Billy Sheehan's bass strings and rig: the Yamaha Attitude and Rotosound BS66 setup, sourced
Billy Sheehan's documented bass rig: a signature Yamaha Attitude bass, custom Rotosound BS66 strings (.043-.110), and the Hartke-into-Helix live setup behind Talas, Mr. Big, and The Winery Dogs.
Mr. Big · reviewed by the Change Your Strings editorial team ·
Billy Sheehan (born March 19, 1953, Buffalo, New York) is the bassist behind Talas, David Lee Roth's Eat 'Em and Smile, Mr. Big, and The Winery Dogs, and a five-time Guitar Player readers' poll 'Best Rock Bass Player.' His signature Yamaha Attitude bass, built on the modified Fender P-bass he calls 'The Wife,' runs a custom Rotosound BS66 stainless roundwound set (.043-.110), gauged heavier on the E to work with the bass's built-in Hipshot D-Tuner.
Who Billy Sheehan is
William Roland Sheehan, born March 19, 1953, in Buffalo, New York, has spent over five decades as one of rock's most recognizable bass players. Guitar Player readers have voted him "Best Rock Bass Player" five times, and his resume runs from 1970s bar-band Buffalo through arena rock, instrumental fusion, and prog supergroups without much of a quiet stretch in between.
He started on a Hagström FB, then added a Fender Precision Bass and pulled the frets off the Hagström. The Precision became "The Wife," the heavily modified bass at the center of his early career (see below), while his first serious band, Talas, built a regional following around Buffalo and the northeast through the late 1970s and opened 30 shows for Van Halen in 1980. Talas never landed a major deal, but two songs written during that era, "Shy Boy" and "Addicted to That Rush," found bigger audiences later when Sheehan re-recorded them with David Lee Roth and Mr. Big.
Roth hired him in 1985 for the band behind Eat 'Em and Smile and Skyscraper, pairing Sheehan's bass with guitarist Steve Vai. In 1988 he co-founded Mr. Big with singer Eric Martin, guitarist Paul Gilbert, and drummer Pat Torpey; the band's 1991 single "To Be with You," from Lean into It, spent three weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and topped charts in a dozen-plus countries worldwide (sources put the exact count at 11 to 15 depending on the tally), a rare commercial peak for a band built around instrumental chops. Mr. Big broke up and reunited more than once over the following decades, releasing a tenth and final studio album, Ten, in 2024 before a farewell tour that closed in February 2025. Sheehan has stayed busy well beyond Mr. Big's own run, too: the jazz-fusion trio Niacin with drummer Dennis Chambers from 1996, the prog supergroup Sons of Apollo starting in 2017 and largely inactive since 2022, and The Winery Dogs, formed in 2012 with Mike Portnoy and Richie Kotzen and still his active band today.
On why he's stuck with the same string maker since 1986:
They really sound great, there's a real organic feel to them, I've been to the factory where they're hand making them. It's such a part of the tone of everything I do! I'm a finger player and when my fingers grip the string the edges on the Rotosound's, because they're hand wound, grip really strongly so I can get a really good snap of power out of each note.
Bassist
What he plays
Two names anchor Sheehan's rig: Yamaha, which has built his signature Attitude bass since 1990, and Rotosound, which has strung it since long before that. Both relationships trace back to the same source instrument.
The rig, sourced
- Signature bass
- Yamaha Attitude, patterned on his retired "Wife" Fender Precision Bass; scalloped upper frets, Hipshot D-Tuner, dual DiMarzio pickups.
- Strings
- Rotosound BS66 custom gauge, .043-.065-.080-.110 stainless roundwound, a Rotosound artist since 1986.
- Amps
- Hartke amplification since at least 2011, now paired with a Line 6 Helix modeling processor.
- Style
- Chording, two-handed tapping, and three-finger picking; voted Best Rock Bass Player five times by Guitar Player readers.
Swing Bass 66 Billy Sheehan Custom (.043-.110)
Why this one: His actual custom-gauged set, developed with Rotosound: a lighter G for even tension and a heavier .110 E built to handle the Hipshot D-Tuner on his signature bass without losing intonation.
Bass guitars
Signature series · Yamaha, since 1990
Yamaha Attitude
Yamaha's longest-running signature bass line, patterned directly on Sheehan's modified Fender "Wife." Features across the series include a 34-inch-scale alder body, a miter-bolted neck joint, an upper fingerboard scalloped from the 17th to 21st fret, a Hipshot D-Tuner for instant E-to-D drops, and a two-pickup, two-output electronics layout (a Yamaha-designed DiMarzio Woofer plus a DiMarzio Will Power). Yamaha's A.R.E. and I.R.A. wood-and-joint treatments are standard on current builds. The 30th Anniversary edition ships from the factory strung with D'Addario EXL170 (.045-.100); Sheehan's own touring gauge is the heavier Rotosound custom set below.
Source: Yamaha's Attitude 30th Anniversary product page and full specs.
Retired · Original modified Fender Precision Bass
"The Wife"
Sheehan's first Fender Precision Bass, acquired after his original Hagström FB, and the instrument he modified into the design that became the Attitude series. He scalloped its five highest frets, added a second pickup (a Gibson EB-0-type unit) in the neck position for what he called "super deep low end," inspired by Paul Samwell-Smith of the Yardbirds and Mel Schacher of Grand Funk Railroad, and gave each pickup its own stereo output jack so the two tones could be amplified and processed separately. It's retired from the road now, but it's the direct ancestor of every Yamaha Attitude bass built since.
Source: Wikipedia.
Strings
Documented · Custom gauge, a Rotosound artist since 1986
Rotosound Swing Bass 66 Billy Sheehan Custom (.043-.110)
Stainless steel roundwound, long scale (940mm/37" ball end to taper), gauged .043-.065-.080-.110. Two changes set it apart from a standard Swing Bass 66 (.045-.105): a slightly lighter .043 G for more even tension across the neck and easier bending, and a heavier .110 E for a tighter low end that doesn't bottom out or lose intonation when he drops it to D with his bass's Hipshot D-Tuner. Rotosound's own tension chart lists the set at 40.94 lbs (G), 51.30 lbs (D), 43.80 lbs (A), and 42.25 lbs (E), around 178 lbs combined. Players who want the same construction in an off-the-shelf gauge can reach for the standard Rotosound Swing Bass 66 (.045-.105) instead.
Source: Rotosound's own BS66 product page; Premier Guitar Rig Rundown.
Amps and pedalboard
Hartke amplification is the constant across every documented version of Sheehan's rig. Premier Guitar's 2011 Rig Rundown, filmed on a Mr. Big summer tour, showed a Pearce BC1 preamp (he says only three of the unit remain in his possession) splitting his signal by pickup into two Hartke LH1000 heads, one carrying his low end and one feeding his pedals, plus a Hartke HA5500 for the high end. Ashly Audio compressors sat on the clean side of the Pearce and on the low-end LH1000, with an ISP Decimator ProRack handling noise, and a pedalboard functioning like Taurus bass pedals triggered a Roland SonicCell sound module.
By the time No Treble filmed him before a 2023 Winery Dogs show in Stockholm, the rig had modernized around the same amp brand: Hartke amps and cabinets remained, now joined by a Line 6 Helix modeling processor running his core tones and effects, an MXR compressor, Morningstar MIDI controllers switching presets, and a Line 6 Relay G90 wireless system. The 2023 rundown also covers how his Mr. Big and Winery Dogs setups differ and his in-ear monitoring system.
Style signatures
Three things that define Sheehan's playing across five decades of records:
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"Lead bass." Chording, two-handed tapping, and a three-finger picking technique put the bass in a melodic, soloing role more often than a typical rock rhythm section part, closer to a second lead instrument than a foundation.
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Two amps, two pickups, one bass. The dual-output wiring he built into "The Wife," and that Yamaha carried into every Attitude model since, lets him run a distorted, guitar-like tone from one pickup and a clean, low-end tone from the other, simultaneously, from a single instrument.
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A string gauge built around one lever. The heavier .110 E in his Rotosound custom set exists specifically to support the Hipshot D-Tuner on his bass, engineering the string gauge and the hardware together rather than treating them as separate decisions.
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