Pink Floyd Legacy

[Kerry King]

David Bowie sponges it all up and wrings it out. I yawn.

Porcupine Tree is right up there with Radiohead when it comes to hype.

[ZiggyZipgun]

“Originality is the art of concealing your source."

[Kerry King]

^ - Heraclitus

Life is plagiarism. There's nothing new under the sun. etc. Pink Floyd forged their own sound in spite of it all.

[ZiggyZipgun]

Case in point: Hours... was the beginning of Bowie's attempt to recapture some of the sounds of his early albums and get away from the drum and bass stuff he'd been obsessing with. That particular song ("If I'm Dreaming My Life") uses the same piano-through-a-Leslie sound he first used on Hunky Dory's "The Bewlay Brothers"...recorded at the same time as "Echoes", which had by then been performed about nine times over the previous three months.

https://youtu.be/aDRi30GNFMc

[Eclipse]

I also believe Steven Wilson would be a cool spiritual sucessor.
But I think Tool would be even closer, despite the heavier sound. I see a lot of that Floydian ethereal magic in Tool, even though they are really different bands.
And let's not forget Radiohead, which reinvent themselves in each album.

Hey, tough choice.
Maybe not Tool...I'll go with Radiohead!

But my favorite of all those three is................Opeth.

Cheers!

[Kerry King]

Case in point: Hours... was the beginning of Bowie's attempt to recapture some of the sounds of his early albums and get away from the drum and bass stuff he'd been obsessing with. That particular song ("If I'm Dreaming My Life") uses the same piano-through-a-Leslie sound he first used on Hunky Dory's "The Bewlay Brothers"...recorded at the same time as "Echoes", which had by then been performed about nine times over the previous three months.

https://youtu.be/aDRi30GNFMc

The keyboard through a Leslie was old news in 1971. It's funny that you chose that particular song because it's one of the few I really like. The Leslie was probably Wakeman's idea? Or Ken Scott? Or maybe Tony Defries, haha.

[ZiggyZipgun]

Another reason that their sound is so distinctive is that while they didn't actually have a lot of gear in the early days, what they did have wasn't widely used by other groups, and they became experts with that gear. Even as they moved on from things like the Farfisa Compact Duo and the Binson Echorec, it instructed how they used later gear, and a lot of those quirky features were absorbed into their music and production techniques. The longest delay time on the Echorec is about 370 milliseconds; long before beat-synced effects were available, they were using it as a triplet repeat, which at that maximum setting would create a tempo of 54 BPM - which is around where "Breathe" started out in its early live performances, before they added the tape loop and brought it up closer to a typical heartbeart at 60 BPM.

"I don't use them very much anymore, although there are some things that only a Binson will do. I used to be expert with Binsons. I was able to dismantle them, put them back together, and change the head positioning. In fact, there was a time when Pink Floyd's original road manager, Peter Watts, and I were the only two people who could actually maintain a Binson. But they are so noisy, and I guess all the ones we've got are so old that it is impossible to keep them noise free. I have managed to nearly replicate what a Binson will do using a combination of modern digital units." - DG, 2015

Similarly, the fixed frequency of the Farfisa's vibrato circuit determined the tempo of the build-up sequence in the second half of "Echoes".

Radiohead shares this approach to a certain extent, adopting some really odd gear and exploring it over the course of many years - particularly Jonny Greenwood's revival of the 1928 Ondes Martenot (even having a modular synth controller developed based on its features) and the fine of art of sampling live vocals in real-time.

[Kerry King]

^ And yet all of the clone bands who have access to all of this information still can't breathe the same breath as David Gilmour.

the fixed frequency of the Farfisa's vibrato circuit determined the tempo

Roger Waters loves fixed frequencies. When Gilmour utters the famous line about rock and roll and feedback in the Pompeii film the first thing I think is: Roger Waters doesn't play rock and roll. It was definitely a sign of trouble to come for pink floyd.

[shoutinyoursleep]

Well its been a while posting here but two definite albums for me that have a Wish You Were Here influence would be French group AIR and their album Moon Safari from 1997 I think, definitely anyway the keyboard player has been influenced by Rick Wright's synths in Wish you were here. Air also had another Floyd characteristic in vocal harmonies, like the way Gilmour and Wright blend their voices in say, Echoes.

[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4U19zwFENs[media]

I think Dire Straits may have been influenced by Floyd too with their 1982 album Love Over Gold, at least some of the tracks have long extended instrumental passages with quite an intensity, some of the later soundtracks Mark Knopfler done was similar to David Gilmour's atmospherics, especially on the film soundtrack Cal and Bill Forsyth's Comfort and Joy.