Ask Derek Trucks if he'll ever stop playing Gibson SGs and he'll tell you he's tried substituting other electric guitars without success. "Anytime I would move to another guitar, I would just be annoyed by it," he says in a new interview for Chris Shiflett's Shred with Shifty. "You have to think too hard about it. So I just got stuck with it."
"I played this one for maybe 15, 20, years," Trucks said of his guitar. It is certainly a special instrument — Artist Proof number four of the 2012 Gibson Custom Shop Dickey Betts SG, which was itself a copy of the 1961 SG Duane Allman gifted to Betts. "Duane's daughter, Galadrielle, gave me this, and it's just a super-light SG. They're all light, but this one's especially light."
But Trucks said it's not just its weight that makes the guitar his favorite. It's also because he's played SGs since he was young. "When I was, I think, 11 or 12, I got my first SG. A Les Paul was too heavy," he explained with a laugh. "I was about 90 pounds."
More importantly, the SG's double cutaways give him easy access to the highest frets. "For playing slide, I think just the access up top is really nice," Trucks says. "And then I think you get comfortable with something, and it becomes a bit second nature."
As Trucks told Guitar Player in 2021, his Artist Proof Dickey Betts SG "has been my main guitar since I got it. I did those last three or four years in the Allman Brothers with it – all those final shows – so it’s kinda been the only guitar I’ve played since I got it.
"I’ve got a Gibson signature model that I’ve played on and off, and for a long time that was the backup guitar I’d use. I also use this guitar in the studio. There is something about it – I can’t put it down. It feels better that this is a gift. I’m into that. And the guitar has a little history to it.”
Trucks recently teamed up with his former Allman Brothers guitar partner, Warren Haynes, for an appearance on Haynes' latest album, Million Voices Whisper. The two men cut the new song "Real Real Love," a tune Haynes wrote from lyrics composed by the late Gregg Allman. Haynes received the lyrics from former Allman Brothers Band manager Bert Holman, who had received them from Paco Zimmer, who had been Allman’s tour manager in the early 1980s. Haynes and Allman had co-written many songs together, which made him the natural choice to turn the lyrics into a new composition. Once Haynes finished writing the song, he immediately knew he wanted Trucks on the track. “It just made sense,” he said.
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