I just saw his new DVD. His opening number was Shine On. He did it acoustically. He strummed a chord and pressed on one of his pedals and a virtual chord held in the backround while he played some lead. Then he did the same thing again when he wanted to change the chord. What piece of equipment will do that.

I think the Boomerrang will do that. I saw Floyd back in 1975 at Knebworth and he had a sampler back then. He would play a lead and store it and bring it back up and jam another on top of it storing that one also untill he had about 5 parts going at once. I would think Pete Cornish probably had something to do with the development of that.

A looper like a Boomerang will do that for you or an Akai Headrush. Gibson also makes a rack unit called the echoplex that has an optional footswitch that does that and is better in sound quality than the Boomerang or akai.

Since you were kind enough to take a stab at how he created his own background pad on crazy diamond I thought I'd take the trouble to write you and let you know how he actually did it. I just read a recent account of it by Pete Cornish. They split the signal from his guitar- one going to the PA and the second going to a volume pedal. The volume pedal fed into a Roland SDE3000 delay unit. The delay was set for 1800 ms. and feedback adjusted to give about a 20 second response. Once the signal was sent to the delay, he closed the volume pedal so that his lead playing would not interrupt the delay generated swell in the background. That was fed into a Fender Passport stereo PA that generated a signal for him on the stage and then sent a direct out to the sound board. You were actually pretty close in your guess.

Ray Johnson