Learning to Fly guitar tone
Pink Floyd · David Gilmour
A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987)
A split rig: an 18W Fender valve combo carrying the compressed, chorused, chiming clean side, and a solid-state Gallien-Krueger on its overdrive channel carrying the singing lead - with a long delay under the solo and a big 1987 plate around everything.
The rig Pink Floyd used
Researched from interviews, production write-ups and gear histories — not guessed.
Guitar
Fender Stratocaster 1983 '57 Reissue with EMG-SA pickups and the EXG/SPC boosters - bridge pickup for the rhythms, neck pickup for the solo and the fills. Corrected from the stored Steinberger GL2T, which the per-song documentation contradicts and which was the wrong Steinberger model in any case.
Amplifier
Two amps, split, as the album sessions ran them: a Fender Super Champ 18W valve combo for the clean rhythms, and a Gallien-Krueger 250ML MkII on Channel B, its overdrive channel, for the lead. The change from clean to driven on this song is which amplifier is playing, not a pedal and not a knob.
Cabinet
Fender Super Champ 1x10 (Electro-Voice); the Gallien-Krueger ran with its speakers bypassed, direct to the desk
Microphone
Shure SM57 close on the Super Champ's ten; the Gallien-Krueger is a line feed
Signal chain
The order the original sound was built in. The exact settings get dialled for your own amp or modeller when you generate the tone.
Get this tone on your rig
Pick your amp or modeller and we’ll build Learning to Fly for it — with a preset file you can load, not a list of knob positions.
Why we think this is right
gilmourish.com's 'A Momentary Lapse of Reason settings and setups' page breaks Learning to Fly into rhythms on the bridge pickup running 'overdrive and CE-2' and a solo and fills on the neck pickup running 'overdrive, CE-2 and delay' - which is the four-section shape used here. The album gear rundown describes the studio split in detail: one lead direct into a Gallien-Krueger 250ML MkII using its overdrive channel with the speakers bypassed, the second through Boss pedals into a Fender 1984 Super Champ 18W with a 1x10 Electro-Voice. Gilmour described exactly that arrangement himself in Guitar World, July 1988. Pedal dial positions are documented on the same settings page: CS-2 level 11:00, attack 11:00, sustain 1:30; CE-2 rate 11:00, depth 1:00; delays around 440 ms 'covering the basics'. The Gallien-Krueger's control set is taken from its own manual, and the amp genuinely has no continuous gain knob, no presence and no single mid control, so none is reported. The reverb is the one place this record guesses: no session document names it, so the most probable specific machine is named at 32 confidence rather than a category being shipped.
Sources
- gilmourish.com - 'A Momentary Lapse of Reason settings and setups' (Learning to Fly per-part breakdown; CS-2, CE-2 and delay dial positions)
- gilmourish.com - A Momentary Lapse of Reason gear rundown (the studio split, Gallien-Krueger 250ML MkII, Fender Super Champ 18W 1x10 Electro-Voice, Yamaha SPX90, Boss digital delay)
- David Gilmour, Guitar World, July 1988 (the two-amp split described in his own words)
- Gallien-Krueger 250ML owner's manual / panel documentation (control set: no continuous gain, no presence, no single mid)