometimes I just think a little thing [a bit of vibrato] just gives it a little bit of tone. And, I hesitate to use the word, refinement.”

In fact, in a 1994 Guitar World interview, Pink Floyd technician Phil Taylor commented on Gilmour’s now-iconic use of vibrato, saying, “It really is just his fingers, his vibrato, his choice of notes and how he sets his effects... In reality, no matter how well you duplicate the equipment, you will never be able to duplicate the personality.”

And while Gilmour is known for these expressive tear-jerkers, he admits that sometimes, while on stage, he still finds himself thinking that his solos are a tad too long.

“I’m just going on for too long. Time to stop,” he quips. “I just play until I think, ‘Oh, maybe we’ll end now.’ A lot of them have a musical cue. There’s one in Comfortably Numb and they [the band] all know the next one’s gonna be the end one.”

Gilmour has just wrapped up his Luck and Strange tour in support of the album of the same name. It’s the guitarist's fifth solo studio album, which he called “the best album I’ve made in all those years since 1973 when The Dark Side of the Moon came out.”

Like a lump of Play-Doh, the archetypal session guitarist is malleable, able to stretch their style to accommodate any playing situation.

David Gilmour is, for good reason, not a hired gun by trade – sure, that’s one perk of being a world-famous rock star, but it’s also due to his sonic thumbprint. You get this dude because you want that David Gilmour touch (and, let’s be honest, you’re also comfortable being overshadowed on your own track).

When he wasn’t conquering planet Earth with Pink Floyd or working on his own music, Gilmour did rack up an impressive amount of session credits – with everyone from enormous pop stars (Paul McCartney) to art rock legends (Robert Wyatt) to an obscure songwriter you’ve most likely never heard of (Rachid Bahri). Let’s examine 10 of his finest extracurricular guitar moments.

Roy Harper – The Game (Parts 1-5) (1975)

Progressive folk artist Roy Harper looms large in Gilmour’s history, adding backing vocals to Gilmour's 1984 solo album, About Face, and taking a famous lead on Floyd’s acerbic psych-funk classic, Have a Cigar.

But the duo also came together for The Game (Parts 1-5), a nearly 14-minute epic from Harper’s HQ album, with bassist John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin), and Bill Bruford (King Crimson, Yes) rounding out what could be the most impressive one-off studio band ever assembled.

The whole piece is worth (re)discovering, but Gilmour shines brightest around the five-minute mark, adding some spacey leads during a lovely folky stretch.

Rachid Bahri – Il Survivra (1977)

It’s hard to track down concrete info about soul-funk songwriter Rachid Bahri, but he apparently didn’t have trouble tracking down a bunch of famous session players.

His self-titled French-language LP features heavy hitters like Steve Winwood (keys), Kenney Jones (drums), Rick Wills (bass), Tim Renwick (guitar), and, perhaps most notably, two members of Pink Floyd.

Gilmour and Nick Mason appear on Il Survivra, a slow-burning ballad pitched somewhere between art-rock and jazz-fusion – and it’s fascinating to hear the guitarist in this context, ripping into pinched harmonics and greasy leads over glimmering keys.

Supertramp – Brother Where You Bound (1985)

Supertramp pulled out all the proggy stops for the 16-minute Brother Where You Bound, the title track and centerpiece of their first post-Roger Hodgson LP. One such “stop” involved recruiting Gilmour to do Gilmour things, like toss off some soulful, arena-sized melodies during a slow stretch about seven minutes deep.

Bryan Ferry – Is Your Love Strong Enough? (1986)

Legend, the Ridley Scott fantasy-adventure film starring Tom Cruise, includes a mostly ambient score by synth giants Tangerine Dream. But the soundtrack’s biggest selling point is, inevitably, Is Your Love Strong Enough?, a charismatic ballad fronted by Bryan Ferry at his sophisti-pop peak.

Gilmour adds a little edge to this quasi-power ballad, but bonus points for the gorgeous volume swells and psychedelic delay during the intro.

Berlin – Pink and Velvet (1986)

Everyone knows Take My Breath Away, the chart-topping ballad from Top Gun. But there’s a good chance you haven’t heard this seven-minute anthem, which closes out Berlin’s fourth LP, Count Three & Pray, with some soaring atmospherics – most notably Gilmour in full-blown Comfortably Numb mode. The guitarist sounds inspired here, even weaving in some wild chromatic runs and experimental effects.

Arcadia – The Promise (1986)

Arcadia was Duran Duran’s short-lived art-pop spinoff, with singer Simon Le Bon, keyboardist Nick Rhodes, and drummer Roger Taylor joined by an army of high-profile guests (including Sting, Herbie Hancock, and Grace Jones). Gilmour shows up on overcast single The Promise, darkening the storm clouds with his tasteful bends.

Paul McCartney – We Got Married (1989)

The former Beatle seemed to have Gilmour on speed-dial for several years; the latter’s guitar cameos include Wings’ star-studded 1979 instrumental, Rockestra Theme, the 1984 solo ballad, No More Lonely Nights (the long fadeout section of which is pretty much owned by Gilmour), an obscure semi-gem called I Love This House, all of 1999’s Run Devil Run, and 2000’s Live at the Cavern Club (DVD) – and this tough-shelled art-rocker, a highlight from McCartney’s Flowers in the Dirt.

Gilmour’s presence on this track – which was released in ’89 but recorded in ’84 – is essential; dig those chunky rhythms and high, squealing lines.

Kate Bush – Love and Anger (1989)

Gilmour has a long history with art-pop icon Kate Bush – he helped organize her first professional demo recordings, introduced her to valuable industry connections, and wound up co-producing her 1978 debut.

The guitar god also remained in her general orbit, first adding vocals to 1983’s Pull Out the Pin and then, more crucially, contributing some cinematic guitar to one of Bush’s most underrated songs, 1989’s Love and Anger.

His crunchy chords pierce through the fabric of the fretless bass and tom-toms, careful not to overcrowd the spacious arrangement as Bush’s vocals ascend into the wide-open sky.

Robert Wyatt – Forest (2003) 

Canterbury scene icon Robert Wyatt didn’t need any guitar overdubs on Forest, the experimental jazz waltz from his eighth LP, Cuckooland. But Gilmour’s shapeshifting effects are yet one more layer of fairy dust sprinkled atop the cascading woodwinds and stabbing ride cymbals.

Alan Parsons – Return to Tunguska (2004)

Alan Parsons, king of the hi-fi recording, helped bring to life Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. So it made sense for Gilmour to return the studio favor on Parsons’ nine-minute solo track, Return to Tunguska, offering some sustained electric nuggets amid glitchy electro-psych on the same wavelength as Metallic Spheres.

When David Gilmour touches a Strat, the result is pure cinema. His distinct touch, both in and out of Pink Floyd, has spawned a shorthand for the soulfully psychedelic – from the four-note phaser motif that echoes into infinity on Shine on You Crazy Diamond to the arena-rumbling blues bends of Comfortably Numb.

But he’s never been a “guitar god” in the virtuoso sense – he’s an expert in atmosphere and dynamics, disinterested in showboat-y shredding and sophisticated scales for the sake of them. (“Well, I can’t really play fast, per se,” he told Guitar World in 1988. “Not like so many players today. I don’t have a very disciplined approach to practicing or anything… Generally, I’m not too ambitious about that sort of thing.”)

During a solo, he can attack one note with perfect sustain and vibrato, and you’d probably know who it is straight away. Less, one might say, is Gil-more.

If the sign of a great player is creating a signature, there’s no argument against him. Still, even if Gilmour is properly hailed as a tour guide of spaciness – he’s been on seemingly every “best guitarist” list since people started publishing them – he’s never gotten his due as a frontman or songwriter.

One reason is that Pink Floyd was always built on larger-than-life characters: first the psych-pop wizard and acid-era cautionary tale Syd Barrett (whom he inadvertently replaced in 1967) and, eventually, the outspoken concept master Roger Waters.

Despite singing Floyd’s most agile vocals (the sandpaper grit of Time, the soothing falsetto scatting of Wish You Were Here) and helping write many of their classic songs, he was never the obvious dominant personality in that band.

As a solo artist (and you might as well include his period leading Pink Floyd after their famously heated split with Waters), Gilmour seemed to achieve his Platonic Ideal in sound.

And with each subsequent album, his music seemed to grow increasingly… Gilmour-y: creamy Strat tones, pillowy vocal harmonies, ambient synth pads, musical drama prioritized over conceptual drama.

It’s easy to take Gilmour for granted because his music is so solid, so reliable, but that consistency isn’t easy to achieve. (That said, when you’re approaching 80, it’s probably easier to traffic in his brand of slow, sky-swallowing rock than, say, the knotty prog popularized by many of his peers.)

But we’ll take any excuse possible to rectify that slight. And in 2024, we have two: the 40th anniversary of Gilmour’s second LP, About Face, and the release of his new album, Luck and Strange. To mark the occasion, we will meticulously navigate through the man’s entire studio catalog, throwing in a couple of surprise detours.

David Gilmour (1978) 

It was a prolific year: While Waters was baring his soul to write the foundation of Pink Floyd’s sprawling, conceptual double album, The Wall, his bandmates were off the main mothership working on their own, much less emotionally draining, material.

Mason produced former Gong guitarist Steve Hillage’s electro-space LP Green; Richard Wright recorded his sax-heavy debut, Wet Dream; and Gilmour crossed that same solo bridge with his self-titled outing, which largely plays like high-quality Floyd without the lyrical sophistication.

The tracks are rock-solid from start to finish, partly because some of his friends were on hand – just not the ones you might expect: bassist Rick Wills and drummer Willie Wilson, who’d played with Gilmour in the pre-Floyd rock outfit Jokers Wild, bring swagger to both stewing rockers (the harmonica-heavy There’s No Way Out of Here) and daydreamy piano ballads (So Far Away, with Gilmour on the aforementioned keys).

The guitar playing is, naturally, phenomenal: clean arpeggios (Raise My Rent), enormously ringing chords (Short and Sweet), woozy pedal-steel (No Way), bluesy solos at every turn.

If the stakes feel lower than a typical Floyd record, well, that’s gonna happen when you’ve suddenly drained the Waters. But David Gilmour was also recorded “just for fun”:

“After years in a band, you feel you should try something on your own,” he told The Guardian. “And it was nice not to have to compromise. I mean I believe the whole process of compromise is vital for a group, but it was nice not to have everything vetted.”

GUITAR HIGHLIGHT: Opening instrumental Mihalis feels like it could be an outtake from the prior year’s Animals, and I mean that as a supreme compliment. The solo is a real powerhouse, full of twangy asides and huge sustain, as it builds and recedes in intensity.

Fun fact: As Gilmour highlighted in a 2019 interview with Rolling Stone, this track features his “Number One” Strat (with a 0001 serial number), which he purchased from his guitar tech in the mid ’70s. (The instrument also appears on the much more famous Another Brick in the Wall.) “He bought it, and then I strong-armed him out of it, really,” Gilmour said, noting that Mihalis includes a roundabout “tribute” to the Shadows’ Hank Marvin.

About Face (1984) 

To say the very least, the sessions for 1983’s The Final Cut, Pink Floyd’s final album with Waters, were fraught with creative and personal tension. (Flash-forward to all the lawsuits and media mudslinging.) And given that Gilmour didn’t write a single song for that LP – and only sang one co-lead, on Not Now John – he probably felt he had something to prove on his next solo project.

“I’m not ready to retire yet,” Gilmour enthused in the tour documentary Beyond the Floyd, and the forceful About Face bears out that promise.

The guitarist aimed to craft a real statement with his second album, so he recruited both famous friends (the Who’s Pete Townshend, who wrote lyrics for Love on the Air and All Lovers Are Deranged) and renowned session players (including drummer Jeff Porcaro, bassist Pino Palladino and Steve Winwood on occasional keys).

Gilmour sounded reinvigorated with this all-star crew, churning out some of his most direct and commercial music: the slow synth-string balladry of Love on the Air (highlighted by a colorful fretless bass and his spanky, Mark Knopfler-like guitar fills), the brief detour into reggae on Cruise, the orchestral heft of You Know I’m Right.

The album’s catchiest moment has to be Blue Light – with its funky guitar delay, clanging percussion, hip-shaking tambourine and bright brass, it shares a lot of musical DNA with, yes, Phil Collins. It’s not like Gilmour abandoned his roots – there are powerful solos all over this thing – but it’s fascinating to hear him dabble with a bit more immediacy.

“It can not help sounding quite a bit like Pink Floyd if it’s got my voice and my guitar playing on it anyway,” he told Musician in 1992. “On [About Face], I was actually steering a bit away from it, a little more rock ’n’ roll.” Fun fact: The album art shows Gilmour posing with his ’55 Fender Esquire, which he nicknamed The Workmate.)

GUITAR HIGHLIGHT: Murder is a true epic, opening as a folky acoustic waltz with fusion-y fretless and ascending to a resounding climax with harmonized guitar leads. The guitars are all over the map; there’s some bluesy stomp, some growling tremolo-bar action, a generous portion of twang.

Various writers say the song was inspired by the killing of John Lennon, and the lyrics seem to make sense: “None of the tears that we cry in sorrow or rage,” he sings, “Can make any difference or turn back the page.”

On an Island (2006)

Setting aside all the legal confusion, there’s no artistic reason that Gilmour’s third album, On an Island, couldn’t be labeled under “Pink Floyd.” After all, the guitarist had been leading the classic-rock institution since the mid ’80s, piloting both 1987’s A Momentary Lapse of Reason and 1991’s The Division Bell. (Yes, Wright did co-write three songs from the latter.)

By this point, Floyd and Gilmour essentially referred to the same sense of grandeur. Even at his most hushed and intimate, his songs carry the enormity of a real event – like gazing up from your backyard to find a UFO breaking through the clouds.

By 2006 (12 years since The Division Bell, 22 years since About Face), fans were starved for new music – especially so, given the one-off reunion of Pink Floyd’s classic lineup for the Live 8 benefit show in 2005.

And while On an Island sticks to what Gilmour does best, it does lean more heavily on the peaceful side of his sound: For Red Sky at Night, the maestro plays a spitty alto sax solo over simmering strings, evoking the title phrase; during the title track’s sublime waltz, Gilmour harmonizes with Graham Nash and David Crosby over a hazily strummed acoustics; meanwhile, Then I Close My Eyes plays like his version of Fleetwood Mac’s Albatross, pairing clean arpeggios with reversed electric guitar birdsong and BJ Cole’s acoustic lap-steel.

“That’s my Weissenborn he’s playing,” Gilmour told Guitarist. “I played it on Smile. … Weissenborn’s a lovely thing. I always felt pretty good and comfortable on slide instruments. There are places between the notes where I really like to go, and you can go there on slide instruments.”

GUITAR HIGHLIGHT: The tranquil The Blue, like those other tracks, sways beautifully in a breeze of acoustic guitars and keys and vocal harmonies. But the real magic is Gilmour’s solo, utilizing a DigiTech Whammy for extremes in glissando pitch-bending.

Though he generally doesn’t like to reveal his studio secrets, he spilled them to Guitarist, enthusing about the effect.

“I love driving people crazy,” he said. “They come and say, ‘How the fuck did you do that? I’ve been working for months trying to get that.’ And I say, ‘It’s just a pedal!’ I used it on Marooned from The Division Bell. It gives a whole extra dimension.

“It had a flavor of that old album Songs of the Humpback Whale, where they recorded whale noises. It’s that floating thing. Both Marooned and The Blue are pieces of music that remind me of the sea.”

Live in Gdańsk (2008) 

Given Gilmour’s high profile and overall consistency – zero of his albums are below average, and none are exactly curveballs – it’s easy to assume they’ve all been big hits. But that’s not quite true: David Gilmour peaked at Number 17 in the U.K. and Number 29 in the U.S., and About Face, which had even wider commercial appeal, came in at an even weaker 21 and 32.

The music-buying public, clearly craving Floyd-related material, really took to On an Island; it topped the charts in the U.K. and Europe, reached Number 2 in a handful of countries and peaked at Number 6 in the U.S., making it his first American Top 10.

Most artists would have capitalized on that momentum by touring for a year and a half, bleeding themselves dry in arenas across the world. Instead, Gilmour booked a compact 2006 tour spread over three legs in the U.S. and Europe – with the final date, August 26 in Gdańsk, Poland, captured for a live album and DVD.

As stage documents go, this one’s hard to top, from the who’s-who backing band with an array of Floyd alumni (including Wright on keys, Guy Pratt on bass and Dick Parry on saxophone, plus Roxy Music’s Phil Manzanera) to the presence of the Polish Baltic Philharmonic Orchestra (more on Take a Breath later) to the balance of stellar fidelity and unpolished rough edges.

The set list features On an Island in full – a bold move, given that half the people in attendance probably just wanted to hear Dark Side deep cuts. But he also rewarded Floyd fans’ patience: Time is particularly touching in retrospect, with Gilmour and Wright’s sweet (and just a hair out of tune) harmonies; meanwhile, the arrangement on Shine On You Crazy Diamond is fascinating, with the band playing with dynamics and the solo boiling over with an uncontrollable intensity.

Gilmour has always had a special place in his heart for Wish You Were Here: “For me, [it’s Pink Floyd’s] most satisfying album,” he told Guitar World in 1993. I really love it. I’d rather listen to that than The Dark Side of the Moon.

GUITAR HIGHLIGHT: Take a Breath, already the heavy centerpiece of On an Island, is even more menacing in this live version, with the tension in the guitar riff taking on more than a hint of King Crimson. (With a bit more bite in the rhythm section, you could picture this being on Red next to One More Red Nightmare.)

The track climaxes with a fiery Gilmour guitar solo that’s even more dramatic with its visual counterpart, as white lights flash vividly around him.

The Orb, Metallic Spheres (2010) 

In a sunnier alternate universe, Pink Floyd’s brief set at Live 8 was merely the jumping-off point for a full-scale reunion tour, with Gilmour and Waters swapping smiles and stories on stage each night like long-lost brothers.

Instead, it was simply a historical moment for a charitable cause – and with Wright’s death in September 2008, one never to be repeated. There were other half-reunions over the years: Wright did join Gilmour and Mason in 2007 to play a couple songs as part of the Syd Barrett tribute show The Madcap’s Last Laugh; Waters and Gilmour played together during a small event for the Hoping Foundation charity in 2010; and Gilmour and Mason made cameos during a 2011 Waters show.

As a recording act, Pink Floyd appeared to be dead (spoiler alert: not exactly), and it took Gilmour a few more years to finish tinkering and release something of his own. Ironically, the exact opposite recording situation – a rapid-fire guitar session – resulted in Metallic Spheres, his collaborative album with electronic act the Orb.

Funny enough, the origins of this ambient-psych LP date back to Gilmour’s cover of the somber Graham Nash protest song Chicago, which was then remixed by the Orb. They recruited the guitarist to add some new parts – and when he over-delivered, a new idea arose.

“We spent a day with David at the studio with his guitar, and he just plugged in and started playing, and it became this 25-minute track,” the album’s producer, Martin “Youth” Glover, told Prog. “After Dave left, I thought, ‘There’s so many twists and turns in this jam, we could stretch it out, put a few things in and turn it into a 50-minute album,’ so that’s what I did!”

If you’re counting it as a proper Gilmour album, it’s by far his weakest, and not because of the stylistic change; it just sounds like an aimless jam cobbled together into finished pieces, with the rock legend’s soaring lines skittering around simple synths and techno beats.

GUITAR HIGHLIGHT: Black Graham isn’t riveting; the kick drum just kinda pounds along, and a synth-like tone wafts through like misplaced fairy dust. But the guitar collage is charming, blending trippy effects with plucked acoustic guitars that call to mind the folkiest stretches of Meddle.

Rattle That Lock (2015) 

Gilmour finally put Pink Floyd to bed with the band’s 15th album, 2014’s The Endless River, assembled largely from instrumental pieces recorded (and then abandoned) during the Division Bell sessions. (Well, “put to bed” if you don’t count the 2022 single Hey, Hey, Rise Up! with BoomBox’s Andriy Khlyvnyuk.)

The project has a lovely ambiance, and it serves as a fitting memorial for the late Wright, who appears posthumously. But it naturally felt a bit slight next to their classic works – only whetting the appetite for Gilmour’s more song-oriented solo follow-up, Rattle That Lock.

There’s an interesting contrast between the two LPs, with the former nodding to soundscapes of yore and the latter pushing forward with new experiments.

The title track is groovy, low-key blues rock – nothing too fancy – but the core hook cleverly samples the frosty jingle of a French railway company. (I doubt anybody saw that one coming!) Faces of Stone is a carnivalesque waltz with horns and accordion and calliope keys.

And while Today initially scans as a signature grinding Gilmour rocker, listening on headphones opens up the uniqueness of its production: There’s a bit of funk in the mechanical electric riff in the left speaker, and the counter riff on the right sounds like a shorted-out amp sputtering to life. But the biggest head-turner is The Girl in the Yellow Dress, which ventures into slinky lite jazz.

“I don’t ever want to turn anything away when it arrives,” Gilmour told Guitar World, detailing the album’s tonal shift. “These songs kind of struggle and fight their way to the top of the pile. They present themselves to me and say, ‘Now is my moment.’”

GUITAR HIGHLIGHT: 5 A.M. is one of the album’s most subtle and conventional moments, but Gilmour thrives in this kind of gentle setting, soloing patiently here over a fingerpicked acoustic and trembling strings.

Live at Pompeii (2017)

Pompeii has loomed large in Pink Floyd history since 1972, when the band released an experimental concert doc filmed at the empty Roman amphitheater. Playing on that legacy, Gilmour staged his own live spectacle at the venue during the Rattle That Lock tour – except this time a massive crowd filled the ancient seats.

The reliably hi-fi Live at Pompeii, issued in audio and visual form, follows the same general format as Live in Gdańsk: tons of new material (almost all of the new LP) balanced out with Pink Floyd staples (Wish You Were Here, Money) and deeper cuts (the sun-streaked folk-rock of Fat Old Sun).

It’s a testament to Gilmour’s old-pro skill that, even at this peak of live-rock excess, he makes playing at freaking Pompeii feel as natural as a hardcore punk band crashing a basement.

GUITAR HIGHLIGHT: One of These Days is already one of Floyd’s most underrated tracks, a psych-prog epic driven by echoing bass and spacey effects. This version is particularly tasty, with Gilmour attacking his lap steel like a wild man. “Of course, we did One of These Days, which we hadn’t been playing on the tour,” he told Prog. “That’s the only song that we played there back in 1971.”

Luck and Strange (2024) 

“It’s over 50 years now since The Dark Side of the Moon,” Gilmour told Prog, teasing his fifth solo LP. “My feeling is that this album is the best album I’ve made in all those years since 1973 when The Dark Side of the Moon came out.”

With all due respect, sir: No way. That would be a major slight to Wish You Were Here, Animals and The Wall, before even debating your early solo stuff. But you have to admire his confidence, and to his credit, Luck continues his streak of searching for new ideas.

Sure, there are plenty of vintage moves here: the slappy Strat strut of the title track, the nasty blues soloing at the end of The Piper’s Call, the floating-in-space tones of A Single Spark.

But the most thrilling moments are also the least expected, like the classical-folk vibe of Yes, I Have Ghosts and the acoustic-symphonic stylings of Between Two Points (a cover of a 1999 song by dream-pop act the Montgolfier Brothers), featuring a hypnotic vocal by the guitarist’s daughter, Romany.

GUITAR HIGHLIGHT: In the back half of Between Two Points, Gilmour elevates the dark, oceanic mood with one of his most soulful solos in many years – an expressive patch of stank-face funkiness and spine-tingling chromatic runs. As with Gilmour at his best, it’s hard to picture anyone else on Earth playing these notes with more naked emotion.

• Luck & Strange is out now via Legacy.

David Gilmour's Luck and Strange – and his ongoing career-spanning tour with stops in Rome, London, New York, and Los Angeles – served very much as a celebration, and some may say a return to form, of the Pink Floyd six-stringer’s distinctive guitar style that has inspired countless musicians.

At 78, and decades deep into his career, Gilmour states that he’s still excited by the guitar and its potential as a vehicle to “give birth to new tunes”.

“The actual playing and melodies and stuff, they’re up here [points to head] and you just transfer it onto the string,” he tells the Los Angeles Times.

“But I want an instrument to give me the start of a song. And, often, getting discomfited slightly helps that process along. I’m a really rotten piano player, but I’ve written quite a few songs which I think are pretty good on the piano.”

However, being “bad” at piano, and pushing his own boundaries on guitar – the instrument he's most comfortable with – has actually benefited him and his craft.

“It’s the limitations. When you get a guitar and it’s got a different tuning, you find something new. The comfort zone can be too comfortable.”

In a recent interview with Guitar World, Gilmour expanded on the idea of inspiration – and discussed how his guitar parts actually come into fruition.

“It’s hard to pinpoint what inspires guitar parts. Things just demand to be done a certain way,” he states matter-of-factly. “No one is commanding you. That solo [on The Piper's Call] – that’s just how it came out. It’s the way it had to be.

“I had a clear idea of how The Piper’s Call should be, starting with just the groove chugging along, then this rough, raunchy sort of guitar solo. I wish I could be a bit more lucid and articulate. But it is what it is. It’s a moment.”

Gilmour will be wrapping up his tour with two final dates at Madison Square Garden tomorrow and on November 10.

For Luck and Strange, his fifth solo album, Pink Floyd legend David Gilmour leaned on both the familiar and the new, gear-wise. For instance, though he's known primarily as a Fender man – his Black Strat being the most expensive Stratocaster ever sold – Gilmour found himself falling for a Gibson ES-335 during the album's recording.

“I've not got a huge history with Gibson guitars, but this one [the ES-335] is one I've bought comparatively recently to have a different tone, a different thing,” Gilmour explained recently on his YouTube channel. “This is a very, very different sort of guitar to what I'm used to.”

For home demos, though, things were a bit more familiar.

“I will be using physical heads and cabinets on the tour – but at home I have this thing that’s now 30 years old called a Zoom,” Gilmour explained to Guitar World.

“It’s a tiny little gray box, and I use that most of the time when I’m working on the early version of songs. Because I know how to work it – it’s got lots of good sounds and I know how to adjust them.”

Below is a full list of the gear David Gilmour used to record Luck and Strange. You can thank Phil Taylor, who has been Gilmour’s guitar tech since 1974, not to mention Pink Floyd’s warehouse and studios manager.

Taylor also oversaw Fender’s 2008 introduction of the David Gilmour Signature Strat and is the author of The Black Strat: A History of David Gilmour’s Black Fender Stratocaster (2008).

Guitars, lap steels, and ukes

• 2008 Fender DG6 NOS Black Cat Strat
• 1958 Gretsch Duo Jet 
• 1956 Gibson Les Paul 
• 1961 Gibson ES-335
• 1930s Rickenbacker A-22 “frying pan” lap steel  
• 1930s Martin ukulele

• 1945 Martin D-18
• 2021 Martin DG D-35
• 2021 Martin DG D-35 12-string      
• 2019 Cordoba C10 Crossover 
• 1978 Zemaitis 3/4 acoustic 
• 1977 Ovation 1619-4 “high-strung”

Amps

• Hiwatt Custom 50 SA212
• Alessandro Redbone Special
• Fender Bandmaster
• Fender Tweed Twin
• Yamaha RA-200
• Lazy J 20

Effects

• Origin Effects Cali76 compressor
• Effectrode compressor
• Demeter Compulator compressor
• BK Butler Tube Driver
• Electro-Harmonix Big Muff
• Free the Tone Future Factory FY-1 (phase modulation delay)

• Binson Echorec 2 (echo/reverb)
• Dawner Prince Boonar (echo/delay)
• Source Audio EQ2
• Boss CE-2 Chorus
• Electro-Harmonix Electric Mistress (flanger/chorus)
• Zoom 9030 (guitar multi-effects processor)

Luck & Strange is out now via Legacy. You can read all about the making of the album in Guitar World's interview with David Gilmour.

Over the half-century we’ve had the pleasure of his company, David Gilmour has never been one for hype or hot air.

While other rock stars deliver each new album alongside chest-beating proclamations of its greatness, the former Pink Floyd legend has always let his exquisite phrasing do the talking (a marketing non-strategy that has nonetheless gifted him career album sales north of 250 million).

Given his reticence for the hard sell, the opinion that Gilmour voices in the making-of video for new solo record Luck and Strange is liable to stop you in your tracks. “This is the best work I’ve done, and the best album I’ve made,” considers the 78-year-old in the final frame, “since The Dark Side of the Moon in 1973.”

At first glance, it’s an outrageous statement. Better than Floyd’s 1975 opus Wish You Were Here, home to the haunting four-note starburst of Shine On You Crazy Diamond? Better than 1979’s biting double-album polemic The Wall, whose aching Comfortably Numb solo is so perfect you’re scared to breathe while it plays?

But when Guitar World negotiates a rare interview with Gilmour – whose long stewardship of Pink Floyd ended with 2014’s swansong The Endless River – the guitarist doubles down. And the curious thing is, the longer you live with Luck and Strange, the more you come around to his way of thinking. Bewitching and wistful, with melodies that punch through like sunbeams, these songs of love and mortality are decorated by some of Gilmour’s most stunning touches and emotive playing.

“I genuinely think it’s as good as anything I’ve ever done,” says the guitarist, speaking from Astoria, the houseboat-slash-studio that has been his creative nerve center since 1986. “I’ve been able to throw away the rulebook on anything I might have to adhere to with people’s expectations.”

Luck and Strange sounds like a real family affair. Your wife Polly Samson once again wrote lyrics, while your daughter Romany sang and played harp.

“This album is something that really came out of Covid. We were locked down together, and the topics of discussion were the dangers of the virus and how many ancient old people like me were going to get killed off in the first flush. And of course, Polly’s novel [A Theatre for Dreamers] was released in the first week of lockdown, so we couldn’t do the shows we were planning to promote it.

“Charlie, our son, said, ‘Just do a livestream.’ So we filmed it from our barn, with Polly reading from her book, answering questions from people online – and playing a couple of songs. And ‘playing a couple of songs’ very quickly became me and Romany playing and singing songs together.

“All of that experience gave me a feeling that I could be freer than I had been, than I’d allowed myself to be. There was that feeling of, ‘Fuck it, I’ll do exactly what I feel like doing, with whoever I fucking feel like doing it with.’ There was a release in that. You know, the chains of the past were blasted asunder. I’m genuinely thrilled with this album.”

Recruiting Alt-J producer Charlie Andrew was an interesting move. It sounds like he wasn’t overawed by your reputation and really challenged you. Is it important not to surround yourself with “yes” men?

“That is a big danger. You want true, honest opinions that are freely stated. You want to be freed up to do whatever you feel like doing. And having any weight of expectation of what’s gone before clouding the vision of your collaborators is something you want to avoid. I guess someone who comes with the baggage, if you like, that I come with, it’s going to be a bit intimidating to many people. But Charlie didn’t show any sign of being intimidated.”

The story goes that when you met Charlie and played him the demos, he questioned some of the guitar solos.

“Yes. He asked us, ‘Why is there a guitar solo here?’ and ‘Why do they all fade out?’ There were these little moments that made us giggle. He also had very clear ideas about how we should approach the songs and the recording. That’s a great thing. You want things to be clear. I had not much in the way of problems with it.

“There was one song – A Single Spark – which took a bit of getting used to his approach. But I fell in love with it pretty quickly. And I think he developed a keenness on guitar solos he hadn’t previously had. I think he changed as much as I did. I think we both changed in our attitudes through the process.”

One of the most powerful moments is the title track, which grew from a jam with your late Pink Floyd bandmate, Rick Wright. What are your memories?

“Well, at the end of the On an Island tour, I thought the band was on fire. So I got them all to convene at my house, in the barn, in January 2007. To just throw ideas about, to muck about. I had lots of little semi-ideas that I wanted to try. So we went into the barn on the first morning.

“It was fucking freezing. It’s a rickety old barn. Big holes between the planks, the wind howling through, snowing outside. Really bitterly cold. I chose the timing very poorly. But I started playing that little lick that I had from somewhere. They all joined in and we jammed on it for 15 minutes.

“Of course, later, I had to split it up and write bridges and choruses – but that is the take you hear on the album. That’s what we used. It had never been played before. It had never been rehearsed. It just is what it is.”

What emotions came over you while working on that track and hearing Rick’s keys for the first time since his death in 2008? Joy, sorrow, nostalgia?

“All of those things, all the time. I mean, obviously, most of the time when you’re working, you’re focusing on what you have to do. I didn’t spend the whole time sitting around weeping. But Rick has a very unusual, idiosyncratic style that comes out in the track. It’s lovely.”

Your guitar is so atmospheric on the cover of the Montgolfier Brothers’ Between Two Points. It sounds like you were really channeling something.

“On the guitar solo? Yeah. It’s a song Polly and I have loved for years. I’d put together a rough backing track, Romany had done her vocal, and I played the guitar over it at the end. How does one describe it?

“I got so into the guitar part, it was like being on drugs. I could forget where I was in the moment and get completely lost in the playing. Which is actually quite unusual. It’s a feeling – a movement – that you search for. Because you always want to be completely lost in what you’re doing. But in my biased view, it really happened on that occasion.”

The solo on The Piper’s Call has a very contrasting feel. What was the inspiration there?

“It’s hard to pinpoint what inspires guitar parts. Things just demand to be done a certain way. No one is commanding you. That solo – that’s just how it came out. It’s the way it had to be. I had a clear idea of how The Piper’s Call should be, starting with just the groove chugging along, then this rough, raunchy sort of guitar solo. I wish I could be a bit more lucid and articulate. But it is what it is. It’s a moment.”

Another highlight is the call-and-response between multiple guitars on Scattered.

“That was great fun to record. There’s three guitar solos on that – one is on a nylon-string, then one on a Strat with a semi-beefy setting, then switching to the full Big Muff tone on that third one. It’s not that these guitar parts aren’t carefully thought out. But these ideas throw themselves at you and demand to be followed.”

Where did you choose to lay down these tracks?

“Well, there were a number of studios involved in this album. I have my own studio in Brighton [Medina], and we did a lot of the guitars and vocals there. We used a studio called Salvation Music Studios, which is an old ex-Salvation Army hall. We also used Mark Knopfler’s beautiful studio in West London, British Grove.

“I did a lot of it at home, in our barn studio, which works really well. There’s another one in North London called Angel Studios where we did orchestras and choirs. We recorded in a cathedral.

“A lot of it was down to Charlie Andrew saying, ‘I’d like to try this place…’ He and his fantastic engineer, Matt Glasbey, have all sorts of ideas about how they want things to sound – and they use 20 mics where I would use one. There were Pro Tools sessions that were way beyond my comprehension. But they find new ways of giving me a life and an air that we’re all after.”

What was it like working your guitar parts into Will Gardner’s string arrangements?

“Most of the guitars were done pre the orchestration. But Will Gardner is a genius. He’s off the wall. He goes places it wouldn’t occur to me to go. And it’s so great to have people around you who are inspiring and inspired. He did brilliant, brilliant, weird things. I mean, not all of it is weird. And the ‘weird’ is only there because that’s what works.”

It’s been five years since you auctioned the bulk of your guitar collection, including fabled Pink Floyd gear like the Black Strat. How do you feel about that decision now?

“The charity the money went to, ClientEarth, is doing the most extraordinary work throughout the world. Every day – I got one this morning – there’s an email about a court case they’ve won somewhere in the world, against countries where they break their own laws on climate change and emissions, or against people who are building plastics factories or cutting down medieval forests in Poland.

“ClientEarth brings a ton of heavy lawyers down on them, and they win these cases. I don’t think my money could have gone to a better place. The guitars have served me very well. They’ve done their job, they’re the tools of my trade. And the secret is [whispers conspiratorially], you can always buy another one.”

Was handing over the Black Strat like losing a limb – or was it actually liberating to cut the ties with your past?

“I mean, Fender did a David Gilmour model [launched in 2008], so now I’ve got the Black Cat Strat. And it’s the same, you know? It does what it says on the tin.”

But Floyd fans might argue there was an intangible magic in the original Black Strat. Can the same be said for the signature models?

“Phil Taylor, my guitar tech, insisted on a lot of affection from Fender before we’d agree to do it, and the David Gilmour Signature Strat is a fine, fine instrument. And we make sure it stays that way. We’re on their case about it regularly. I think they’ve done an extremely good job in making a beautiful guitar.”

Would it pass a blindfolded comparison with the original?

“It certainly would with me. Why wouldn’t it?”

A few guitars escaped that 2019 auction. Your 1950s Gretsch 6128 Duo Jet, for one.

“Yes. That one’s on Luck and Strange, the track itself. This is one of the guitars I have a genuine affection for and didn’t want to sell. I mean, it’s not like it’s the rarest guitar in the world and you couldn’t get another one. But I don’t want to appear too disparaging of the magic values of these tools of the trade.

“There are one or two I kept. There’s the old beat-up Telecaster [’55 Esquire]. And there were also a couple of other guitars I’d forgotten about, which were away in the Pink Floyd Exhibition [Their Mortal Remains] somewhere. Suddenly, they turned up and I said, ‘Fuck, I thought I’d sold all those!’”

How much action did those survivors see on this new album?

“Well, the Black Cat Strat – a lot. The Telecaster, a bit. Certainly, the Duo Jet is there on two or three tracks and is the main one on Luck and Strange. I’ve got a Gibson ES-335 I bought not so long ago; that’s on one track at least. And a Gibson goldtop, which is not the ’55 goldtop I used on Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2, because I sold that. But this was the spare. It’s the same year; it’s identical.”

Is your cherished 1945 Martin D-18 the acoustic guitar used on Yes, I Have Ghosts?

“I honestly can’t remember. It’s my favorite acoustic, and I wasn’t going to sell that one. But Martin have very kindly made me some new guitars as well. So I tried my best to get rid of some guitars… but I still seem to have quite a few.”

You’ve always had eclectic tastes, but one constant is that you love old gear. Some would argue that production methods get better over time with most things. Is that not true of guitars?

“I honestly believe you could pick up a 1954 Fender Stratocaster – from the first year they were made – and I can’t see how it could be improved. There’s a little fantasy-belief I hold, which is that when a guitar has been played for years, the vibrations of all the different bits of the body achieve some sort of harmony. So I think a 30-year-old Martin – identical to a new one – would definitely sound better.”

You once said the Stratocaster enhances the personality of the person playing it.

“The Stratocaster, I have believed for years, is a clearer signal for the person who’s playing it. The person who’s playing it is more recognizable on a Strat than, for example, on a Les Paul. That’s just another of my fantasy-beliefs.”

These days it seems fewer and fewer guitarists are using physical amps. How has your own philosophy changed since the days of your classic Hiwatt rig?

“Oh, I will be using physical heads and cabinets on the tour – but at home I have this thing that’s now 30 years old, called a Zoom. It’s a tiny little gray box, and I use that most of the time when I’m working on the early version of songs. Because I know how to work it, it’s got lots of good sounds and I know how to adjust them.”

You even wrote The Piper’s Call on a ukulele. How did that come about?

“I’ve got a 1950s Martin ukulele. It’s a lovely little thing. One day, it was sitting there, and I picked it up and strummed it, and found an unusual chord change I’ve never found before. One finger stays in one position, another finger moves from the second fret of the first string to the second fret of the third string. And that’s all it is. It’s the simplest thing.

“The whole song formed itself out of those two little notes. A bit like Shine On You Crazy Diamond formed itself out of those four little notes. These magic moments just pop out of their own volition.”

Do you have to be in a certain mood or mindset to lay down your solos?

“That’s a tough one. At the moment that I want to do that bit of playing, I obviously want to get myself into the right space. What else could I do? But I don’t have a formula or routine that I follow, or some particular exercises. I just play it and hope that my fingers and my brain and the instrument will be in some sort of harmony.”

With this album, there’s a real sense that you want to keep pushing the limits and creating new music. That you’re not satisfied to just play the hits?

“Yeah, absolutely. I’m much more interested in being part of the future than playing too much of the really old stuff. I mean, on the tour, I’m not going to not play any of the expected stuff. But the focus will be much more on recent times.”

You’ve said it was never your plan to become a solo artist.

“I started out when I was 16 in a band in my hometown of Cambridge. I like being a part of that setup. I never wanted to be a solo artist. When I joined Pink Floyd, same thing: I was very happy to be a part of something. And I got thrust into the role of leader.

“And that’s OK. That’s fine. I’m a big boy, I can cope. And I dealt with that as well as I could. But then, outside of that, it’s either forming another band or becoming a solo artist. And I really wouldn’t know where to start, forming a new band. That moment of being in a band – when you’re young, when you can shout at each other and fall out, but still be back at it, because your common destiny is still there… [Sighs] Yeah, I’m set in my ways now. It would be harder to do that today. It’s harder to be equal.”

You’ve made records amidst friction and tension – and you’ve also made records in the ethos of complete harmony, like this one. Which state do you find more productive?

“Oh, being in a state of harmony. But you might have different ideas about [the conflict in Pink Floyd]. There are publicly presumed, accepted versions of things which are not necessarily the way they were. Even some of the moments that felt like they had been pretty dark, the satisfaction of some of the musical achievements at the time were also great. So it’s not quite as simple as that.”

Finally, famous guitarists always say they’re trying to play more like David Gilmour as they mature. How has your own playing evolved since the ’70s?

[Deadpan] “I just try to play more like David Gilmour.”

• Luck and Strange is out now via Legacy.

Of his first studio solo release for nine years, and his fourth since Pink Floyd split, David Gilmour says: “The album’s called Luck And Strange. It’s the ‘luck’ of the very strange moment that me, and baby boomers in general, have lived through,” he says. “To have had such a fortunate moment, so many positive ideas that one thought were moving us forward.”

For guitar lovers, the album is a showcase for fabulous instruments of all stripes, from Fender Stratocasters (of course) to vintage Gibson Les Paul Goldtop and ES-335 dot neck, Gretsch Duo-Jet, classic Martin acoustics and ukuleles, and of course David’s ancient Rickenbacker lap steel ‘frying pan’ that features throughout.

Produced by Mercury Music Prize winner Charlie Andrew, best known for his work with Alt-J, Gilmour admires Andrew’s lack of reverence for both him and his musical history. “He’s quite bossy and doesn’t have any great preconceptions about what I do, or what Pink Floyd has done,” laughs David. “He just tells us what he wants us to get on with, and we get on with it. The result is extremely pleasing to me.”

“David’s been very receptive to my bossiness,” says Charlie.

With few budget restraints, the album brims with instruments, players and voices, including orchestrations by Will Gardner, and boasting the choir of Ely Cathedral (the ‘ship of the fens’ featured on the cover of Floyd’s Division Bell album). The orchestrations are “break-your-heart beautiful,” says David’s wife and lyricist Polly Samson. Gilmour agrees: “He’s a real genius.”

David Gilmour is one of those musicians held in almost universal reverence by players and music fans alike. “David Gilmour is an outstanding Strat player,” says arch-melodist
Hank Marvin. “He always gets a variety of great tones, uses finger vibrato and the bar, has super feel, creates beautifully constructed bluesy solos and is not afraid to let a phrase really
speak. Wonderful!”

“I’ve changed my whole thinking about guitar,” says Toto’s Steve Lukather. “I’d rather be more like David Gilmour than anybody else.”

Gilmour joined Pink Floyd as the group’s founder and guitarist Syd Barrett drifted from the band due to mental health issues. Since then, he has enjoyed a stellar career and his compositions, vocals, and huge soaring solos have featured on several of the world’s greatest-selling albums. The Dark Side Of The Moon became the fourth best-selling album of all time.

Wish You Were Here is another monster, full of epic tracks including Shine On You Crazy Diamond, while The Wall features the Gilmour and Roger Waters composition Comfortably Numb – in 2022 Total Guitar readers voted it the third-best solo of all time, after Van Halen’s Eruption and Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody.

When Pink Floyd finally imploded, Gilmour released solo albums like the eponymous debut, plus On An Island and Rattle That Lock, where he enlisted the help of fellow legends David Crosby, Graham Nash, Phil Manzanera, Jools Holland, Roger Eno, Floyd’s Rick Wright and others, to create finely-sculpted and highly-regarded works.

Gilmour’s playing is ever-tasteful, always in service of the song, and offers a range of techniques including string bends (with the infamous compound bend) and vibrato, both finger and whammy style. His compositions are thoughtful and musical, with arrangements that blend rock, pop, prog and blues to create dreamy musical soundscapes.

All of this is in evidence on Luck And Strange. But there’s a sense within the Gilmour camp that this one is something special. “I started off in a pop group,” says Gilmour, “and I found myself eventually leading that group, never a position I wanted. Same with being a solo artist – not something I really asked for.

“This album feels much closer to that than I’ve had all these years, with a group of people very collaborative, very positive, and pushing in everything they can to what we’re doing. It’s the best album I’ve made since The Dark Side Of The Moon in 1973.”

1. Black Cat

At just a minute and a half, the album’s instrumental opener features just Gilmour on guitar and piano, plus ambient genius Roger Eno on synthesiser. Black Cat features a replacement for the infamous black Strat that David sold at auction in 2019 for over £3,000,000.

A typically simple piece in C minor, the playing could be no-one else. It’s beautiful, tasteful and although mainly minor pentatonic-based, is laced with colour tones, glorious bends, and subtle vibrato, not to mention that echo-laden ‘fingerprint’ Stratocaster tone.

2. Luck and Strange

“Luck And Strange comes from a jam that we did in 2007 while Rick Wright was still alive,” Gilmour explains. “I wrote choruses and bridges for it and Polly wrote these great words. From the first second you hear Rick playing his electric piano, you just know there’s something about it that no one else could do.”

Introduced by Gilmour’s black Gretsch Duo Jet, it’s as close as he ever gets to a foot-tapper. The changes are very Floyd-y, too, especially the Em-C in the bridge, followed by the very Dark Side-ish G-Gdim5-C move. Packed with gorgeous bluesy fills and another monster solo, Gilmour’s vocals are relaxed and confident. A great track that harks back across the decades, both lyrically and musically.

3. The Piper’s Call

The album’s first single was written on David’s old Martin ukulele and begins with uke and acoustic guitar licks. “It’s a song about the Faustian pact – that deal with the devil,” David explains. “It could be with using up the planet,” says Polly Samson, “it could be with hedonism.”

The powerful fills and huge solo are played on possibly the same 1955 Les Paul Goldtop used on Another Brick In The Wall Part 2. Lyrically the song is almost Roger Waters-like in its social commentary: the dismissal of materialism (“ the spoils of fame”) and treachery (“but you reap what you sow, as I found long ago”).

But is the ‘piper’ The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn (Floyd’s debut album on which Gilmour didn’t play but which he performed live after Barrett left the band), or perhaps the Pied Piper of Hamelin? Whatever its meaning, the track’s simple beauty belies the insidious darkness behind it.

4. Between Two Points

“Polly always asks who my favourite drummer is,” states David. “Steve Gadd of course!” This song from The Montgolfier Brothers, a ’90s dream-pop duo featuring Mark Tranmer and Roger Quigley, had been on Gilmour’s personal playlist for years.

“I made a backing track and realised the lyrics weren’t naturally a thing I’d sing,” expresses David. So he asked daughter Romany to provide vocals. Gilmour says the guitar solo is a rare moment.

“I was so into that moment, it was like being stoned but I wasn’t – not separated from the guitar and what I was playing at that particular moment, which is rare. It was joyful.”

5. A Single Spark

Featuring Romany, Daniel and David Gilmour on ethereal backing vocals, with the man himself singing raspy lead, this cool track’s Cmaj7-Dm7-G7 verse is propelled by Adam Betts’ lovely loping drums. As for the solo, it’s about as melodic as a player can get, following the chords and targeting notes like major 7th, 9th and 5th so musically.

6. Vita Brevis

If Black Cat represents the tasty pre-dinner nibbles then this 46-second snippet is the sorbet break in our 9-course feast. Featuring daughter Romany on delicate harp, and David playing swooping slide guitar it’s a pretty and easy-to-digest respite from the weightier pieces here.

Played as an entire album rather than cherry-picking tracks, Vita Brevis (life is short) works perfectly in the context of the overall offering.

7. Dark And Velvet Nights

Featuring A-list session drummer Steve Gadd and long-time collaborator on bass, Guy Pratt, Dark And Velvet Nights is one of the album’s highlights.

“The music sprang out of me one day,” exclaims David, although the lyrics were pure happenstance. “Polly had given me a poem for our wedding anniversary and it happened to be sitting on my desk next to me. I just picked up the paper and sang these words.”

Gilmour played it to Polly, she loved it, added some further lyrics… “and there it was. Serendipitous, really.” With possibly the most soaring, anthemic solo on the album - played on David’s recently acquired dot-neck Gibson ES-335 (“I don’t know why I didn’t discover one of these a long time ago”) it’s a joyous yet melancholy piece.

8. Sings

Again, there’s no mistaking the writing and playing here. Featuring David’s two-year-old son Joe imploring him to “sing daddy, sing”, the track’s chorus was originally written 25 years ago.

Perhaps more of a grower than an instantaneous album ‘hit’ it does finish with a tasty, dare we say Roger Waters-ish, repeating bass guitar run (possibly from Gilmour himself).

9. Scattered

Lyrically credited to Samson, and both David and son Charlie Gilmour, Scattered is a classic E minor ballad, but with a few surprises. It starts in atmospheric style with a synth-borne descending Em-D-Cmaj7 sequence that builds to a darkly diminished piano breakdown from Eno and Rob Gentry.

Light relief comes with Gilmour’s acoustic guitar solo. But it’s the calm before the storm as his distortion-laden guitar takes off like a rocket to the pentatonic Strat-osphere. If there’s a Comfortably Numb moment on the album, then this is it!

10. Yes, I Have Ghosts

Another short and sparsely instrumented number, …Ghosts boasts only Gilmour on acoustic guitar, with daughter Romany on backing vocals, string programming and harp.

The instruments and vocals weave elegantly around one another, before David’s acoustic outro solo dances around Polly’s programmed violin before the song fades out. Somewhat Elizabethan in nature it’s an interesting left turn from the album’s more symphonic tracks.

11. Luck And Strange (original Barn Jam)

A spontaneous jam in Gilmour’s freezing barn with the late Rick Wright playing unmistakable electric piano (with Guy Pratt on bass and Steve DiStanislao on drums), there are nevertheless epic Gilmour moments here. He’s as cool (sic) as ever, never drops a note, and this could well be the original black Strat.

Whether you’re a complete beginner or a certified legend of the instrument, no one is immune to electric guitar mishaps. Just ask David Gilmour.

The Pink Floyd legend kicked off his world tour in support of Luck and Strange, his first solo album in nine years, in Rome last month, and was halfway through Comfortably Numb on September 28 when his guitar strap – which may have been one that once belonged to Jimi Hendrix – completely snapped mid-song.

While strumming through the chorus on his signature Stratocaster – which he believes is just as good as his record-shattering $4m Black Strat – Gilmour attempts to put the fallen strap back in place. Then he sees the damage caused, shrugs, and continues to perform sans Strat.

Thankfully, after waving over his guitar tech, he manages to swap the guitar out for another Fender signature just in time for the song’s spine-tingling solo.

Gilmour's leather strap, adorned with a row of white crosses, is very reminiscent of the strap Hendrix used circa 1970, which had been bought for Gilmour by his wife, Polly, in 2006 from an auction.

He once joked “I think it makes me sound more like Jimi Hendrix, don’t you?”

Now, it’s unclear whether or not the strap that recently broke is the exact one that Hendrix owned or just a replica, but all signs unfortunately point to it being the former. It doesn't look like it will be too tricky to fix, though.

It’s fair to say that Gilmour handled the strap snap like the pro he is, and saw him fair better than other recent on-stage mishaps we've seen, including Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready falling off-stage mid-solo. New Schecter signature artist Sullivan King, meanwhile, launched one of his new guitars at a photographer, mistaking them for his guitar tech.

Gilmour's new album Luck and Strange has been well received by fans and critics alike, with Gilmour praising the fact the record’s producer didn’t care about his illustrious past. He did, however, have to win them over when it came to guitar solos.

In a recent interview with Guitar World, David Gilmour maintained that his signature Fender Stratocasters felt the same to him as his iconic Black Strat, which was sold at auction in 2019 for a cool $3,975,000.

Though there are a few he says he'd never auction off, not to mention his steadfast belief that vintage guitars are superior to newer ones, Gilmour isn't too precious about most of the guitars he's owned over the decades.

“The guitars [sold at the same auction in 2019] have served me very well,” he told Guitar World. “They’ve done their job, they’re the tools of my trade.”

In the same Guitar World interview, Gilmour revealed that, in a similar vein, he also doesn't feel the need to record home demos with the best setup money can buy.

Though he hasn't yet jumped on the digital amp bandwagon for his live shows, things are much simpler for him at home.

“I will be using physical heads and cabinets on the tour – but at home I have this thing that’s now 30 years old called a Zoom,” he explained to GW.

“It’s a tiny little gray box, and I use that most of the time when I’m working on the early version of songs. Because I know how to work it – it’s got lots of good sounds and I know how to adjust them.”

Thanks to insider info from Gilmour’s guitar tech Phil Taylor, we know that the model in question is the Zoom 9030 – a half-rack-sized multi-effects unit that features an analog preamp section and digital effects, and launched way back in 1991.

The Pink Floyd icon isn’t the only fan of the 9030, either – it featured heavily on Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral, while Prince and the Edge were also known to be fans.

Although his demo rig is consistent, Gilmour did explore plenty of gear during the recording of his new solo LP, Luck and Strange – and despite his long history with the Fender Strat, he found himself falling for the Gibson ES-335.

“I've not got a huge history with Gibson guitars, but this one is one I've bought comparatively recently to have a different tone, a different thing,” Gilmour said of 335 in a recent video on his YouTube channel. “This is a very, very different sort of guitar to what I'm used to.”

To read Guitar World's full chat with Gilmour – which covers the changes to his creative process when making the album, his approach to guitar solos, and more – pick up a copy of the new issue of the mag at Magazines Direct.

A few years ago, I wrote a GW feature about George Harrison’s best guitar work after the Beatles.

It contained this sentence: “Regardless of how great they might be, albums by individual members of iconic bands – from the Stones to the Beatles to Led Zeppelin to the Who – rarely, if ever, attain the same mythic status as the music released by the bands themselves.”

Obviously, I could’ve added Pink Floyd to that list. Because, no matter what, Comfortably Numb will always remind you of your first kiss – or the great time you had that random summer – or your childhood in general, your teenage years, high school or college – or just plain old innocence not having to pay for rent, mortgage, your car, someone else’s tuition or your aging cat’s hyperthyroidism medicine.

Meanwhile, all the cool guitar work on, say, 1978’s David Gilmour or 1984’s About Face doesn’t quite generate the same squishy feelings, does it?

Part of the reason is that no one really talks about them; we let albums like these live in small corners of the past, behind Grandma’s cookie jar in the basement.

So instead of pairing our new Gilmour interview with yet another story about The Wall, The Dark Side of the Moon or A Momentary Lapse of Reason, we’ve decided to go all-out “solo David Gilmour” – for pretty much the first time ever, I might add – and shine the spotlight on the guitarist’s solo career.

I mean, if you like David Gilmour, what could be more "David Gilmour" than a David Gilmour solo album? How about five David Gilmour solo albums and a couple of live albums?

If you’ve only listened to Gilmour in the context of Pink Floyd, consider this issue your guide to “the alternate discography of David Gilmour.”

Anyway, here's what we've crammed into GW this month:

>>> Echoes: Nine years since his last solo album – and a half-decade after auctioning his fabled guitar collection – David Gilmour’s latest release, Luck and Strange, is a rule-breaking new chapter laced with nods to his past. “There was that feeling,” he tells us, “of, ‘F*** it, I’ll do exactly what I feel like doing…’”

>>> Extracurricular Gilmour: With a solo career that spans a whopping 46 years, David Gilmour is so much more than that guy from Pink Floyd. GW deep-dives into the guitarist’s entire solo output, attention-worthy guitar solos and all.

>>> Comfortably Done: David Gilmour’s 10 greatest lead-guitar guest appearances.

Plus a guide to the gear heard on Luck and Strange and more!

This issue – aka the menacing December 2024 issue of Guitar World – is available right here, right now!

Hold on, now! There's also this other stuff...

>>> Slipknot: Twenty-five years ago, a little-known Des Moines, Iowa, band dropped an album that would forever change the look and sound of heavy metal. Slipknot’s Mick Thomson discusses the manic recording of Slipknot, his 1999 gear, the album’s weird dearth of guitar solos and more.

>>> From Madonna to Ministry: It might seem strange that a dude best known for playing guitar lines for pumping, thumping dance songs is now blowing eardrums with industrial metallers Ministry. But Monte Pittman says he’s right where he belongs.

>>> Justin Hayward: The Moody Blues guitarist revisits obscure Moodies tracks and discusses the gear and thought processes behind his gear, tone and criminally unsung riffs.

>>> Les Dudek: Meet the guitarist who played on the Allman Brothers’ Ramblin’ Man and Jessica, dated Cher, worked with Steve Miller and was almost a founding member of Journey (But wait, there’s more…)

>>> Mike Campbell: How Mike Campbell applies lessons learned from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Fleetwood Mac to his own band, the Dirty Knobs.

>>> Rusan Guitarworks: With Prince’s Cloud 3 guitar fetching nearly a million bucks in June, we speak to Dave Rusan about working for the Purple Rain legend and the replicas he continues to produce for diehard fans.

>>> Clapton: the Fender years: Joe Bonamassa's tribute to Eric Clapton continues!

Plus new interviews with Cocteau Twins’ Robin Guthrie and Richie Kotzen, plus Marcus King, Grace Bowers, Jontavious Willis, the Asymmetric Universe brothers, Austin’s Ian Moore, Nile’s Karl Sanders, Alcest’s Neige and Wunderhorse’s Jacob Slater.

Gear-wise, we explore the history and allure of the Martin D-18 and D-28 (can you name the differences?) and review a whole bunch of cool stuff, namely:

>>> Taylor/Circa 74 AV150-10 Acoustic/Vocal amplifier
>>> Yamaha Revstar Element
>>> Ernie Ball Music Man Axis
>>> Interstellar Audio Machines Supernova Zoeldrive
>>> Electro-Harmonix Lizard King Bass Octave Fuzz

We have new columns by Joe Bonamassa (see above), Jared James Nichols, Jim Oblon and Andy Wood, plus transcriptions of Lux Æterna by Metallica, Scar Tissue by Red Hot Chili Peppers and Malagueña, as performed by Michael Lucarelli.

You can buy new issues of Guitar World at Barnes & Noble, Walmart, Hudson News, Books a Million and other stores – and online from Magazines Direct. And, while you're at it, why not save on every issue by subscribing?

Back in 2019, David Gilmour's iconic black Stratocaster shattered records when it was sold at auction for an incredible $3,975,000, making it at the time the most expensive guitar ever sold at auction (indeed, today it remains the most expensive non-Kurt-Cobain-related guitar to ever go under the hammer).

Its history speaks for itself – it was Gilmour's main guitar during Pink Floyd's golden era, during which the band recorded two of the best-selling albums of all time, and was used by Gilmour to record both the solos for Comfortably Numb, ranked (together) by this very publication as the third greatest guitar solo ever recorded. That said, Gilmour has lost no sleep over his decision to part ways with the Strat.

Asked by Guitar World how he felt about the guitar's sale five years down the line, Gilmour spoke excitedly of the funds the sale raised for environmental causes.

“The charity the money went to, ClientEarth, is doing the most extraordinary work throughout the world,” he said. “Every day – I got one this morning – there’s an email about a court case they’ve won somewhere in the world, against countries where they break their own laws on climate change and emissions, or against people who are building plastics factories or cutting down medieval forests in Poland.”

Pressed further about whether or not he felt a sense of loss with his sale of the Strat – which Gilmour prominently used in the classic Pink Floyd lineup's final performance at the 2005 Live 8 concert – the guitarist shrugged, “Fender did a David Gilmour model, so now I’ve got the Black Cat Strat. And it’s the same, you know? It does what it says on the tin.”

That said, the creation of the Fender model in question, which was launched in 2008, was rigorously overseen by Gilmour and his team.

“Phil Taylor, my guitar tech, insisted on a lot of affection from Fender before we’d agree to do it, and the David Gilmour Signature Strat is a fine, fine instrument – and we make sure it stays that way,” he explained. “We’re on their case about it regularly. I think they’ve done an extremely good job in making a beautiful guitar.”

So, would it pass a blindfold comparison with the real $4 million deal?

“It certainly would with me,” Gilmour asserted. “Why wouldn’t it?”

Gilmour is fresh off the release of Luck and Strange, his first new solo album in nine years. Cited by the man himself as his best work since Floyd's epochal Dark Side of the Moon, the album was produced by Alt-J and London Grammar producer Charlie Andrew, who challenged Gilmour's usual creative process.

To read Guitar World's full chat with Gilmour – which covers the making of the album, his home studio setup, and the guitars he wouldn't sell – pick up a new issue of the mag at Magazines Direct.