“I never thought I got it quite as good again”: David Gilmour reveals a lost solo on this classic Pink Floyd song was better than what ended up on the record
Sure, you can try to describe a guitar solo technically using music theory, pointing to its note selection, phrasing and so on. But the best guitar solos hold a magic within that can’t be explained. But these magic takes aren’t always kept…
As David Gilmour recalls in a new conversation on the Broken Record Podcast, there’s one particular Pink Floyd solo which he tried to recreate after the perfect take was erased. But despite re-recording the solo note-for-note, it never landed in quite the same way as the original take.
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The solo he’s referring to was on Dogs, from Pink Floyd’s 1977 album, Animals.
“If it’s perfect, don’t mess with it,” Gilmour advises recording guitarists. “You’ve got to stick with when something is right. And if there’s something not perfect about the sound, that’s kind of secondary… You’d always think, something about the phrasing or the way the tremolo was working and the way this and that, was not quite perfect.”
He continues: “I did it once on the Animals albums years and years ago on Dogs, where I did a solo, and for some reason it got erased.
“But I had a stereo mix that I’d taken home because I thought that was nice. So I could learn it off that and then [redo it]. But I never thought that I got it quite as good again. Even though it’s sort of note-for-note perfect, how can you describe that difference between note-for-note perfect and original note-for-note perfect?”
Should guitarists be trying to recreate solos note-for-note anyway – especially when they’re ultimately performed in a live setting?
Gilmour recently explained why he “never learned” the legendary solo of Comfortably Numb. “To me it’s just different every time,” he told Rick Beato.
“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?”
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