Top 10 Guitars Of All Time, According To Billboard

We all love top 10 lists no matter what they’re about, but when it comes to guitar-based music, we usually see things like top 10 best guitar players. Billboard Magazine decided to go in a different direction though. It put out a Top 100 Best Guitars article that looks at the guitars made famous by some of the legendary players across the decades.

100 is a really long list, and you can read the article if you want to see all of them, but here are what the magazine considers the top 10 guitars, along with some excerpts on each one.

#10: Stevie Ray Vaughan – 1963 Fender Stratocaster aka “Number One.” Stevie’s ’63 Strat was originally owned by Texas singer-songwriter Christopher Cross, composer of mellow hits such as “Sailing” and “Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do).” A month before Vaughan’s death in 1990 at age 35, a piece of stage rigging fell on “Number One” and snapped the neck at the headstock

#9: Sister Rosetta Tharpe -1961 White Les Paul. The guitar has been part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Play It Loud: Instruments of Rock & Roll” exhibit since 2019.

#8: Robert Johnson – Gibson L-1. Nobody knows whether Johnson actually played the L-1 on his only recordings, the 29 songs and 12 alternate takes that make up the 1990 box set Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings. 

#7: David Gilmour – 1969 Fender Stratocaster “The Black Strat.” In 2019 it sold at a charity auction through Christie’s. The Black Strat was purchased by Indianapolis Colts owner and guitar collector Jim Irsay for $3,975,000, a record at the time.

#6: Angus Young – Gibson SG. He fell in love with the SG — his first was a ca. 1967 SG Standard — in the earliest days of AC/DC, and you can hear the guitar on every album and every show since the Aussie rockers’ debut, High Voltage (although not always the original early ‘70s model he purchased). He stopped using it for concerts around 1978 and limited it mostly to studio use. He has said that he has “hundreds” of SGs in his collection.

#5: Chuck Berry – 1955 Gibson ES-350T. Berry’s blonde, voluptuously pear-shaped, thinline Gibson — that’s what the “T” stands for — has defined what rock n’ roll looks and sounds from the start. He played the model (designed for big-band jazz guitarists) on his first hit “Maybelline,” and kept on playing it on “Johnny B. Goode,” “Roll Over Beethoven” and everything else until he switched to the ES-330 and the ES-355 by the early ’60s.

#4: B.B. King – “Lucille”. King loved Gibsons, particularly semi-hollow “ES,” or “electric Spanish,” models — such as the ES-335 he used on his 1965 classic Live at the Regal. By 2005, King was on his 16th version of Lucille — and rode in a tour bus with Lucille’s picture painted on the side. The name of the bus? Lucille, of course.

#3: Eddie Van Halen – Homemade “Frankenstein”. “Frankenstein” featured many different pickups in its bridge position, but Van Halen eventually settled on a “Patent Number” humbucker removed from his 1964 Gibson ES-335.

#2: Willie Nelson – 1969 Martin N-20 “Trigger”. Trigger boasts a Sitka spruce top (what’s left of it), Brazilian rosewood back and sides, a mahogany neck and ebony fretboard and bridge.

#1: Jimi Hendrix – ca. 1965 Fender Stratocaster “Monterey”. Jimi Hendrix had yet to become a GOAT legend when he played Monterey Pop, so little is known about this (destroyed) Strat, other than he favored Strats made after 1965. Some have theorized that this was because their weaker single-coil pickups, when fed into Marshall stacks, made for a heavier sound.

Yes, every other guitar that you can think of is included as well at some point in the list. I don’t know if I can agree with the order, but the top 10 guitars are certainly interesting choices.

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