Thundercat's bass strings: the La Bella and Dean Markley rig, sourced

Stephen Lee Bruner, born October 19, 1984, in Los Angeles, performs as Thundercat, a stage name pulled from the 1985 cartoon series ThunderCats. He comes from a family of musicians: his father Ronald Bruner Sr. played drums for the Temptations and Gladys Knight, and his brother Ronald Bruner Jr. is a Grammy-winning drummer in his own right. He started on bass listening to Stanley Clarke and Marcus Miller for inspiration, then joined the crossover-thrash band Suicidal Tendencies as a teenager before building a second career as one of the most in-demand session bassists in modern R&B and jazz fusion, working with Flying Lotus, Erykah Badu, and Kendrick Lamar.

He was a major contributor to Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly (2015), described as being "at the creative epicenter" of the record, and won a Grammy for Best Rap/Sung Performance for the track "These Walls." His fourth solo album, It Is What It Is (2020), won the Grammy for Best Progressive R&B Album. Rolling Stone has ranked him among the greatest bass players of all time.

Thundercat's live rig runs on two La Bella sets, both built for his 6-string Ibanez: Deep Talkin' Bass Flats (.029 to .128) as his main set, and 750G-CB Gold White Nylon Tapewound (.043 to .135) as a brighter, more percussive alternate. Both are documented in Mixdown Magazine's gear rundown on him, and La Bella's own artist page lists him directly on its roster.

In the studio, he reaches for a different set: Dean Markley SR2000 Medium Custom, a stainless steel compound-wound 6-string gauged .027 to .127, still listed on Dean Markley's current site.

The gauge spread is unusually wide for a mainstream bass string set, as thin as .027 and as thick as .135 across the three sets, because a 6-string bass needs a thick enough low B to stay in tune under tension and a thin enough high C to stay playable. Flats and tapewounds also behave differently than rounds under his hands: less finger noise, darker overtones, smoother under fast passages.

Two more basses show up across his catalog. Before the 2012 Custom Shop build, he played a custom-shop MTD 6-string with a full maple body and neck, audible on Flying Lotus's "MmmHmm." He also owns a thin-line Ibanez Artcore AGB200 4-string, and has been photographed on a 5-string solid-body version of the same design during his Suicidal Tendencies years.

Thundercat is an Aguilar amplification endorser, switching between the Tone Hammer 500, DB 750, or DB 751 heads depending on the room, usually through Aguilar GS410 or DB410 cabinets. Earlier in his career, before the Aguilar relationship, he ran an SWR750x head through two SWR 4x10 cabs.

His live effects chain stays short: a DigiTech Whammy pedal set to octave-up, and a Pigtronix Bass Envelope Phaser, which he's compared to a Mu-Tron Bi-Phase without the extra weight. Earlier boards have included a Moogerfooger MF-103 12-Step Phaser, an MF-104M Cluster Flux chorus/vibrato, an MF-104Z analog delay, an MF-101 low-pass filter, and a Boss SYB-5 synth-bass pedal.

La Bella and Aguilar are both documented endorsements: Thundercat appears directly on La Bella's own artist roster, and Mixdown's gear rundown states plainly that he's endorsed by Aguilar. The Ibanez relationship goes further than a strings-and-amp deal: Ibanez built him a custom one-off in 2012, then put a production version of it into their catalog five years later as the TCB1006.

The Dean Markley SR2000 sits in a different category. Nothing in the sourcing calls it a paid partnership, just a studio set he often uses. That's verified use, a real documented choice, but not the same tier of relationship as his La Bella and Aguilar endorsements.

A 6-string bass tuned BEADGC covers more range than most players need, which is the point: Thundercat's basslines move between walking low end, chordal comping, and lead-register runs inside the same song. Flatwounds and tapewounds give him a smoother, more controlled surface for that range-jumping than fresh roundwounds would. Less finger noise under fast position shifts, darker overtones that don't fight with his falsetto vocals, and a broken-in feel from day one instead of the bright zing new rounds take weeks to lose.

The gauge choice reinforces it. A low B under enough tension (.128 to .135 depending on the set) stays articulate instead of flubby, while a thin high C (.027 to .043) stays playable for fast chordal and tapped passages. Switching to Dean Markley's brighter, more standard-feeling SR2000 rounds for studio work makes sense too: a session or solo-album context often wants more top-end definition than a live flatwound tone gives up.