Effectology Vol. #26
Make your guitar sound like a Pink Floyd Synthesizer.

In this episode I show how to make your guitar sound like the synthesizers used in the Pink Floyd song
“Shine On You Crazy Diamond”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2On2JDgdxQ

Radio voice
To set the mood I started the piece with an old time radio clip played through headphones.
The headphone was held against the bridge pickup to give it the weird dirty filtered sound.

Wind
The wind sound was done using a Big Muff pedal with a dummy plug in the input jack to turn the unit with out having anything directly connected to it.
The white noise sound was filtered by hand using a MicroSynth filter.

Melody Synth

Synth pad

Four note guitar line.
Below is a picture of David Gilmour in Abbey Road Studios recording the epic guitar theme for “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”.
He used a Fender, Hiwatt and Leslie amp.
I used a Stereo Electric Mistress to capture the slow rotating speaker sound of the Leslie speaker:

Explosive Boom
To create the giant boom sound I used a Big Muff into a volume pedal and Cathedral reverb set for a very large room sound.
The trick is to push the volume pedal to max the second you smack the strings and return the pedal to zero immediately after.
This sends a very short impulse to the reverb creating an explosion sound.