Derek Trucks is an American guitarist best known for being a member of the Allman Brothers Band and founder of the Tedeschi Trucks Band.

Trucks began playing guitar at the age of nine. His early repertoire was heavily influenced by the blues, and inspired by The Allman Brothers Band, of which his uncle, drummer Butch Trucks, was a founding member.

Historical bluesmen such as Howlin’ Wolf, jazz musicians such as Miles Davis and Eastern classical music (especially Indian), later had a considerable impact on Trucks’ musical development, mainly in the use of slide guitar.

Artist Proof #4

Derek’s main guitar from around 2011 has been the Gibson Dickey Betts SG, which is Gibson’s limited edition replica of the guitar that Dickey Betts gave to Duane Allman during their playing days together.

Derek received this guitar as a gift from Galadrielle Allman, Duane’s daughter, and he has been using it as his main live and studio guitar ever since.

The guitar is labeled as “Artist Proof #4” on the back of the headstock, which would mean that this was one of the pre-production models. Usually, there would be a few of these made, before the design was finalized and sent off to the regular line.

In this case, however, only 75 of the Dickey Betts SG were ever made, and it’s unclear whether Derek’s guitar (and the rest of the Artist Proof models) count among these.

It seems then that the number 75 could only refer to the models that were personally signed by Dickey, and that there are more of these guitars out there, and these are labeled as “Artist Proof” models. Perhaps these were given to Dickey and Duane’s family.

Also, it could be important to mention that Derek’s guitar reads “Artist Proof #004” in black marker, while the guitar in the photo above reads “Artist Proof #8”, without the zeros, in white marker.

Pickup

According to Derek, he experimented with different pickups in this guitar. Originally, this guitar came with two humbucking pickups, which were of course installed to replicate the sound of an original ’61 SG on which this guitar was based.

From Derek’s interview with Guitar magazine in 2019, it sounds like he replaced the original pickups with a pair of PAFs at some point, but it is unknown when exactly.

Visually, the pickups remained pretty much the same until around 2019, when Derek either removed the metal cover from the bridge humbucker or completely replaced it. From then on, sometime by mid-2019 he removed both pickups and installed a pair of Thomas Nilson humbuckers. These were at first exposed, white with no metal covers, but by 2020 they had metal covers. Again, it’s unclear whether these were the same pickups now with covers or a completely different set.