David Gilmour’s 'Purple Haze' Replica Stratocaster with Floyd Rose Locking Tremolo

During The Division Bell tour, Gilmour switched from his vintage ’54 and ’57 Stratocasters to a custom‑built 1991 Fender Stratocaster that looked like a replica of Jimi Hendrix’s famous purple “Love Drops” guitar. The most famous live recording featuring this guitar is “Coming Back to Life” from the 1995 Pulse concert film and album. You can spot the purple body and the Floyd Rose locking tremolo system in the video.

The Floyd Rose tremolo is what made this guitar different from Gilmour’s usual vintage Strats. It locks the strings at the nut and at the saddles, so the tension stays perfectly constant even during extreme whammy bar dives. Gilmour could perform violent dive bombs — bending the pitch of the note down by several semitones — and the strings would snap right back to their original tuning immediately after. His older, non‑locking Strats would slip out of tune from even moderate bar use, which is why he barely touched the tremolo arm on them. The Floyd Rose gave him a whole new palette of expressive, controlled pitch drops on songs like “Coming Back to Life” and the Division Bell tour’s reworked “High Hopes.”