SG Special

Pressure-wound pure nickel — a favorite for P-90 vintage purists.

XL's focused mids cut P-90 bite without honkiness.

Pure nickel tames P-90 raw midrange for vintage SG Special territory.

EXL115 on SG Special's P-90s — 11-49 for more body without 11-52 tension.

LaBella Tony Iommi Signature TI942 9-42 on the Gibson SG Special is the literal blueprint of heavy metal — Iommi's customized ultra-light gauge born of necessity after his 1965 industrial-press fingertip accident. As Iommi told multiple interviews about pre-signature-string days: "Before I could buy light gauge strings off the shelf, I took sets of banjo strings and the lighter strings from guitar string packs and made a custom set." That custom set became the foundation of every Black Sabbath riff — 'Iron Man', 'Paranoid', 'War Pigs' — all played on Iommi's home-made banjo-strings hybrid before LaBella made the official TI942 (.009/.010/.012/.020w/.032w/.042w in C# tuning).

Conventional wisdom: every SG metal thread defaults to Beefy Slinky 11-54 or Skinny Top Heavy Bottom 10-52 — the modern downtune defaults. Mismatch logic: TI942's ultra-light bottom strings let Iommi bend C#-tuned riffs without the wrist torque heavier strings demand — exactly why he could play the way he did with prosthetic fingertips.

Best for SG players chasing Iommi's exact Sabbath-era physical playability and tone; skip if you have full-strength fingertips and want modern metal-spec rigidity.