DAVID GILMOUR'S GUITAR EFFECTS & DELAY SETUP

Gilmour's sound is deceptively simple. You hear that sustained, singing lead tone on "Comfortably Numb" or the pulsing delays of "Run Like Hell" and it seems straightforward enough — a Strat, some fuzz, a delay unit. But the specific pieces of gear he chose, the order he ran them in, and the way he coaxed musicality out of hardware that most players would've treated as basic utilities — that's where the real craft lives. His rig wasn't about having the most pedals. It was about having the right ones and knowing exactly what each one contributed to the overall picture.

The Binson Echorec: Gilmour's Secret Weapon

If you had to pick one piece of gear that defines Gilmour's sound more than any other — more than his Black Strat, more than the Big Muff — it'd be the Binson Echorec. This Italian-made delay unit, manufactured from the late 1950s through the '70s, didn't use tape loops like most echo machines of its era. Instead, it ran a rotating magnetic drum — a metal disc coated in magnetic material with multiple playback heads positioned around its circumference.

The drum technology gave the Echorec a character that tape echoes couldn't quite match. Tape delays degrade beautifully but unpredictably; the oxide wears, the transport mechanism wobbles, and eventually you're fighting the hardware as much as playing through it. The Echorec's drum was more stable but still organic. Repeats came back slightly darker and warmer with each pass, but without the wow-and-flutter artifacts that made tape units unreliable on stage. For a band that built entire sections of music around delay patterns, that reliability mattered.

The Echorec's multi-head design was crucial. Each playback head could be engaged independently or in combination, producing different rhythmic patterns from the same input signal. Head 1 gave a short slapback. Heads 1+3 created a dotted-eighth pattern. All four heads running simultaneously produced a dense wash of repeats that felt almost reverb-like. Gilmour used these combinations as compositional tools, switching between head configurations to change the character of a passage without touching another pedal.

Fuzz and Overdrive: The Big Muff Era

Gilmour's relationship with fuzz is basically a love letter to the Electro-Harmonix Big Muff Pi. He ran through several versions over the years, but the one most associated with his classic sound is the "ram's head" variant from the mid-1970s — named for the ram illustration on the circuit board. The ram's head Big Muff had a scooped midrange character that, combined with Gilmour's Stratocaster and Hiwatt amplifiers, produced that thick, creamy sustain heard all over Animals and The Wall.

The second solo on "Comfortably Numb" is probably the single most-referenced example. Gilmour ran his Black Strat through the Big Muff into a pair of Hiwatt DR103 heads, and the combination just sang. There's an almost vocal quality to the sustain — notes don't decay so much as they hover, feeding back gently into themselves. That's the Big Muff doing its thing: compressing the signal just enough to sustain indefinitely at moderate volumes while retaining the Strat's glassy upper harmonics.

For lighter overdrive work — rhythm parts, cleaner lead passages, and those chimey arpeggiated sections — Gilmour often reached for a Tube Screamer or similar mid-hump overdrive. The TS808 and TS9 both appeared in his rigs at various points. Unlike the Big Muff's scooped character, the Tube Screamer pushed mids forward, helping the guitar cut through a dense mix during passages where the rest of the band was filling out the frequency spectrum. He'd also stack the Tube Screamer into the Big Muff for extra saturation on the heaviest sections.

Modulation and Spatial Effects

Gilmour's clean tones are almost as iconic as his lead sound, and modulation effects are a huge part of why. The Uni-Vibe — originally designed to simulate a Leslie rotary speaker cabinet — gave him that lush, swirling quality heard on "Breathe" and throughout The Dark Side of the Moon. It's not quite a phaser, not quite a chorus; the Uni-Vibe produces a throbbing, three-dimensional modulation that makes the guitar sound like it's physically rotating in space.

He also made extensive use of the MXR Phase 90, particularly during the Wish You Were Here and Animals sessions. The Phase 90's single-knob simplicity — just a speed control — meant Gilmour could dial in subtle movement quickly. Set slow, it added a gentle shimmer to clean arpeggios. Set faster, it produced the jet-plane swoosh associated with '70s rock. He generally kept it on the slower side, using it as texture rather than an obvious effect.

Reverb was the final ingredient in Gilmour's spatial toolkit. His Hiwatt amps didn't have built-in reverb, so he relied on external units — initially spring reverb tanks, later the Lexicon PCM70 digital reverb during the '80s and beyond. The key to his reverb approach was restraint. He didn't drown the signal in wash; he used just enough to place the guitar in a convincing acoustic space. The reverb made his tone sound like it existed in a room, not like it was swimming through one.

The Signal Chain

Gilmour's signal routing changed across decades and tours, but the core logic remained consistent. Here's a representative chain based on his late-'70s touring rig — the setup that produced The Wall's guitar tones.

Notice the fuzz before the overdrive. Gilmour's Big Muff wanted to see a relatively clean signal from the guitar — running an overdrive before it would push the fuzz circuit into uncontrolled oscillation. The Tube Screamer came after, acting as a mid-boost and additional gain stage when needed. Modulation sat between the drive section and the delays, so the phaser and Uni-Vibe processed the driven tone without their modulation getting smeared by echo repeats.

Recreating Gilmour's Tone on a Budget

You don't need a $4,000 vintage Echorec and a matched pair of Hiwatt heads to get in the ballpark. The pedal market in 2026 offers remarkably faithful alternatives at every price point.

If you've got more to spend, the Catalinbread Echorec ($230) is purpose-built to replicate the Binson's multi-head behavior — it's the closest any pedal has gotten to the real thing without involving a rotating metal disc. Pair it with a Thorpy Fallout Cloud ($250), which nails the ram's head Big Muff circuit with modern reliability, and you're genuinely close to the source tones.

The guitar matters less than you'd think. Gilmour's Black Strat was a stock '69 Stratocaster with a few modifications — a shortened tremolo arm, a black pickguard, and eventually an EMG active pickup in the bridge position. Any decent Stratocaster with single-coil pickups will get you 90% of the way there. The effects chain does most of the heavy lifting.

For a deeper look at how these effects fit into the broader progressive rock guitar tradition, check out our complete guide to essential guitar effects for progressive rock. And if you want to understand the creative context behind Gilmour's most ambitious tones, our case study on the making of The Wall covers the sessions where many of these sounds were pushed to their limits.