The Pink Floyd guitar solo David Gilmour said he is very proud of

The most successful era of Pink Floyd wouldn’t have been the same without the incredible guitar solos by David Gilmour, which took the band’s songs to another level. The emotion he put into every note made him one of the most influential guitarists of his generation. Although his most famous solo is the one from “Comfortably Numb”, he is proud of many others he came up with throughout his career and once revealed which other is among his favorites.

The Pink Floyd guitar solo David Gilmour said he is very proud of

The Pink Floyd guitar solo that Gilmour said he is very proud of is from “Dogs”, one of the best songs of the band’s praised album “Animals”, released in 1977. “I basically wrote all the chords – the main music part of it. And we wrote some other bits together at the end. (It was originally titled ‘You Gotta Be Crazy), it was fundamentally the same song. But the lyrics changed a little to suit the ‘Animals’ concept.”

“I did one or two very nice, slightly different, guitar solos on it that I was quite pleased with. (There are three-part harmony leads) in some cases; it’s two-part in the melody sections. 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 wiped it out and I had to re-create it. (It was) by mistake, by mistake.”

“(For that I used) A custom Telecaster. I was coming through some Hiwatt amps and a couple of Yamaha rotating speaker cabinets – Leslie style cabinets that they used to make. I used to use two of those on stage along with the regular amps. That slight Leslie effect made a big difference in the sound,” David Gilmour told Guitar World in 1993. As Gilmour explained, the second take of the guitar solo for that song was accidentally erased by Roger Waters. He elaborated on the incident in a 2025 interview with Rick Beato.

He said:

“We had the whole first half of the song. Then we had a middle breakdown, which became all that weird stuff. That was filled with white two-inch leader tape. Eventually, the rest of the song was tagged on there while we were thinking about and working out what to do with it. There was something on the first half that we wanted to erase. Roger and Nick put it into ‘erase,’ and then forgot that it was in ‘erase’. It went right through the leader tape by two minutes, and then took away my second guitar solo. Completely erased, gone forever. Done.”

“Luckily, I do take mixes home. I’d taken a rough mix of that, so I had to go and re-create it from my rough mix. You never quite feel 100 percent satisfied. Although every note has been learned and rehearsed and played, you think, Oh, there’s something about the feel that had before that is gone forever,” he said.

In Gilmour’s opinion, “Animals” (1977) marked a shift from the band’s previous songwriting style, featuring fewer atmospheric soundscapes and more aggressive music, paired with Roger Waters‘ increasingly confrontational lyrics. “We had built our own studio in Islington (London) and we started trying to record in a brand new place, which always had (some) problems. We had some of the music, ‘Dogs’ actually was already largely recorded, it was called ‘You Gotta Be Crazy’ at the time.”

David Gilmour continued:

“At some point, during the making of, the ‘Animals’ idea came to Roger and he tied into the project. (The album was) moving away a little bit from the soundscapes that we did in the ‘Wish You Were Here’ (1975) album, into something that is more in your face. (Something) more rough and ready, more aggressive. The lyrics are much more aggressive from Roger,” he said in an interview for the short documentary posted by the band in 2023 (Transcribed by Rock and Roll Garage).

Although Gilmour loves the song, according to Setlist.fm, he has never performed it live during his solo career. Pink Floyd only played the track live in 1977, performing it just over 100 times that year. Roger Waters, on the other hand, is the musician who has performed the song the most in a solo setting, having played it approximately 267 times.

Bob Dylan is a fan of “Dogs”

During the past decades, Bob Dylan didn’t talk much about other bands and artists but curiously, according to David Gilmour, “Dogs” is the Pink Floyd song that the legendary musician told him he liked.

“The second time we met was around the time of ‘The Delicate Sound Of Thunder’. He said (Imitates Bob Dylan perfectly) ‘Hey, I love your record, ‘The Dogs’, man’. I was so thrilled. Not many Pink Floyd fans like this track. But Bob does. So it was OK with me,” David Gilmour told Record Collector magazine in 2003. The album “Animals”  was inspired by George Orwell’s classic book “Animal Farm” and remains as one of the greatest Pink Floyd albums.