B.B. King's guitar strings: the gauge he played on Lucille, sourced

Riley B. "B.B." King (September 16, 1925, Itta Bena, Mississippi, May 14, 2015, Las Vegas, Nevada) was one of the most-influential blues guitarists in recorded history, a sixty-six-year career from his first single in 1949 through his retirement in 2014. The "B.B." was for "Blues Boy," the on-air name he used as a Memphis radio DJ at WDIA in the late 1940s. The signature instrument family, all named Lucille, were Gibson semi-hollow electrics, and the Lucille signature ES-355 has been a Gibson Custom Shop catalog model since the 1980s.

His 15 Grammy Awards, the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2006), and his role in opening the door for the postwar electric-blues canon (Albert King, Buddy Guy, Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan) make him the load-bearing figure in the genre's modern history.

Gibson B.B. King Signature Electric Guitar Strings (SEG-BBS, .010, .013, .017p, .032, .045, .054) on a Gibson ES-355 Lucille tuned to E standard. Gibson built the set to B.B. King's own gauge: a pure nickel wrap on a premium Swedish steel hex core, light at the top, heavy at the bottom. Gibson has since discontinued it. The unwound .017 third is the detail that matters: his butterfly vibrato sits mostly across the third and second strings, and a plain third bends more freely and rings brighter than a wound third at the same gauge.

Earlier in his career, through the 1960s, he played Fender Rock 'n' Roll strings, for the same reason: he liked an unwound G. A December 1969 Guitar Player interview quotes him on it directly, and Gibson print advertising from the following years had him "wailin' on Gibson strings." The signature SEG-BBS set followed.

His signal chain was simple: Lucille into a Lab Series L5 (the solid-state amp he leaned on from the 1970s onward) or a Fender Twin Reverb in earlier years. A clean, reverb-rich tone with very little overdrive is where his lead vocabulary lives; the saturation comes from picking attack into a clean amp, not from gain.

The Gibson signature set is long discontinued. Want to try his gauge spread today? The closest off-the-shelf match is Ernie Ball's Regular Slinky (.010 to .046): Buy on Amazon. It matches King's light top and unwound third, though its .046 low E runs lighter than his .054. Full breakdown below.

The Gibson B.B. King Signature set (SEG-BBS) is discontinued, so sealed packs are now a collector buy rather than shelf stock. For a current set with the same feel, any light pure-nickel or nickel-plated set with a plain .017 or .018 third string gets close. The one trade-off: most stock .010 sets stop at a .046 low E, lighter than King's .054 bottom.

Ernie Ball

Regular Slinky (.010–.046)

.010 – .046

Price tier: $

Why this one: Modern equivalent at the .010 light-gauge mark, with an unwound .017 third matching King's bend-vocabulary spec. Lighter low E than King's SEG-BBS set (.046 vs .054), so the bottom isn't quite as anchored, but the top-three-strings feel matches.

E StandardBluesBlues rock

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The genuinely distinctive part of the set is the spread: a light .010 top paired with a heavy .054 low E, well above the .046 most .010 sets carry. The asymmetry is on purpose. Light enough at the top for the butterfly vibrato, his most-imitated signature, and heavy enough at the bottom for chord-anchor stability and a thick low end on the ES-355. The .017 G is plain, the unwound third he favored his whole career.

The semi-hollow ES-355 with closed F-holes resists feedback at high stage volume, which is why the signature Lucille has the closed body; his typical performance volumes would have made an open-F-hole 335 howl. The Vari-Tone six-position tone-shaping switch gave him preset tonal options for different songs without changing knob settings between numbers.