Nail the TonePink Floyd

Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2

Pink Floyd · The Wall · 1979

The solo is Gilmour's 1955 Les Paul Goldtop on the neck P-90 — that guitar's identity is confirmed by his own accounts and by the 2019 Christie's sale — recorded clean and heavily compressed into the desk, then fed back out through a Mesa/Boogie and re-recorded. Aim for a fat neck-pickup single-coil sound with strong compression and only a hint of amp crunch, not a fuzz tone. The album mix is remarkably dry, so keep delay and reverb minimal and let the bends and vibrato do the work.

Where these numbers come from: worked out from the documented rig and the sound of the record

Tuning

Standard tuning, no capo

Standard tuning throughout; the solo lives in D minor pentatonic around the 10th fret, while the rhythm part was cut on a different guitar (the white #0001 Strat).

Part: Solo

Guitar

  • Gibson Les Paul Goldtop (1955) · P-90 soapbars · neck pickup
  • Fender Stratocaster (1954 #0001, white) · single-coils · bridge pickup (rhythm part only)

Amp

Mesa/Boogie Mark I

GAIN
4.5
BASS
3.5
MID
6.5
TREBLE
6.5
PRESENCE
4.0

Engineer James Guthrie took a heavily compressed and gated DI of the Les Paul into the console, then sent it back out to a Mesa/Boogie and re-recorded it with a mic; a widely repeated alternate account says the solo is purely direct into the desk with no amp at all, so keep the amp on the edge of breakup rather than fully dirty.

Pedals

  • Studio compressor (console/outboard, MXR Dyna Comp equivalent) · compressor · Heavy: ratio around 6:1, fast attack, 6-10 dB of gain reduction — the squash is most of the tone
  • Noise gate · gate/expander · Tight enough to kill hiss between phrases
  • Electro-Harmonix Big Muff Pi · fuzz · Sustain ~7, tone ~3-4, volume ~5 — documented for the fills/melody lines, not the main solo
  • MXR Phase 90 · phaser · Rate very slow (~10%) — on the fill-in guitar, not the solo

Tone character

compressed and even · forward mids · hollow neck-pickup vocal quality · light breakup, not fuzz · dry, almost no delay

medium

Mostly D minor pentatonic in one box, but the whole thing lives or dies on full- and step-and-a-half bends landing dead in tune and a slow, wide vibrato held to the end of each phrase.

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Sources