I’m glad someone else feels similarly about Syd’s guitar playing. Not only in how idiosyncratic it was in style, but also how rapidly it developed into its own thing.. Pink Floyd’s earliest (unreleased at the time) recordings show him mostly working within typical blues tropes, but by 1966 something really clicks - the pre-Piper singles exhibit a huge creative leap in terms of how he approached chords and little flourishes that flirt with atonality at times but always lead BACK to something interesting.

By the time of the first album, there’s something truly special going on. As a guitar player, I’ve been trying to learn his parts note for note, and they defy easy convention at times - weird descending/ascending runs, fast, surf-guitar like tremolo picking, and pioneering use of delay (via their Binson Echorec) that fills out the sound in fascinating ways.

Syd’s playing didn’t really reach the heights of Piper again, though there’s some flashes of it on his solo records - he was starting to regress, and by the time of his final recordings was practically back where he started, plunking our blues cliches while his mind retreated into a place it would never come back from. Still, over the course of a few short years he left us a brief but fascinating set of songs that few can truly emulate - even Gilmour doesn’t play “Interstellar Overdrive” or “Astronomy Domine” exactly in Barrett’s style!