Tim Commerford's bass strings: the Rage Against the Machine rig, sourced

Timothy Commerford (born February 26, 1968, in Irvine, California) is the founding bassist and backing vocalist of Rage Against the Machine, the Los Angeles rap-rock band he formed in 1991 with vocalist Zack de la Rocha, guitarist Tom Morello, and drummer Brad Wilk. RATM's self-titled 1992 debut, its follow-up Evil Empire (1996), and The Battle of Los Angeles (1999) all reached multi-platinum sales, and the band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2023.

When RATM split in 2000, Commerford stayed with Morello and Wilk to form Audioslave alongside former Soundgarden singer Chris Cornell, releasing three albums between 2002 and 2006. He's also fronted two of his own bands as bassist and lead singer: Future User, formed in 2013 with producer Brendan O'Brien, and the punk-leaning trio Wakrat, formed in 2015. RATM reunited on and off between 2007 and 2023, most recently touring behind a delayed reunion run before drummer Brad Wilk confirmed the band's third breakup in 2024.

Commerford's bass strings are Ernie Ball Regular Slinky Bass, nickel-plated steel roundwound, .050 to .105 gauge, long scale. Premier Guitar's 2016 Rig Rundown covers his StingRay bass setup directly. Ernie Ball Music Man's own blog recap of that same rundown confirms the pairing by name, describing him as an "Ernie Ball artist" who "plays custom Ernie Ball Music Man StingRay basses and Ernie Ball Regular Slinky bass strings."

His main instrument is the Ernie Ball Music Man StingRay, a bass he's played since 2016 and has a much longer personal history with dating back to his teens. Per his own account, he bought his first StingRay, a blonde model with a black pickguard, at a pawn shop around age 18, and that exact bass became the one he used to record Rage Against the Machine's self-titled 1992 debut. Ernie Ball Music Man has since built two generations of a Tim Commerford Artist Series signature StingRay around his specs, released in 2021 and 2024, each a limited run of 50 units per finish.

Commerford plays fingerstyle exclusively and doesn't use a pick. In his own words, he doesn't consider pick-style bass playing "bass playing" at all, with one exception: Yes bassist Chris Squire, whose hybrid pick-and-thumb technique on "Roundabout" he's singled out as one of his favorite bass sounds ever.

Commerford is a documented Ernie Ball Music Man endorser, not a guess pieced together from gear blogs. Ernie Ball Music Man's own blog and product pages label him an artist directly, and the company has released two separate limited-edition signature bass collections built to his specifications, in 2021 and 2024, each covered independently by Guitar World and MusicRadar with his own quotes about the design process. Manufacturer-confirmed artist status plus an ongoing signature-product relationship is about as solid as artist-gear sourcing gets.

Rage Against the Machine's sound leans on Morello treating the guitar like a turntable: kill-switch stutters, Whammy-pedal pitch dives, scratch effects. That means the low end often has to carry a song's actual riff information while the guitar is off doing something texturally strange. A bright nickel roundwound bass string cuts through that in a way a flatwound or a darker-sounding round couldn't, giving Commerford's basslines enough top-end definition to function as a second lead voice instead of disappearing under the noise.

His fingerstyle-only approach reinforces the same goal. Without a pick's harder transient attack, the extra brightness of a fresh roundwound set matters more for note definition, especially under de la Rocha's rapid, rap-cadence vocal phrasing, where the bass often has to lock in rhythmically with the vocal instead of just the drums. The .050 to .105 gauge itself is a standard long-scale spec: heavy enough for Drop D and Drop C without going slack, light enough to keep up with fast, syncopated, funk-influenced lines like the one under "Bulls on Parade."