Carlos Santana's guitar strings: the PRS Santana rig, sourced

Carlos Santana (born July 20, 1947, Autlán de Navarro, Jalisco, Mexico) is the founding guitarist and bandleader of Santana, the San Francisco-based rock-fusion band whose 1969 self-titled debut and 1970 Abraxas are foundational to Latin-rock as a genre. His 1999 record Supernatural won 9 Grammy Awards (a record at the time), and his catalog from the late 1960s through the 2020s remains one of the most-cited rock-and-fusion-guitar bodies of work in modern music.

He's been a core PRS Guitars artist since 1980, when Paul Reed Smith hand-delivered an early prototype to him backstage. The PRS Santana production model has been continuously made since 1995, making the relationship one of the longest-running signature-guitar partnerships in the modern industry.

PRS Santana signature electric, with D'Addario EXL120 nickel-wound super-light .009-.042 strings, in standard E tuning. The 24.5-inch scale of the PRS Santana, shorter than a Fender 25.5-inch and slightly longer than a Gibson 24.75-inch, sits the .009 set at unusually low tension, which suits his sustained, vocal-quality lead phrasing.

His signal chain through Mesa/Boogie tube amps (the Mark series across most of his career) drives the saturation. The PRS humbuckers into a fully-driven Mesa Mark IIC+ produces the singing-violin lead tone that's most associated with his sound from Supernatural (1999) onward.

The .009 set on a 24.5-inch scale is at the low end of practical electric tension, which has two consequences. First, sustained notes don't fight back, the strings settle into vibrato fast and stay there. Second, the lower tension delivers slightly less attack into the pickups, which lets the Mesa tube amp's natural saturation do the work of building note-shape rather than the picking attack doing it, the texture of the recorded lead tone feels like it's being sung rather than played.

The PRS Santana humbuckers are voiced warmer than typical PAF-style humbuckers, less treble bite, more midrange roundness. The combination of light strings, short scale, warm humbuckers, and saturated Mesa tube amp is what produces the violin-like sustained-note quality that defines his lead voice. Removing any one of the four pieces shifts the tone away from the canonical Santana sound.

The D'Addario EXL120 .009-.042 set is widely available; on a shorter-scale guitar (any 24.5- to 24.75-inch model with humbuckers), it's the closest setup to Santana's documented rig short of buying a PRS Santana itself.