How Pink Floyd Recreated the 'Ping' and Whale Sounds in 'Echoes' Live on the 1971 Meddle Tour

That iconic, lonely “ping” at the start of Echoes was originally a single piano note run through a Leslie rotating speaker, giving it that watery, doppler wobble. On the 1971 tour, they couldn’t haul a piano and a giant cabinet onstage, so David Gilmour played the same note on a Farfisa organ or an electric piano (often a Hohner Pianet) and fed it through a Binson Echorec tape delay unit set to a long, slow repeat. The Echorec’s combination of echo and slight pitch warble closely approximated the studio effect, and they’d let the note ring out into the feedback loop.

For the “whale noises” — those rising, mournful howls that slide up into the second half of the song — Gilmour used a slide guitar technique. He’d play single notes high on the fretboard with a glass bottleneck while triggering a heavy dose of delay (again the Echorec) and vibrato from his Uni-Vibe pedal. By manipulating the slide and guitar volume knob, he could mimic the sound of a humpback whale’s song. A foot-controlled volume pedal also let him fade notes in and out, creating that ghostly, underwater swell that filled the pre-Dark Side stadiums.