What Our Lead Guitarist Has In His "Musical Junkyard"

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Walter Stickle, the lead guitarist of Pink Voyd, takes the "Dave Gilmour" role from the original Pink Floyd band. But his history of Dave Gilmour behavior goes further back. Just like Dave, he's spent years and years experimenting with sounds.

"Dave Gilmour's dad was a lecturer in zoology at the University of Cambridge," he says, "and a major part of my own education, in molecular biology and artificial intelligence, was motivated by wanting to understand the living world, and how complexity blossoms out of simplicity. That definitely enters my music."

"Before Pink Voyd, my last band was Fracture and we were very electronic. We had a truly unique sound, not just in the melodies, but in the notes that we could produce. I've spent a lot of time trying to make my guitar totally un-guitar like. I always felt I succeeded if people came up to me after the show and said, "What instrument was that you were playing?".

"A lot of people used to say we sounded something like Nine Inch Nails. But to me, we didn't sound anything like Nine Inch Nails, except that both our bands sounded so far outside the experience of normal music. There wasn't a single moment that made you go 'Oh, that's guitar, bass, and drums and I've heard that before'. So we had that in common, and it was the only reference people had to describe us was Nine Inch Nails. One of the big things that made Fracture was that I spent a lot of time finding unique and interesting sounds and really building. Pink Floyd has so many great synth parts that I secretly wish I could become our primary keyboard player!"

It's a mindset that he carries today into Pink Voyd. "A lot of the organic nature of improvisation has to do with mathematics of complexity," he says, "and I actually do most of the sound programming for our effects boxes at Pink Voyd. I actually have digital models of a lot of Dave Gilmour's old gear, including the amp he uses, the hiwatt, and the old Binson Echorec -- which is an echo box they used to use. The digital model is just software, but it models the circuits and the physics of the original instruments. So when I'm playing guitar, I can reach over to my amplifier and just dial it up and say "I want the Binson Echorec as the delay on this. You don't have to be a nerd to find that cool. It's like having a room full of heavy, complex audio devices at my fingertips."

Walter also described his musical junkyard, a room full of strange little treasures. "Since I do a lot of the synth programming, I'm always making strange and unusual sounds. I have an entire room full of old musical gear that I can't get rid of because each box makes just one sound that's completely unique. And chances are I'll never need to make that sound again, but it's the only way I know how to make that sound, and if I ever need to again. I actually have a tremendous amount of old dead archived gear that I never use, because being able to make those tweaky little sounds matter to me so much that I'm just unwilling to part with them and if I ever have to move it's going to be heineous. I'm going to have to rent a truck just to move the junk!" (But what a nice sound the truck will make when it hits potholes...)

As we end the interview, Walter has a mischievous smile as he throws out this spooky connection to Dave Gilmour. "Shortly after I started playing sax in Pink Voyd, Dave Gilmour took up the sax, and actually plays it some on his latest solo album." Coincidence? Or is Walter just that in tune with Dave's musical direction?

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