Kerry King's guitar strings: the Slayer thrash rig, sourced

Kerry King co-founded Slayer in Huntington Park, California in 1981 alongside guitarist Jeff Hanneman, who wrote and co-wrote the band's music with King until Hanneman's death in 2013. King has been Slayer's only guitarist present on every album since. Across Reign in Blood (1986), South of Heaven (1988), Seasons in the Abyss (1990), and Christ Illusion (2006), King wrote or co-wrote much of the band's most recognizable material, including "Mandatory Suicide," "Disciple," and "Raining Blood." Christ Illusion earned Slayer back-to-back Grammy Awards for Best Metal Performance, for "Eyes of the Insane" and "Final Six." Along with Metallica, Megadeth, and Anthrax, Slayer forms thrash metal's "Big Four," a lineup King almost joined from the other side: in 1984, Dave Mustaine invited him to join his new band Megadeth, and King played several shows with them before staying with Slayer rather than joining full-time.

Slayer played what the band called its final show in November 2019. King spent the pandemic writing what became his debut solo album, From Hell I Rise, released May 17, 2024, and recorded in a two-week session at Henson Recording Studios in Los Angeles with producer Josh Wilbur. His solo band is a thrash and hard-rock supergroup: drummer Paul Bostaph (also a former Slayer member), bassist Kyle Sanders (Hellyeah), guitarist Phil Demmel (Machine Head), and vocalist Mark Osegueda (Death Angel). That band played its first headline tour in early 2025 and a European run that summer.

Slayer itself did not entirely go away. The band announced its first post-breakup show in February 2024, and played a string of 2025 reunion dates, including Louder Than Life, Hersheypark Stadium, Festival d'été de Québec, and UK festival dates at Cardiff and London, plus a short set at Black Sabbath's Back to the Beginning farewell show. A new headline slot is booked for October 24, 2026, at the inaugural Sick New World Texas festival in Fort Worth, which the festival itself is billing as a celebration of the 40th anniversary of Reign in Blood's 1986 release. The band maintains it has no new album or full tour planned, a stance King himself has been skeptical of in interviews given that Slayer said much the same thing after its 2019 "final tour."

Technically, King's signature is his tremolo-arm use, pulled up far more often than pressed down, for the band's dive-bombing scream effects, and a habit almost nobody else on this list shares: he plays three different tunings across three different guitars in a single set, each strung with its own gauge to match.

Most signature-string deals boil an artist's rig down to one number. Dunlop's own KKN1052 retail set does that for King: a .010-.046 nickel set with a spare .052 low E string in the pack for players who want to try a drop tuning. It's a fair, buyable approximation of his general approach, medium-light on top, an option to go heavier on the bottom, and it is genuinely developed with him through Dunlop's String Lab process.

But King's actual stage rig is more particular than any single retail set can capture. Per Premier Guitar's Rig Rundown, he keeps three guitars strung for three different tunings that move through Slayer's catalog and his solo material: D# standard at .009-.042, C# standard at .010-.046, and B standard at .010-.056. Each gauge gets lighter or heavier specifically to compensate for the tuning drop, keeping playing feel roughly consistent across guitars rather than using one gauge everywhere and letting the lowest-tuned guitar go slack.

If you only want one set that matches a piece of that puzzle, D'Addario's NYXL1052 shares the same .010 top and .052 low E as the drop-tuning option in Dunlop's KKN1052 pack, though its middle gauges run a heavier Light Top/Heavy Bottom progression (.013-.017-.030-.042) rather than the KKN1052's more gradual .013-.017-.026-.036. Ernie Ball's Beefy Slinky Cobalt (.011-.054) is a common step up for players who want even more low-end weight than King's B-standard .056 for a 6-string in a similarly low range.