Post-Metal & Post-Rock, Explained: 8 Genres Compared

Space, dynamics and the long build

Pink Floyd — The Patience Engine

Change delivered so slowly you don't notice it happening — built on a guitarist who bends up to his notes instead of striking them, a keyboardist importing Miles Davis voicings, and a drummer who removes beats on purpose.

Gilmour's note economy, in his own words

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• He is explicit and consistent about it across four decades. 1983: "I'll never be a very fast guitar player… There's always a melodic intent in there." 2006: "The fingers aren't very fast but I think I am instantly recognisable." Recently: "I'm not that fast on the guitar, but I don't want to be… I'm just hunting for an emotion, in the moment," and "I wasn't gifted with enormous speed on the guitar… I just want to play a nice tune!"
• The single most useful technical fact: he bends up to target notes rather than striking them. Documented in lesson analysis — he approaches chord tones (roots and fifths) from below by bending, with minimal passing tones. Mechanically: first and second fingers reinforcing the third, thumb hooked over the neck for leverage.
• Vibrato is used sparingly and by design: "a natural thing that's developed over a long career," combining fingers and whammy bar "working, hopefully, in cooperation with each other" — "a little thing just gives it a little bit of tone."
• Sustain is a stack, not a trick: playing loud enough to drive tube compression ("playing incredibly loud to get the amp's tubes really hot"), MXR Dynacomp and Boss CS-2 in tandem, Fairchild limiters at Abbey Road, and long delay trails that blend into the note.
• And a specific technique worth stealing outright — the volume-pedal swell on "Shine On You Crazy Diamond": the signal ran to a Pete Cornish A/B unit and a Roland delay set to roughly 1500 ms with about a twenty-second repeat, so Gilmour could pull the volume pedal down while a sustained pad built from his own long delay carried underneath. The pad is the guitar, delayed.

The tone chain, era by era

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• The fuzz divides the catalogue. A Dallas Arbiter Fuzz Face was his main fuzz on Dark Side (documented settings: fuzz 100%, volume 70%). The Big Muff (a "Ram's Head") arrives around 1974–76 and is first documented at the Animals tour rehearsals — it defines Animals, The Wall and The Final Cut. If you want DSOTM you want Fuzz Face; if you want "Comfortably Numb" you want Big Muff.
• Colorsound Power Boost on DSOTM for both mild and heavy overdrive; Uni-Vibe in chorus mode (volume 100%, intensity 60%, rate 40–50%).
• The Electric Mistress flanger defines 1977–1983 specifically — light use recording The Wall, heavy use on the 1980–81 tour ("Mother," "Comfortably Numb," "Run Like Hell") and on The Final Cut.
• Binson Echorec, 1968–1977, primary setting around 300 ms in repeat mode — then replaced by MXR digital delays for a reason as mundane as it gets: "I was tired of cleaning it and needed something more reliable." The same Echorec was central to Syd Barrett's earlier textural playing, which is worth noting because the machine survived the shift from guitar-as-atmosphere to guitar-as-lead-voice.
• Lap and pedal steel tunings are documented: "One of These Days" in open Em (E B E G B E); a red Jedson lap steel in open G6 (D G D G B E) on "High Hopes," "Great Gig in the Sky" and "Breathe."
• The Black Strat was bought at Manny's in New York in May 1970 after his previous Strat was stolen from the band's van in New Orleans, and was rebuilt continuously — rosewood neck in 1972 during DSOTM, a DiMarzio FS-1 bridge pickup in 1976 for Animals, a Charvel maple neck in 1978.

Richard Wright is the harmonic engine, and it's well documented

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• Waters: "It is hard to overstate the importance of his musical voice in the Pink Floyd of the Sixties and Seventies," and on his best work — "The Great Gig in the Sky and the piano part on Us and Them, in my view, are the best things that Rick did." Gilmour: "In the welter of arguments about who or what was Pink Floyd, Rick's enormous input was frequently forgotten." After Wright's death: "No one can replace Richard Wright – he was my musical partner and my friend," and he dropped songs from live sets because they can't be done properly without him.
• The single best detail in this section: Wright solved "Breathe" with a Miles Davis chord. In his own words, on getting from G back to E minor — "There's a certain chord which is totally down to a chord I had heard on… Miles Davis album" (Kind of Blue, "All Blues") — "I remember this chord (B7)… and I just thought (D7♯9)." That's the mechanism by which jazz harmony entered stadium rock.
• "Us and Them" is Wright's, written in 1969 as an instrumental called "The Violent Sequence" for Antonioni's Zabriskie Point and rejected by the director as "too sad… makes me think of church." Waters added lyrics four years later. Documented voicings: Dsus2, D6add9, D minor-major 7, and G/D with a pedal-tone bass, then Bm–A–Gmaj7sus2–C in the bridge. Note the pedal tone — it matters for merge 1.
• "The Great Gig in the Sky" began as a 1972 organ instrumental ("The Mortality Sequence") before becoming piano-led. Clare Torry improvised the vocal in January 1973 for a £30 session fee, sued for co-composer credit in 2004, won an out-of-court settlement in 2005, and pressings now credit Wright and Torry jointly.
• His keyboards: Farfisa Combo Compact, Hammond RT3 (specifically on DSOTM), Wurlitzer 200, Fender Rhodes Mark I from 1976, Hohner Clavinet D6, Minimoog Model D, EMS VCS3, ARP Solina String Ensemble on Wish You Were Here and Animals, ARP Quadra on The Wall, Mellotron.

Mason, Waters, and the studio

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• Nick Mason names Ginger Baker as decisive: "I wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for Ginger Baker. When the curtain opened at the Regent Street Polytechnic in 1966, and there was Ginger, Eric and Jack, I thought, that's what I'd like to be."
• And he is candid about restraint as a choice: "I've always been a bit disparaging of my own playing." His documented point of pride is deliberately sparse drumming credited to Bob Ezrin's guidance, where he deliberately omitted obvious bass drum beats to achieve a more subtle effect — removing beats, not adding them. Rototoms replaced conventional toms on "Time" because they "gave the best effect."
• Waters on taking creative control, his own words: "It was straight after we had split up with Syd… I simply took responsibility, largely because no-one else seemed to want to do it." And with unusual self-awareness: "I know I can be an oppressive personality because I bubble with ideas and schemes, and in a way it was easier for the others simply to go along with me."
• The "Money" tape loop is the most stealable idea in this guide. Waters recorded coins, a cash register, tearing paper and a counting machine; Alan Parsons then built a physical seven-beat loop by measuring tape segments with a ruler and splicing them with a razor blade, mounting the finished loop on mic stands around the tape machine. Parsons: "The only way to keep it in time was to take a piece of tape with the sound on it and measure it with a ruler… always with the fear that you'd make a mistake and have to start all over again." For the quad mix it was rebuilt across four tracks to walk around the room.
• The clocks were an accident of scope: Parsons had independently recorded antique clocks in a clock shop as a quadraphonic demo, and the band liked it enough to use it as-is on "Time." The heartbeat is a heavily treated, muffled bass drum, bookending the album.
• "On the Run" is almost entirely live performance on one synth. An eight-note sequence entered by hand into an EMS Synthi A at roughly 165 BPM, with filter frequency and resonance modulated in real time, a ring-modulated white-noise "hi-hat," and a Doppler aircraft pass. Parsons: "Everything you hear on that track, apart from the sound effects, was done live. It was all coming out of the Synthi A."
• Segues are composed objects. DSOTM was edited to play as a continuous piece per side. And Gilmour engineered the "Wish You Were Here" transition as a tinny transistor radio: "It's all meant to sound like the first track getting sucked into the radio, with one person sitting in the room playing guitar along to the radio."
• "Shine On" grew from four accidental notes at a King's Cross rehearsal in spring 1974 — Gilmour: "This little four-note arpeggio thing more or less accidentally fell out… After I'd played it a few times, Roger and the others pricked up their ears… the whole of 'Shine On' grew out of that moment."
• Meter and tempo, honestly. "Money" is in 7/4, and it is the only well-documented odd meter of the Gilmour era — treat any other claim as unsourced. On tempo, catalogue analysis puts the mean around 84 BPM, median 72, mode 65, ranging from 37 to 165. So "Floyd is slow" is broadly true but a simplification in the same way it was for Black Sabbath in guide three: "On the Run" runs about 165, "Run Like Hell" 116 with sixteenth-note delay making it read faster, and "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2" was given a four-on-the-floor disco pulse at Bob Ezrin's suggestion — Ezrin told Gilmour to "go to a couple of clubs and listen to what's happening with disco music."
• One genuine three-way dispute worth knowing: the "Comfortably Numb" solo. Bob Ezrin says "That was essentially a first take. He played that part that's on the record his first time." Gilmour says he recorded five or six and comped the best phrases with faders. Waters: "Ezrin has lied through his fucking teeth about it for years and years." Unresolved.