Mother guitar tone
Pink Floyd · David Gilmour
The Wall (1979)
An acoustic song with one distorted electric break. Two thirds of it is a mic'd dreadnought with no amplifier at all; the rest is one clean Hiwatt with a Ram's Head Big Muff and an Electric Mistress switched in for the solo.
The rig Pink Floyd used
Researched from interviews, production write-ups and gear histories — not guessed.
Guitar
Martin D-35 dreadnought for the sung verses and the outro, and the Fender 'Black Strat' for the clean fills and the solo. The stored record had no acoustic instrument in the chain, which left the majority of the song unplayable.
Amplifier
Hiwatt Custom 100 DR103 - one head, one linked clean voice, unchanged all the way through. It never switches channel; the clean electric fills and the distorted solo are the same amp with the Big Muff out and then in.
Cabinet
WEM/Hiwatt 4x12 (Fane)
Microphone
Shure SM57, close on the cone
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 Mother for it — with a preset file you can load, not a list of knob positions.
Why we think this is right
gilmourish.com's 'The Wall settings and setups' page gives Mother as verse and refrain on an acoustic steel string with the solo on 'Muff and Electric Mistress', and its live entry adds that the verse picking ran clean through the Electric Mistress. Those parts are the four sections here. Pedal dial positions are from the same source: Big Muff sustain 70 percent, tone 30-40 percent, volume 50-60 percent; Dynacomp output 2:00 and sensitivity 10:00; Electric Mistress colour 10:00, range 10:00, rate 9:00. Amp settings are Pete Cornish's photographed Wall-era DR103 dial positions. The delay time is Kit Rae's measured 440 ms with four to five repeats, which his library lists for the 1980-81 live performances rather than the session - the only figure that exists, and flagged as such. The Yamaha RA-200 is on the Wall studio amplifier list but its Mother attribution appears in a live passage, so it is bound to the solo alone at 32 confidence.
Sources
- gilmourish.com - 'The Wall settings and setups' (Mother: acoustic verses/refrain, solo = Muff and Electric Mistress; pedal dial positions)
- gilmourish.com - The Wall gear rundown (Feb 1979 Cornish studio board, Martin D-35, Hiwatt DR103, WEM Super Starfinder, Yamaha RA-200, SM57 on the cabinets)
- kitrae.net - 'David Gilmour Delay Time Library' (Mother 440 ms, 4-5 repeats, 1980-81 live)
- kitrae.net - 'David Gilmour Tone Building', Hiwatt settings page (Cornish's Wall-era DR103 dial photographs)