Billy Gibbons picked up the art of playing the guitar in a different era. People were less online. People were not online. You took your wisdom from books. You learned from speaking to people, from watching them play.
Some of the best guitar tips the ZZ Top frontman ever got came from some friendly advice, or from lessons with the greats. Jimi Hendrix once gave him a lesson. B.B. King, famously, had some great advice.
Now, when the King of the Blues spoke, you listened. This was the man who not only inspired Gibbons the guitarist but inspired the name of the band, ZZ Top. He was responsible for Gibbons choosing a lighter gauge of electric guitar strings, and by proxy visited an act of mercy upon the fingertips of his left hand.
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“At the time, using heavy-gauge guitar strings was thought necessary for getting a big tone,” said Gibbons, speaking to Guitarist in February. “When B.B. asked to try a few licks on my guitar, he quickly smiled and asked, ‘Why you working so hard?’ He then laid it down to show off a new set of his super-light-gauge strings.”
This was an epiphany.
“It was at that very moment that everything turned around,” he said. “As B.B. then said, ‘Light is all right!’”
But what about Gibbons’ unorthodox choice of a guitar pick? Again, he grew up in the online era. There were no buyers guides on the best guitar picks money could buy. Well, that’s what Guitar World reader Paul Shuffield, Jr. wanted to know. How come he ended up using a Mexican peso coin as a pick?
On this score, Gibbons had another blues legend to thank, and this cat played bass guitar.
“Tommy Carter of Jimmie Vaughan‘s Dallas band the Chessmen used a quarter to play bass,” said Gibbons. “He described the serrated edge of the coin as producing a delightful scratchiness as he scrubbed the strings. That gave me the idea, and our love of the Mexican border is what drew us to the peso. The peso coin is a rarity, but we’ve still got a few filed down for the ready.”
Gibbons, of course, is not the only guitar player to use a coin. Brian May famously only uses a sixpence, which really is a rarity because it’s not legal tender. He is very particular about his sixpences, favoring the pre-1950s spec, when they, like guitar strings, had a higher nickel content.
“I used to play with those little plastic picks but I always found that they were too bendy,” he told the Guardian in 2023. “I couldn’t really feel what was happening as the thing touched the strings. I went into harder and harder picks, until they were too stiff. Then one day I picked up a coin, which happened to be a sixpence, and I thought, ‘That’s all I need.’”
Like Gibbons and Carter, May liked the fact that the serrated edge gave him an option the regular Delrin or nylon picks didn’t have.
“Sixpences are very soft metal, which doesn’t hurt the guitar strings, but if I turn that serrated edge at an angle to the string, I can get that kind of articulating, percussive consonant sound,” he said. “I call it graunch.”
And, fellow gear hunters and tone hounds, if you’re looking for the best sixpence to play guitar with, seek out one minted in 1947. They’re May’s favorite, and that was the year he was born.
