The Pink Floyd guitar solo Roger Waters accidentally erased
The recording studio is usually where rock stars separate the professionals from the amateurs. Even though it might be easy to deliver songs to an audience of thousands over blaring feedback, having no sonic disguise in the studio leaves the performers vulnerable to themselves, serving as their audience as they finetune songs to make them great. Although Pink Floyd were known to be technicians behind the board, David Gilmour had to live without hearing one of his masterpieces.
When working on the first handful of Floyd releases, though, Syd Barrett was usually the one to take the reins. As opposed to the sounds of progressive rock grandeur, the band were known for making songs that fit with the 1960s psychedelic aesthetic before Roger Waters took over for Barrett after his ousting.
While the band would maintain a collaborative spirit across albums like Meddle, Dark Side of the Moon marked the moment when everyone began operating at the peak of their powers. Alongside engineer Alan Parsons, the band created some of the most sonically enriching songs of their career, with massive waves of sounds on tracks like ‘Time’ and ‘Money’.
As the band took to the road, they realised the opportunity they had when working in the studio. While they had to deliver a different experience every night, the studio would become their refuge to paint their next masterpieces. Experimenting with everything they could get their hands on, the follow-up Wish You Were Here would be a poignant farewell to Barrett and contain some of Gilmour’s most inventive guitar work on tracks like ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond.’
While the album also contained warnings from Waters about the dangers of the music business, Animals would be his first step towards more political material. Taking inspiration from George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the album would become one of Waters’s most ambitious concepts, with each song modelled after a different animal meant to represent an aspect of society.
Though Gilmour got to branch out on the song ‘Dogs’, he had major disagreements with Waters about how the guitar solo should be played. Instead of the final version, Gilmour had an idea to create a guitar symphony, putting different harmonies on top of each other to create a vast array of sounds.
Once it came time to mix the final record, though, Gilmour recalls Waters erasing the initial version of the solo, saying, “But the last line of the first solo, I believe, is a three-part descending augmented chord. Which is quite nice, and I was very proud of it; I thought it was very clever. Then Roger went and (accidentally) wiped it out, and I had to re-create it”.
Despite the headache of having to recreate the sound, the edit is virtually unrecognisable on the final version, with Gilmour playing some of the most intricate musical passages of his career over the track’s sprawling runtime. Even though Waters’s approach to lyrics was becoming more serious and clinical, there’s a certain humanity in Gilmour’s guitar work that cuts through every one of the warnings that Waters talks about.
