Time guitar tone
Pink Floyd · David Gilmour
The Dark Side of the Moon (1973)
One clean 100W head that never changes setting, with the whole tonal story told by three pedals in front of it: a bare clean voice with drum echo for the intro, a mildly overdriven Colorsound rhythm for the verses, a silicon Fuzz Face at full fuzz for the solo, and the Uni-Vibe swirl of the Breathe reprise to close.
The rig Pink Floyd used
Researched from interviews, production write-ups and gear histories — not guessed.
Guitar
Fender 'Black Strat' - the 1969 black Stratocaster with its 1963 rosewood neck, stock single-coils and the added mini-toggle. Bridge pickup for the solo, neck and middle for the verses.
Amplifier
Hiwatt Custom 100 DR103 - one head, one clean voice, Normal and Brilliant inputs internally linked. It is the same amp at the same settings in every section; it never switches channel and it is never the gain source. A Leslie 147 runs in parallel with it, mixed well below the amps.
Cabinet
WEM/Hiwatt 4x12 (Fane Crescendo)
Microphone
Neumann U87 at twelve to eighteen inches, on axis with 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 Time for it — with a preset file you can load, not a list of knob positions.
Why we think this is right
Per-song attribution comes from gilmourish.com's 'Dark Side of the Moon settings and setups' page, which breaks Time into intro (clean signal plus echo), rhythm (Colorsound Power Boost) and solo (bridge pickup, Fuzz Face plus echo), and gives dial positions for each pedal. Delay times are Kit Rae's measured 'David Gilmour Delay Time Library': the Time intro uses Echorec head 4 at 312 ms and head 1 at 78 ms, and the solo runs 312 ms with a second delay at 440 ms. Amp settings are read from Kit Rae's annotated photograph of the studio DR103 faceplate captioned 'Dark Side of the Moon through The Wall era'. The microphone and its distance are Alan Parsons' own account in Premier Guitar, 2012. The Uni-Vibe is bound only to the Breathe reprise because that is where gilmourish documents it, on Breathe itself, rather than anywhere in Time proper. The Leslie 147 is retained from the stored chain at low confidence and a low blend: the rotating cabinets really were in the DSOTM rig and mixed under the amps, but the only per-song Leslie attributions on record are Brain Damage and Eclipse.
Sources
- gilmourish.com - 'Dark Side of the Moon settings and setups' (per-song pedal attribution and dial positions)
- gilmourish.com - Dark Side of the Moon gear rundown (Fuzz Face BC108, Colorsound Power Boost, Uni-Vibe, Binson Echorec 2, Hiwatt DR103, Leslie 147)
- kitrae.net - 'David Gilmour Delay Time Library' (Time intro 312 ms / 78 ms, solo 312 ms and 440 ms)
- kitrae.net - 'David Gilmour Tone Building', Hiwatt settings page (studio DR103 faceplate photograph)
- Alan Parsons, Premier Guitar, 2012 (Neumann U87 at one foot to eighteen inches on the guitar cabs)