Want to play like David Gilmour

[hawk]

I really like his style. He's not about speed, but slow melodic lines that sound awesome. I've been playing guitar for years but never much lead guitar. When I improvise I hit tons of wrong notes and pretty much just noodle around the minor pentatonic, sometimes hitting a few good notes. I think because of his style, I could learn to play like him because it's technically not that hard (aside from maybe the vibrato and hairy bends he's known for.) So, I guess my question is what's the fastest way to learn to play him? I know he has a lot of blues licks, should I learn some blues stuff? If so where to start? Obviously I need to learn his solos but wont all that will do is teach me how to play HIS songs, not my own stuff? I want to know how he approaches the instrument and apply that to my own style.

[bdemon]

Yup, you should learn his songs if you want to get a touch of his mojo. Now if that's all you do then yes, you'll only be playing his songs. But you're not going to do that. :) You're going to learn the minor pentatonic scale up and down the neck, check out the cool articles on improv and lead playing on this site and study rhythm in general.

On the occasional restless night of practice I'll take a cool solo that would kill me to master and study just one or two measures of it. I did that once with Satch's Flying in A Blue Dream, Metallica's One...a couple measures of study gave me a cool batch of new riffs to explore around the neck.

[hawk]

You're right about learning the pentatonic positions. I know the box shapes, but connecting them together and hitting the right notes within them is the tricky part :) Got any advice on learning that?

[EricV]

Try my scale workout, which has some exercises with pentatonic patterns that should help to memorize them and get your hands used to them

Regarding Gilmour... I think it would be a good idea to transcribe a few of his solos. Some of them are not too hard to figure out regarding the actual notes, but will be hard to play if you wanna get to his impeccable tone, phrasing, vibrato and control.
Try the solos of "Comfortably Numb" ( start with the album version, the live version from "Pulse" is way longer ), "Mother", "Young Lust" ( what a cool solo ! ), "Back To Life" ( the intro of that song still gives me goosebumps big time, both the studio-version and the live-version from the "Pulse" album )
Even though many of his solos were based on blues-vocabulary or pentatonic patterns, he also used the major- and natural minor scale a lot. One lick that always stood out to me was one at the beginning of the first ( I think ) "Comfortably Numb" solo... a descending line with bends thrown in. ( I looked up a TAB at the powertab archive, check it out here... http://www.powertabs.net/pta.php?page=song,726
The solo starts in measure 35 )
That one line just drove me insane back then, and hearing it a lot sure influenced me a bit, cuz that kinda lick I use rather often ( i.e. in "Canyon Of Spirits" )
Eric