“Why would I want to do it the same?”: Why David Gilmour “never learned” this classic Pink Floyd guitar solo
Few guitar solos are as universally revered as the climactic second solo in Comfortably Numb. It’s the soaring, heart-wrenching finale to one of Pink Floyd’s most enduring songs, and the kind of performance many guitarists have spent decades trying to replicate. Yet the man who wrote it – prog wizard David Gilmour – admits he’s never actually learned it when it comes to playing live.
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Speaking with Rick Beato in a recent interview, the Floyd guitarist explains that the solo, while immortalised on The Wall, has never been something he felt the need to reproduce exactly.
“I’m not thinking about the audience and what they want, to be honest,” he explains. “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.”
For Gilmour, the live experience is about feeling the moment rather than sticking to a routine formula: “I mean, there are a lot of guys who can play that. But I don’t play it,” he laughs.
“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?”
Still, his improvisational spirit doesn’t mean he’s completely unmoored from the studio version.
“There are cues within it, which I use to tell the band, ‘We’re going to end,’ or, ‘We’re going to do this,’” says Gilmour. “And so, they crop up as being the same every time, pretty much.”
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