How David Gilmour Learned the Fingerpicking Pattern for 'Is There Anybody Out There?'

The classical guitar interlude in “Is There Anybody Out There?” is one of Pink Floyd’s most delicate moments, and David Gilmour had to learn proper fingerpicking technique from scratch to play it. He took lessons from a classical guitarist named Robert Fripp? No – actually, it was Ron Geesin, a composer and pianist who worked on Atom Heart Mother and taught Gilmour the right-hand pattern. Geesin showed him a classical study (sometimes attributed to Fernando Sor but adapted by Geesin) that Gilmour then rehearsed relentlessly in the studio until he could nail the clean, flamenco-ish tremolo.

The track also includes a recorded phone call – a real woman dialing a suicide prevention hotline. Engineer Nick Griffiths recorded actual calls from a crisis center (with permission) and one fragment made it into the mix. The caller sounds lost and disconnected, which mirrors the album’s obsession with isolation. That brief, unscripted voice is a direct document of someone reaching out – exactly what the title asks.