Gary Clark Jr's guitar strings: the Epiphone Casino and Gibson signature rig, sourced

Gary Clark Jr. is a guitarist, singer, and songwriter from Austin, Texas, whose catalog fuses blues, rock, and soul with strands of hip-hop and R&B. Per his Wikipedia entry, born February 15, 1984, he picked up a guitar at 12 and spent his teens on Austin's open-mic circuit before cutting his teeth at the city's storied Antone's blues club. His first releases, the independent EP 110 (2004) and Worry No More (2008), built his name in the Texas scene years before Warner Bros. signed him in 2011.

The major-label breakout came with Blak and Blu (2012), followed by The Story of Sonny Boy Slim (2015) and This Land (2019). Per GRAMMY.com, the title track from This Land won three Grammys at the 62nd Awards in 2020: Best Rock Performance, Best Rock Song, and Best Contemporary Blues Album for the record itself, adding to the Best Traditional R&B Performance Grammy he'd already won in 2014 for "Please Come Home." An early co-sign from Eric Clapton, who invited him to play Crossroads, helped put Clark's sound in front of a national blues-rock audience already listening for someone to carry Austin's Stevie Ray Vaughan tradition forward.

D'Addario strings, headlined on D'Addario's own artist page as XL Chromes 11-50. A pair of Fender Vibro-King combo amps. Signature instruments from Epiphone and Gibson, the newest being the February 2026 Gibson ES-355.

Three guitars trace the arc of Clark's career.

The Casino came first. His 2007 Epiphone Casino, nicknamed "Red," is the hollow-body P-90 guitar behind Blak and Blu (2012), the record that took him from Austin clubs to a national stage. Per his longtime guitar tech in an Ultimate Guitar interview, the pickups in Clark's own Casino are Chinese-made rather than premium USA units. That's not an accident. Clark has been explicit that he wants his signature gear priced within reach of fans, not built as a collector's flex, and Epiphone's own "Blak & Blu" signature Casino, released after the album's success, followed the same affordable-instrument logic.

The SG came next, and by way of someone else's guitar. Per Guitar Lifestyle, Clark started playing SGs more seriously after Foo Fighters guitarist Pat Smear gave him one during the 2014 Sonic Highways sessions. Gibson built on that with the 2017 Gary Clark Jr. Signature SG: three P-90 pickups, a mahogany body, a SlimTaper neck, in Gloss Yellow or Vintage Cherry.

The ES-355 is the newest chapter, and the most personal. Gibson Custom unveiled the Gary Clark Jr. ES-355 "Cobra Burst" in February 2026, a 100-unit run built as a direct homage to B.B. King's Lucille. Clark has said he had a poster of King playing Lucille on his wall as a kid. Per Guitar World, the ES-355 has already become his new primary stage guitar, a full-circle instrument for a player whose entire catalog sits downstream of King's phrasing.

Every guitar in Clark's main rotation, the Casino, the Blak & Blu signature, the SG, and the ES-355, is built around P-90 single-coils rather than humbuckers. That's a deliberate throughline, not a coincidence of four separate instrument choices. A P-90 sits tonally between a Stratocaster-style single-coil and a full humbucker: more midrange growl and output than a single-coil, less compression and top-end rolloff than a humbucker. That middle ground supports the two things Clark's playing needs from a pickup, clean-ish blues chording that still has some bark, and a lead tone that can be pushed into thick, fuzzed-out sustain without turning to mud.

The Vibro-King completes that picture. It's a clean-headroom Fender combo built around 6L6 power tubes rather than the higher-gain 6V6 or EL34 designs other blues-rock players lean on, so the amp itself doesn't add much dirt. Clark's Fulltone Octafuzz, Function f(x) fuzzes, and Hermida Zendrive do that work instead, running through the amp's effects loop so the guitar signal hits the front end clean before anything else touches it. A P-90 into a clean tube combo, with the amp's dirt handled entirely by outboard fuzz, is the setup that lets Clark move between his cleanest, jazziest chord voicings and his most distorted lead runs without changing guitars or amps mid-set.

Sourced from Premier Guitar's 2016 and 2019 Rig Rundowns, Gibson's and Epiphone's own product pages, and press coverage of each signature launch.

D'Addario across the board. D'Addario's own artist page names XL Chromes 11-50 as his nightly stage set, with EXL115 nickel wound also among his listed favorites.