Interesting Mods: David Gilmour’s Black Strat

David Gilmour’s original black Stratocaster has become the stuff of legend among guitarists and diehard Pink Floyd fans.

Heavily modified and experimented on over the decades, the guitar became a cornerstone of Pink Floyd’s surreally psychedelic sound as soon as he got it, and it was featured prominently on landmark chart-topping albums such as The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), Wish You Were Here (1975), Animals (1977) and The Wall (1979), in addition to Gilmour’s acclaimed solo albums David Gilmour(1978), About Face (1983) and On An Island (2006).

Gilmour originally bought the guitar at Manny’s Music in New York in May 1970, in time to use it on Pink Floyd’s fifth album, Atom Heart Mother. It was a black (painted over the original Sunburst) standard Fender Strat CBS-era model and originally featured a white pickguard and maple neck.

He played it for the first time live at the Bath Festival in June 1970, and it quickly became his main guitar onstage and in the studio.

FLORENCE AND THE MACHINE’S ROB ACKROYD ON HIS MODIFIED JAZZMASTER

“It was a little bit mysterious, but we ended up with some hand-wound pickups. And we put the Johnny Marr bridge on it. I was trying to find a pre-CBS Jazzmaster, but one that wouldn’t be risky to take on tour. With a lot of vintage equipment, the touring life isn’t conducive to sustainability. So we thought the best way to do it was to start from scratch and put together a new guitar.”

Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth fame was a big fan of the Fender Telecaster Deluxe and Fender Jaguars throughout the 1980s, but late in the decade he and bandmate Thurston Moore came across the Fender Jazzmaster.

“We liked it immediately because it was similar to the Jaguar, and then when we discovered that longer scale that it has, somehow we both immediately gravitated towards that,” said Ranaldo.

Around that time, Sonic Youth was on a few bills with Dinosaur Jr., and in seeing what J Mascis was doing with his Jazzmasters, it cemented the coolness factor of the offset Fender guitar.

But Sonic Youth has always marched to its own beat, so even though Ranaldo and Moore both adopted the Jazzmaster as their go-to instrument, they made it their own with a series of modifications.