Marooned: The Grammy-Winning Instrumental and Gilmour’s Crying Guitar Techniques

“Marooned” is the only Pink Floyd instrumental to ever win a Grammy, taking Best Rock Instrumental Performance in 1995. What makes it stand out isn’t just its slow 6/8 crawl – it’s how David Gilmour turned a standard Stratocaster into something that sounds like a wounded animal singing underwater.

The core trick was a DigiTech Whammy pedal, set to pitch-shift upward by an octave or more as he played sustained notes. He’d fret a note, pick it, then rock the pedal forward to bend the pitch beyond human finger range – creating those long, agonized slides that never sound quite like a normal string bend. He doubled that with controlled volume swells, rolling the guitar’s volume knob up from zero after each note, so the attacks vanish and the notes float in like ghosts. The whole piece feels like a slow-motion cry because every note has that slippery, breathless start and an impossible upward climb.

Recorded at Gilmour’s houseboat studio, the track also relied on subtle studio tricks – heavy compression and reverb – to smear the notes into each other. But the emotional core is that Whammy pedal trick. Without it, “Marooned” would be just another pretty instrumental. With it, it became the only piece of Pink Floyd music to get a golden gramophone