Derek Trucks's guitar strings: the Tedeschi Trucks Band slide rig, sourced

Derek Trucks is the guitarist and co-founder, with his wife Susan Tedeschi, of the Tedeschi Trucks Band, formed in 2010. Born June 8, 1979 in Jacksonville, Florida, he is the nephew of the late Butch Trucks, founding drummer of The Allman Brothers Band. He bought his first guitar at a yard sale for five dollars at age nine, was playing paid shows by 11, and formed The Derek Trucks Band in his hometown at 15. He became a formal member of The Allman Brothers Band in 1999 and stayed until the band's final show in October 2014.

Per Wikipedia's sourced biography, Rolling Stone has placed him on its "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time" list twice, 81st in 2003 and 16th in 2011, and put him on a 2007 cover alongside John Mayer and John Frusciante under the headline "The New Guitar Gods." A 2006 Wall Street Journal piece went further, calling him the most awe-inspiring electric slide guitar player performing today. He's won Grammys with two different bands: Best Contemporary Blues Album for The Derek Trucks Band's Already Free (2009) and Best Blues Album for Tedeschi Trucks Band's Revelator (2011).

DR Pure Blues in a custom hybrid gauge (.011 to .046), a Gibson SG tuned to open E, a Dunlop glass slide built to his own spec, and a blackface Fender Super Reverb. No pedals.

Every piece of this setup answers to the same constraint: Trucks plays slide and standard fretted guitar on the same instrument, in the same tuning, in the same song, without stopping to swap gear.

Open E tuning lays a full major chord across any fret, which is what makes a barre slide sound like a chord instead of a single note. But open E also means the guitar is under different tension and geometry than standard tuning, which is why the gauge can't just be a stock set. The heavier .017 to .046 wound strings, pulled from the PHR-10 pack, give the slide enough string mass to sustain cleanly at his low action. The .011 and .014 plain strings, pulled from a PHR-11 pack instead of PHR-10's own lighter stock .010 and .013, add just enough extra tension to keep the top end comfortable to fret and bend when the slide comes off his finger. Per MusicRadar's 2014 review of his signature SG, Gibson ships the guitar with a standard .010 to .046 set and normal action; Trucks's own setup is a deliberate departure from the factory spec in both string choice and bridge height.

The SG body shape is part of the same logic. Its long, thin neck-to-body join gives full access to the upper frets, which matters when slide lines run the length of the fretboard. No vibrato, no pedals, no separate slide guitar: the entire rig is built around one instrument doing both jobs at once.

Three things that identify a Derek Trucks passage before you know it's him:

1. Vocal-toned slide phrasing. Trucks has said he started playing slide as a kid because his hands were too small to fret normally, a detail documented in a Guitar Center TV interview cited on his Wikipedia page. What began as a workaround became his main voice: long, singing, legato slide lines that lean on his open-E tuning rather than fast picking.

2. No pedals, by choice. Asked directly which three pedals he couldn't live without, his answer was that he doesn't use any: guitar straight into the amp. That's an unusually bare signal chain for a touring lead guitarist, and it means every bit of his tone comes from his hands, the slide, the SG, and the Super Reverb's own breakup.

3. Jazz and Indian classical music inside a blues-rock frame. Trucks has named Duane Allman and Elmore James as his earliest slide influences, but also cites John Coltrane and sarod master Ali Akbar Khan, whose college in San Rafael, California he studied at. That range shows up as long, modal-sounding improvisations layered over southern-rock and blues structures, closer to a horn player's phrasing than a typical rock guitarist's.