“I couldn’t”: David Gilmour’s biggest weakness as a guitarist

On any list of the most influential guitar players of all time, David Gilmour is surely there. During his time in Pink Floyd, he rewrote the rule book in many ways, as the band was on the pioneering edge of progressive rock, a new musical world born from rock and roll but resolved to be more epic, expansive, and experimental. Since then, players have tried their best to replicate Gilmour’s sound, even while the man himself spent all that time grappling with a perceived weakness.

If Gilmour didn’t think he had a flaw as a musician, that would be a worry. Art, to some degree, relies on a level of insecurity. Uncertainty is arguably the fuel of creativity as it keeps people asking questions and seeking answers. It drives people to get better and to keep at things if they have the guts and resolve to do so. Without that slight glimmer of inferiority in us all, no one would ever improve because no one would ever feel the need to.

In Gilmour’s case, a long-running insecurity about his guitar playing was perhaps the key to his entire legacy. As he faced up to weaknesses in his skill, he could have thrown in the towel and retreated back to the shadows of being a simple rhythm guitarist in a far simpler band than his own. But with the drive to do more than that, adaptation is what made him an idol.

“I just have not got very good coordination between left and right hand,” he once admitted to The Daily Telegraph back in 2002. It was a revelation that surely a lot of people rolled their eyes at, mocking him with phrases like, ‘Oh really, David Gilmour, you’re going to tell us that you, the guitarist of one of the most well-known and influential bands in the world, are not very good at guitar?’

Years back, that probably would be what he would have said as he saw this weakness as the ultimate downfall. “My fingers are very slow,” he added as he was forced to realise long ago that he couldn’t shred his guitar in the way other rock players could. “I couldn’t do what all these other guitar players could do, so I had to do something different,” he continued – and there’s the key.

Realising that he couldn’t as competently play a very classic, riff-heavy style of rock guitar, Gilmour didn’t just surrender to that downfall. Instead, it became the fuel for the band in a lot of ways. Progressive rock is all about that. It’s about moving forward, so the guitarist did, working around his weaknesses to find strengths instead and write the best songs he could to account for that.

“My way was trying to create guitar melodies over what we did,” Gilmour concluded. The vast and epic melodies he would write for the band were the way he found a place for himself in rock, despite feeling like he lacked a key part of the skill set.