Roger Waters - Equipment and Instruments

Equipment and Instruments

Waters' primary instrument in Pink Floyd was the electric bass guitar. He briefly played a Höfner bass but replaced it with a Rickenbacker RM-1999/4001S, until 1970 when it was stolen along with the rest of the band's equipment in New Orleans. He began using Fender Precision Basses in 1968, originally alongside the Rickenbacker, and then exclusively after the Rickenbacker was lost in 1970. First seen at a concert in Hyde Park, London in July 1970, the black P-Bass was rarely used until April 1972 when it became his main stage guitar and as of 2 October 2010, the basis for a Fender Artist Signature model. Waters endorses RotoSound Jazz Bass 77 flat-wound strings. Throughout his career he has used Selmer, WEM, Hiwatt and Ashdown amplifiers but has recently settled on using Ampeg for the last few major tours, also employing delay, tremolo, chorus, stereo panning and phaser effects in his bass playing.

Waters experimented with the EMS Synthi A and VCS 3 synthesisers on Pink Floyd pieces such as "On the Run", "Welcome to the Machine", and "In the Flesh?" He played electric and acoustic guitar on Pink Floyd tracks using Fender, Martin, Ovation and Washburn guitars. He played electric guitar on the Pink Floyd song "Sheep", from Animals, and acoustic guitar on several Pink Floyd recordings, such as "Pigs on the Wing 1 & 2", also from Animals, "Southampton Dock" from The Final Cut, and on "Mother" from The Wall. A Binson Echorec 2 echo effect was used on his bass-guitar lead track "One of These Days". Waters has also played clarinet during concert performances of "Outside the Wall".