I've been doing the Gilmour thing live for a decade now, and I can give you a little bit of my experience: Listening back to the recordings, it's impossible to hear the hiss when I am playing, and doubly impossible to hear it in the band mix. When I am playing all I hear is the playing. That's just the nature of stacking gain circuits.

I use the same power conditioner David uses, but when I am not playing the noise is so loud I can't even hear myself talk. Today I was running a Ram's Head Big Muff through a comp, TC BLD, Mesa/Boogie Mark III (as an overdrive), and a delay through my Reeves Custom 50 and two 4x12 cabs. They are even noisier when you run them with a compressor or stack them with overdrives like David has done. The volume only comes up when he plays.Д«ig Muffs are high gain pedals and the hiss is normal. If it is a song like Sorrow, where there are fills and solos throughout, he rides the volume pedal. If he plays a solo in the middle of a song, the muff is only on for the solo, then it's off or he has switched to a different patch.

He always has a volume pedal on stage, and in some of his bigger rigs he had a volume bypass switch or master mute on his floor switcher. 90% of the time you would never be able to hear the noise in a band context, and when David is not playing the muff, he switches it off or kills the volume. But in answer to your question - How does Gilmour play a Muff without noise? - He doesn't play without the noise. Click to expand.He actually has used noise gates in his live rigs in a few instances, but I think that was more to prevent buzz and interference from the lighting rigs at the time.

David gilmour signal path