ChangeYourStrings

Billy Gibbons's guitar strings: the Pearly Gates rig, sourced

ZZ Top · reviewed by the Change Your Strings editorial team ·

Billy Gibbons uses his Dunlop signature set Reverend Willy Extra Light (.007, .009, .011, .020w, .030, .038), extreme-light gauges he switched to after a famous backstage moment with B.B. King, who strummed Gibbons's heavy-strung guitar and asked, 'Why you working so hard?' His primary instrument is 'Pearly Gates,' a 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard he's played for the entire ZZ Top catalog. Tone signal chain runs Pearly Gates into a vintage Marshall or Fender.

Who Billy Gibbons is

Billy Gibbons is the founding guitarist, lead vocalist, and primary songwriter of ZZ Top, Texas blues-rock trio formed in 1969. The band's catalog from Tres Hombres (1973) through La Futura (2012) sits at the center of American hard-blues guitar tradition, and Gibbons's tone, a 1959 Les Paul through a Marshall or vintage Fender, with .007-gauge strings, is one of the most identifiable in classic rock.

What he plays

Dunlop Reverend Willy Extra Light (.007, .009, .011, .020 wound G, .030, .038) on Pearly Gates, his 1959 Les Paul Standard. The set is sold under his nickname (Reverend Willy G) and in his exact custom gauge. He's been on extreme-light gauges since the early 1980s, when a backstage conversation with B.B. King ended with King picking up Gibbons's heavy-strung guitar, strumming it, and asking, "Why you working so hard?"

Gibbons moved to lighter gauges and never went back. The Dunlop signature relationship formalized that gauge into a production set.

Why this fits the rig

A Les Paul at .007–.038 in E standard sits at very low tension, roughly two-thirds of a stock .010 set. That gives Gibbons the fingertip-light bend feel his lead vocabulary depends on (the vocal phrasing of the La Grange lead, the slide-into-vibrato that defines Sharp Dressed Man's solo). The trade-off is pitch stability under pick attack: Gibbons's right hand is feathered enough that the strings don't go sharp under the attack, most players who try the gauge find their picking is too aggressive for it.

The signal chain, Pearly Gates' PAF humbuckers into a vintage Marshall (or sometimes a tweed Fender), handles the rest. The gauge isn't tone-shaping per se; it's feel-shaping. The tone is the Les Paul + the amp + Gibbons's right hand. The gauge buys him the bend feel he wanted from the moment B.B. King handed him back his guitar.

Related