It’s among the most famous electric guitar solos in all of rock. Some consider it the best solo of all time.
But David Gilmour says he can’t play it. Which is odd, considering he’s the one who created it.
The solo in question is the second in the Pink Floyd iconic song “Comfortably Numb,” from 1979’s The Wall.
Gilmour tells Rick Beato that he “never learned” it and prefers to just wing it and do something fresh when he performs it live.
“I’m not thinking about the audience and what they want, to be honest,” he tells the host. “I just like it starting the way it starts, and the rest of it sort of 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.
“I mean, there are a lot of guys who can play that. But I don’t play it,” he adds with a laugh. “To me, it’s just 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 prefer it to be real and to be happening, you know? There are cues within it, which I use to tell the band, ‘We’re going to end’ or ‘We’re going to do this.’ And so, they crop up as being the same every time, pretty much.”
As The Wall producer Bob Ezrin explained to Guitar Player in 2024, the two solos were cut at different times, with different producers.
“The solo at the end of the song was done when Roger [Waters] and I were in a different studio, and David did that with James Guthrie,” Ezrin said. (For the record, the first solo, which takes place at 2:38 into the song, is Ezrin’s favorite of the two.)
Both solos were cut with the guitarist’s celebrated Black Strat played through a combination of Hiwatt amplifiers and his Yamaha rotary speaker cabinet.
While the first solo has a more “composed” feeling about it, the second combines a sense of being both planned and improvised. Gilmour has explained he created this impression by recording five or six takes and compiling the finished solo from the best bits of each. The combination of repetition and development keeps the excitement building for two minutes, before Gilmour moves up an octave to raise the intensity another level.
That freedom to create on the fly ran counter to Pink Floyd’s meticulous approach to recording. Gilmour tells Beato the group constantly discussed each song’s development.
“All the time, on everything, on every instrument,” he attests. And while he says drummer Nick Mason never required much direction from the others on any song, Gilmour made one special request of him for “Comfortably Numb.”
“There’s a place where there’s a bass drum missing,” he explains. “I said, ‘Can you just not play that bass drum? I want that gap.’”
While guitarists ranging from Steve Morse to Joe Perry have raved to us about Gilmour’s first “Comfortably Numb” solo, Alex Skolnick tells us he prefers the second.
“Often overshadowed by the song’s first solo, that second solo somehow manages to be screaming, despite the slow tempo, and is a true lightning-in-a-bottle moment,” he said in our November 2024 issue. “It’s a masterclass in using space, bends, melodic development, resolution of ideas, effective tone, blues in a non-blues context and pure emotion.”
As for Gilmour, his favorite solo is on “Dogs,” from the group’s 1977 album, Animals. Sadly, he doesn’t say which of the track’s four guitar solos he’s referring to. And as he revealed recently, one of those was accidentally erased, forcing him to redo it.
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