The Ruler-and-Razor Technique That Built Pink Floyd’s “Money”

Pink Floyd’s relationship with the singles market was always ambivalent. Yet “Money” became one of their rare chart hits, and its defining feature — that relentless, clicking cash register intro — was assembled with tools more familiar to a tailor than a rock band: a razor blade, a ruler, and a splicing block.

Roger Waters first developed the idea in a converted garden shed at his Islington home, recording the sound of coins dropping into a mixing bowl, paper tearing, and a cash register. The song, written in an off-kilter 7/4 time signature, needed these sounds to land precisely on each beat. To make a tape loop keep perfect time, Waters and engineer Alan Parsons resorted to analog exactitude at Abbey Road Studios.

They cut the recorded tape into equal lengths, measured with a ruler, then spliced the segments together. Seven pieces of tape, one for each beat, joined to form a seamless loop. As Waters later explained, “The only way to keep it in time was to take a piece of tape with the sound on it and measure it with a ruler.”

The method echoed the musique concrète experiments of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, but applied to a rock song wrestling with Waters’ own conflicted feelings about wealth. What emerged was less a political statement than a tightly constructed oddity — and an unlikely hit. Before digital sampling, precision like this demanded physical labour, turning a garden-shed demo into one of the most recognisable loops in rock.