Pink Floyd

Pink Floyd formed in London in 1965, initially under Syd Barrett's leadership. Barrett's psychedelic songwriting and guitar playing defined the band's early character before his deteriorating mental health led to his departure in 1968, replaced by David Gilmour. The lineup of Gilmour, Roger Waters, Richard Wright, and Nick Mason recorded the albums that defined the band's legacy. Gilmour's guitar tone is among the most studied and least successfully replicated in rock history. Its foundation was a late-1960s Fender Stratocaster — the Black Strat, built from various parts including a 1963 rosewood neck — run through Hiwatt DR103 100-watt heads into WEM 4x12 Starfinder cabinets loaded with Fane Crescendo speakers. The Hiwatt's unusually stiff power supply kept the amp clean at volumes where any Marshall would be saturating. All of Gilmour's distortion came from the pedal chain: a Dallas Arbiter Fuzz Face (silicon) for the core drive, a Colorsound Power Boost as a boost and additional drive stage, an Electro-Harmonix Big Muff Pi for the thicker sustained leads on The Wall. A Binson Echorec tape echo — a rotating magnetic disc unit that produced a degrading, organic echo impossible to reproduce digitally — defined the spatial quality of his leads from Meddle onward. A UniVox Uni-Vibe in chorus mode produced the swirling quality on Dark Side of the Moon. The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) spent 741 weeks on the Billboard 200 chart over its lifetime — a record that stands to this day. The guitar tone on "Time," "Money," and "Any Colour You Like" came from the Fuzz Face into the Echorec into the Hiwatt, recorded at high volume to capture the Hiwatt's clean dynamic response. The Wall (1979) shifted toward a Big Muff-based lead tone and a more processed, studio-forward production approach, but the underlying architecture — clean amp, dirty pedals — remained constant. Roger Waters departed acrimoniously in 1985. Gilmour continued under the Pink Floyd name, releasing A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987) and The Division Bell (1994) without Waters. The band's final recording, The Endless River (2014), was assembled largely from sessions recorded with Wright before his death in 2008. Key gear: Fender Stratocaster (Black Strat), Hiwatt DR103, Dallas Arbiter Fuzz Face, Colorsound Power Boost, Electro-Harmonix Big Muff Pi, Binson Echorec, UniVox Uni-Vibe, WEM 4x12 Starfinder cabinet.