Pink Floyd - Comfortably Numb
It’s been a while since I’ve done a music video post so I thought I’d go with one of my favorite guitar solos of all time, David Gilmour performing with Pink Floyd on Comfortably Numb live at Earls Court, London on October 20, 1994.
The Comfortably Numb outro guitar solo is almost always in top ten rock guitar solo lists. This particular performance is also one of the most highly rated live guitar solos because of Gilmour’s accurate guitar playing and the emotional content of the performance. The outro solo kicks off at about 4:50 in the performance and runs for the rest of the clip.
When the album version was created it was spliced together from several different takes. This caused a problem when Pink Floyd needed to perform the song live since some of the transitions weren’t practical. Much to Gilmour’s enjoyment, this meant that he had the opportunity to improvise his outro solo during live performances as he did in this video. He has said that his favorite performance of this song was in New Orleans on the same 1994 Division Bell tour as shown in the video.
While the song, Comfortably Numb, itself isn’t really that difficult to play on guitar, from a technical perspective, getting the right guitar tone and emotion is quite tricky. When I play it, not to well usually, I use a longish analog delay and rotating speaker effect (digital emulation of one) and a Marshall or other British style amp model with a bit of fuzz box distortion.
I have such great memories of laying on the living room floor with HUGE headphones on, listening to Pink Floyd on an 8-Track. Thanks for sharing. A good day for reminiscing:)
Hi WP Modder,
I see you’re ancient too.
I never bought 8 Tracks though, just vinyl. I still have a few hundred vinyl albums, including The Wall. I don’t have anything to play them on but I still have them. These days I rarely even use a CD. I mostly use a MP3 player or my computer.
The Wall is one of my favorites. I raised my children not to be another brick in the wall. They grew up very unique and now have a very open view of the world and their surroundings. Course I was a 60s hippie so what can be expected.
Denise
Hi Denise,
I was a little bit too young to be a ‘hippie’ and too old to be ‘Gen X’. Those of this age have tended to go by Gen-Jones or a few other terms. As such, we’re likely to have both Pink Floyd and Nirvana on our MP3 players.
Just don’t blame us for the BeeGees!
The Bee Gees! Thats too funny! At least you got to catch the end of the wave that the 60s screwed up.