Lonnie Mack's guitar strings: the Flying V 'Number 7' rig, sourced

Lonnie Mack, born Lonnie McIntosh on July 18, 1941, in West Harrison, Indiana, spent a career blending country, blues, gospel, and rock and roll into a style he once described simply: "a little bit of everything. There's country, blues, rock 'n' roll, all the way down to some bluegrass and a little Cajun with some uptown jazzy stuff mixed in." Critics remember him more narrowly, and more importantly: as the guitarist who put the electric guitar solo at the center of rock music before almost anyone else did it.

His breakthrough came in 1963. At the tail end of a session backing another act for Cincinnati's Fraternity Records, the label handed Mack's band a leftover 20-minute studio block. He cut an instrumental version of Chuck Berry's "Memphis, Tennessee," fast, melodic, guitar out front. It hit the Billboard Top Five that summer. The follow-up, "Wham!," went further: showcasing a Bigsby vibrato bar wielded so aggressively that guitarists started calling the device a "whammy bar" after the song's title. Rolling Stone, reviewing his work in 1968, called him "a pioneer in rock guitar soloing." Guitar World later put it in harder technical terms: Mack "attacked the strings with fast, aggressive single-string phrasing and a seamless rhythm style that significantly raised the guitar virtuoso bar and foreshadowed the arena-sized tones of guitar heroes to come."

He died April 21, 2016, at a medical facility near his home in Smithville, Tennessee, at 74. His death was overshadowed in the press by Prince, who died the same day.

A 1958 Gibson Flying V nicknamed Number 7, run through a cranked Magnatone amp, strung heavy. Mack himself put his 1985 gauge at .013 to .056, Gibson 340 strings; a separately documented account gives a lighter-topped custom set with a wound third string instead of a plain one.

When Gibson released the Flying V in 1958, almost nobody wanted one. Only 98 sold before production quietly stopped. A teenage Mack, who had Native American heritage and liked the guitar's arrowhead shape, was the exception. He spotted it in Gibson's catalog at Hughes Music in Norwood, Ohio, and the shop owner special-ordered it, driving 600 miles round trip to Gibson's Kalamazoo, Michigan factory to bring it back. Its serial number marked it the seventh Flying V off the line. Mack nicknamed it Number 7 and played almost nothing else for the rest of his life.

The guitar's most famous feature, its Bigsby vibrato bar bridged across the V's wings with a cut steel plate, has a disputed origin. Most retellings, including Guitar.com's, credit shop owner Glen Hughes with fabricating the mount because no commercial Bigsby fit a Flying V's body shape. Mack told Premier Guitar's Ted Drozdowski something different in a 1985 backstage interview: the Bigsby was already installed when he bought the guitar. Both accounts can't be fully right, and neither can be fully ruled out from the available sourcing, but everyone agrees on what happened next: Mack's aggressive vibrato-arm technique on 1963's "Wham!" is why guitarists still call the device a "whammy bar" today.

Number 7 lived a rough life. It fell out of a van during a drive between gigs. Mack once threw it in a trash can after a bad show; a fan fished it out and returned it. It was refretted at least once and repainted red at another point, though the paint dried closer to pink. Its whereabouts today are unknown, presumed to be with Mack's family. In 1993, Gibson issued a limited run of signature Flying Vs with a factory Bigsby, reportedly around 185 of them, a nod to Number 7's influence on the model's rehabilitated reputation.

Mack's playing leaned on two things simultaneously: violent vibrato-arm technique and a guitar strung heavier than most rock players would touch. That's not a coincidence. A heavier gauge, whatever his exact spec was in a given year, holds pitch and tension better under aggressive Bigsby manipulation than a light set would. Light strings go slack and go out of tune fast under the kind of arm-work Mack applied on "Wham!." The tradeoff is feel: heavier strings fight back harder under the fretting hand, which is part of why so few players since have tried to replicate his exact setup.

The Flying V's body shape mattered too. Its symmetrical wings meant Mack could play sitting or standing without the neck-dive problems some V players report, and the guitar's thinner, ergonomic body let him execute the fast single-string runs Guitar World singled out without extra physical strain. Pair that with a Magnatone's true vibrato circuit, distinct from the tremolo units in most rival amps of the era, and Number 7's whole rig was built around making a solo undulate and sustain rather than just distort.

Mack's commercial momentum stalled fast. The British Invasion buried his early singles within about a year, and Fraternity Records folded not long after. But the influence never stopped compounding. A 1968 Rolling Stone review of his catalog reignited industry interest and led to an Elektra Records deal; during that era he also played the driving bass line on the Doors' "Roadhouse Blues." "That was cut on a crazy night," Mack recalled to Premier Guitar. "Morrison came in all drunk. He'd stop in the middle of takes and holler, 'Hey, time this,' and chug a beer."

The guitarists who came after him are the real measure of his reach. Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, and Keith Richards all cited him as a formative influence, per Premier Guitar and Rolling Stone. Beck's own "Beck's Boogie," a Yardbirds-era showcase, is a deliberate nod to Mack's playing. Duane Allman and Dickey Betts of the Allman Brothers both named him directly: "Lonnie is one of the greatest players I know of," Betts once said. "He's always been a great influence on me." Parliament-Funkadelic's Bootsy Collins called Mack his musical idol: "The songs that he did were just so incredible to me. I would try to mimic all the notes he would play on his guitar... I couldn't wait for them to come out."

The deepest connection was with Stevie Ray Vaughan, who named "Wham!" as the first single he ever bought. Vaughan spent years as an outspoken fan before the two even met; there's a paper trail showing Mack and songwriter Ed Labunski were quietly trying to produce an album for "a then-obscure Texas guitarist named Stevie Ray Vaughan" years before that ever happened, a plan that fell apart only when Labunski died in a car accident. In 1983, Vaughan finally convinced Mack to relocate from Indiana to Texas. When Alligator Records signed Mack for a comeback the following year, Vaughan volunteered to co-produce the resulting album, 1985's Strike Like Lightning, and played guitar on several tracks, including an acoustic duet called "Oreo Cookie Blues." Vaughan's own instrumental "Scuttle Buttin'" is a direct descendant of Mack's "Chicken Pickin'," down to the melodic runs and the song's finale.

Mack's 1985 comeback tour became its own event. Keith Richards, Ron Wood, and Ry Cooder joined him onstage; Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Paul Simon, and Eddie Van Halen turned up to watch. The year closed with a show at Carnegie Hall alongside Albert Collins and Roy Buchanan, later released as the concert film Further On Down the Road.

Two different documented gauges, from two different sources. Neither is a guess.

No catalog set on the market reproduces either of Mack's documented gauges exactly: modern strings don't ship with a wound third, and few electric sets run as heavy as .013-.056. The closest shortcut is a light-topped, heavy-bottomed set that gets you the same light-touch-up-top, thick-low-end character both accounts describe.

Ernie Ball

Skinny Top Heavy Bottom Slinky Cobalt (.010-.052)

.010 – .052

Price tier: $

Why this one: Not a claim about either documented Mack spec exactly, one of which used a wound third string no catalog set reproduces today. But the light top and heavy .052 low end land closest to the shared character both sourced accounts describe.

E StandardDrop DRock

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