David Gilmour Lead Guitar Tone Tutorial – Time

By Carl Brown | June 8, 2014 |


In this guitar tone series lesson we will try to recreate the epic guitar tone that David Gilmour uses during his solo for "Time" from the Dark Side of The Moon album.

David Gilmour has always favored huge sounding delay and reverb drenched lead tones. In fact, he pretty much created that sound himself.

For this video tutorial I will show you the types of pedals and amps he uses in addition to the order that he uses them.

It is actually not a very complicated setup and most players will have either an Amp/FX modeler or a few pedals that can do the job just fine.

As with all of my tone lessons, the idea here is not to get to stuck on the exact pedals that he is using but rather how to set up your own pedals or modeler to have the same effect.

I start with just the basic amp sound and gradually add more pedals to the signal chain as we work our way to the full tone. The order that I add the pedals to the signal is the same that you should do as well when trying to recreate this guitar tone.

Starting with the finer details of the setup's tone like amp EQ and drive pedal levels and EQ will help you hear everything much more clearly before adding all the delay and reverb.

All of the settings for this tone can be found in this PDF download below.

David Gilmour Lead Guitar Tone PDF Download

What the desired tone is here is a clear gain sound with lots of sustain given lots of space with delay and reverb.

I think this David Gilmour lead guitar tone tutorial will help you fully understand what he does to get his signature solo tone.

I hope you have as much fun playing around with this killer guitar tone as I do!

Oh and if you wanna learn the actual solo for "Time" just click the link below. 🙂

Time Guitar Solo Lesson - Pink Floyd

Carl...

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David Gilmour Lead Guitar Tone Tutorial

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19 Comments

  1. Dimitri Amirejibi on June 14, 2014 at 1:28 pm

    WOW This is so great. Tutorials I wanted so much but it just didn’t exist. Thanks for starting them.

    • Carl Brown on June 15, 2014 at 12:13 pm

      Thanks for the feedback Dimitri, I am hoping to get a new tone lesson up every week. 🙂

      Carl..

  2. Tushar on August 17, 2014 at 5:18 am

    Carl, please do a tone tutorial of Comfortably numb. Time was awesom.

  3. Ron on September 16, 2014 at 7:38 pm

    Really Carl this is truly the best tutorial on the web thank you !!!!!

  4. Ron on September 16, 2014 at 7:41 pm

    And I’m just waiting to get my axe FX II GREAT TOO!

  5. Kerry Wargo on February 6, 2015 at 1:50 pm

    Hi Carl. What are the settings on the guitar itself? That’s something that I’ve always been confused about. You’ve got settings on your amp but also settings on the guitar. How do you coordinate the two? Hope that makes sense. Thanks, Kerry

    • Carl Brown on February 6, 2015 at 4:06 pm

      For the most part, the most I usually do with the guitar’s settings would be to switch between the neck and bridge pickups and perhaps slightly roll off a little treble of the bridge pickup with the tone knob.

      For this lesson I was on my bridge pickup with the tone knob probably around 8 or so.

      Carl…

  6. Karl Colon on March 3, 2015 at 8:58 pm

    What actual amp modeler did you use for the video? Thanks!

  7. Robert Bowles on April 7, 2015 at 1:56 pm

    Carl,
    Is the Delay Pedal and Reverb going through a loop from the back of the amp?
    Robert

    • Carl Brown on April 8, 2015 at 11:29 am

      He wouldn’t have back when he originally recorded it. Nowadays you would see a lot of that. Just make sure the delay then reverb are the last effects in the chain now matter where you put your effects. 🙂

      • Marc Huijbregts on July 4, 2015 at 9:25 am

        Hi Carl,

        Greet tutorial. I have an Axe-fx II myselff. Is it possible to share your preset?

        Thanks in advance
        Kind regards
        Marc
        The Netherlands

  8. Biraj Shrestha on December 29, 2015 at 4:44 am

    hey buddy!!!
    will you please post the tutorial of like a stone by Audio slave
    for Line 6 PODX3LIVE.

    Kind regards
    Biraj Shrestha

  9. Enrico Barberis on February 27, 2017 at 2:03 am

    Hi Carl, before of all… thanhs for teaching, I’d like play 1% your ability in Satch song … ahahah!
    Please tell me what digital rack effect you’re using, I’m thinking about purchase one of them. Thanks a lot….
    Regards from Italy
    Enrico

    • Carl Brown on February 27, 2017 at 1:42 pm

      I can’t remember what processor I used for this lesson. At the moment I am using the Line 6 POD HD500X. You could easily get this tone with it. :0

  10. Roman Gronkowski on April 12, 2018 at 1:08 pm

    Hi Carl, Thank you for the lesson. Do you think you could do a tutorial on David Gilmour’s ‘Raise My Rent’. Thanks fro all the lessons.

  11. Yehia 115 on October 3, 2018 at 3:04 am

    Hey guys, I’m looking for comfortably numb backing track that was in the video,
    Can anyone help?

  12. Patrik Stanic on July 25, 2019 at 2:36 am

    Hey Carl, I have a concern regarding my amp… It’s a modeling amp and what happened is that my electricity in the house went down as the amp was still turned on and plugged into the power source! I wasn’t playing anything at the time the power loss happened and I tried it later and it worked again, but I wanted to know if any consequences can appear later on like the loss of sound strength or something like that?? Thanks in advance!

    • Carl Brown on July 25, 2019 at 7:29 am

      I am sure any modern electronic device has safety precautions built into it. It should be fine. A power surge would be more concerning not a power loss.

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