The David Gilmour Black Strat is probably the most documented electric guitar in rock, and one of the very few with a book written about it by the man who looked after it. It is a 1969 Fender Stratocaster, bought in New York in May 1970, rebuilt repeatedly over the following fifteen years, hung on a restaurant wall for eleven, and then brought back into service. What follows is the part that is on the record: the dates, the modifications that are actually documented, the albums it was used on and the two auctions. Where the sources disagree – and on this guitar they do – I say so rather than pick the tidier version.

A replacement bought in a hurry

In May 1970, on Pink Floyd’s American tour, the band’s equipment was stolen from a truck in New Orleans. Gilmour bought the guitar that became the Black Strat at Manny’s Music on West 48th Street in New York during that same month. It was a 1969 Stratocaster with a large headstock, a maple neck and a black finish over sunburst; whether that refinish was done at the factory or in the shop is one of the points the sources do not settle. Its first known live outing was at the Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music in Somerset later in 1970, and Gilmour has said the first album he used it on was Meddle (1971).

What was actually changed

The guitar did not stay as bought for long. The changes that are consistently documented, in order:

An XLR socket was fitted into the edge of the body in the early 1970s, with a switch on the pickguard to select it, as a way of cutting the noise the fuzz pedal picked up; it was taken out again a couple of years later. Kluson tuners replaced the originals around 1972. In 1973 a Gibson humbucker was installed between the middle and bridge pickups, with the body routed to take it – and removed again in early 1974, when the single-ply black pickguard that is still on the guitar went on. Before the Animals sessions the bridge pickup was changed for a DiMarzio FS-1; a Seymour Duncan pickup replaced it later. The neck was swapped more than once across the late 1970s and early 1980s, including necks made by Grover Jackson at Charvel, and a Kahler vibrato with a locking nut went on in 1983. The shortened vibrato arm that became one of the guitar’s recognisable details dates from that period too.

Two cautions. The pickup chronology does not reconcile: Phil Taylor’s book on the guitar dates the 1974 change to a set taken from a 1971 Stratocaster, while Gilmour said in a 2006 interview that the pickups had been wound for him by Seymour Duncan. And the serial number is quoted all over the internet without a documented source behind it, so it is not repeated here.

The records

After Meddle the guitar runs through the central Pink Floyd sequence: The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), Wish You Were Here (1975), Animals (1977) and The Wall (1979). The specific parts most often credited to it are the opening notes of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” and the solo on “Comfortably Numb”, though Gilmour used several guitars across those sessions and the track-by-track attributions are not all firm. For the solos themselves there is my piece on the Comfortably Numb solo and the wider survey of the best David Gilmour solos.

Eleven years off duty

In 1986 the guitar was lent to the Hard Rock Cafe in Dallas, Texas, and stopped being played. It came back to Gilmour in June 1997 in poor condition. The restoration that followed removed the Kahler system and the locking nut and settled the neck question: the maple neck on the guitar now is dated 1983 and came from another instrument of Gilmour’s. This is the detail worth holding on to when the guitar is described as a constant companion – for more than a decade it was a museum exhibit.

Back in service

The restored guitar appears at Live 8 in 2005, on the On an Island tour in 2006 and on the Rattle That Lock tour in 2015 and 2016. The last Pink Floyd album it appears on is The Endless River (2014).

The signature models

Fender’s Custom Shop announced a David Gilmour signature Stratocaster in the summer of 2008, after roughly two years of work with Gilmour and his guitar technician Phil Taylor. Two versions were offered: an NOS finished in black and a Relic finished in black over sunburst. Both carry a Seymour Duncan SSL-5 in the bridge and a custom-wound Fat ’50s in the neck, a 21-fret maple neck with a 7.25-inch radius, the shortened vibrato arm, and a small switch on the pickguard that adds the bridge pickup in the first three selector positions. The model stayed in the Custom Shop catalogue until 2019.

The two auctions

On 20 June 2019 Christie’s in New York sold more than 120 guitars from Gilmour’s collection for the environmental law charity ClientEarth. The sale raised around 21 million dollars in total, and the Black Strat alone went for 3,975,000 dollars – at the time the highest price paid for a guitar at auction. It came back to the block in 2026, where Rolling Stone reported the price at 14.55 million dollars, again a record.

What the guitar does not explain

It is, underneath everything, an ordinary production Stratocaster from a year Fender enthusiasts do not especially prize, carrying fifteen years of small practical changes made by a working guitarist and his technician. Gilmour himself rated the Custom Shop copies as highly as the original. The sound people are chasing when they buy one is not really in the wood: it is in a Big Muff, a delay unit, a Hiwatt and a pair of hands. The rest of that chain is covered in my guide to David Gilmour’s guitars and gear and in the piece on the Big Muff.

Go deeper

The full picture of the instruments is in the hub, the instruments of progressive rock, alongside the guides to Gilmour’s guitars and gear, the Big Muff pedal and the Binson Echorec. For the band, start with the Pink Floyd band guide and the best Pink Floyd albums, and for the argument about the two halves of the catalogue there is the Waters era against the Gilmour era. The British scene that produced all of this, Pink Floyd included, is the subject of Beyond the Thames, the second book in my Beyond the Sound series.

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