page_title: Johnny Winter
section_title: Guitars and picking style
hierarchical_section_title: Johnny Winter / Guitars and picking style
caption_attribution_description: Johnny Winter
context_page_description: John Dawson Winter III, known as Johnny Winter, was an American blues singer and guitarist. Best known for his high-energy blues-rock albums and live performances in the late 1960s and 1970s, Winter also produced three Grammy Award-winning albums for blues singer and guitarist Muddy Waters. After his time with Waters, Winter recorded several Grammy-nominated blues albums. In 1988, he was inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame and in 2003, he was ranked 63rd in Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time".
context_section_description: Winter played a variety of guitars during his career, but he is probably best known for his use of Gibson Firebirds. He owned several, but favored a 1963 Firebird V model. Winter explained:
  I still have all six of them ... but that first one [1963] I ever bought is my favorite because I've played it so long and I've gotten used to it. They all sound different, but that one sounds the best. The neck is nice and thin ... there's nothing it can't do. It's a great guitar.
  The Firebird V was a departure from Gibson's traditional configuration, with mini-humbucker pickups in place of the company's standard sized PAF humbucker or P-90 single-coil pickup models. In a 2014 interview, Winter described the tone:
  The Firebird is the best of all worlds. It feels like a Gibson, but it sounds closer to a Fender than most other Gibsons. I was never a big fan of humbucking pickups, but the mini humbuckers on the Firebird have more bite and treble.
  In 2008, the Gibson Custom Shop issued a signature Johnny Winter Firebird V in a ceremony in Nashville with Slash presenting.
  In 1984, luthier Mark Erlewine approached Winter with his Lazer electric guitar. With its unusual design (for the time) without a headstock and having a small body, Winter responded immediately: "the first day I plugged it in, it sounded so good that I wanted to use it for a gig that night." He commented:
  [The Lazer is] the closest thing I've found to sounding like a Strat and feeling like a Gibson ... Lazer is a bit easier to play than the Firebird. The action is high, but the strings pull easier ... But I still use the Firebird on slide songs; the slide still sounds better on the Firebird.
  Other guitars that Winter owned and played include a Gibson ES-125 (his first electric guitar), a Fender Stratocaster, a Gibson Les Paul/SG Custom, a Fender Mustang, a Gibson Les Paul Goldtop with P-90 pickups, a Gibson Flying V, an Epiphone Wilshire, a Gibson Black Beauty, a Fender Electric XII (with only the regular six strings), and an acoustic National Resonator.
  Winter played with a thumb pick and his fingers. His picking style was inspired by Chet Atkins and Merle Travis and he never used a flat pick. Winter preferred a plastic thumb pick sold by Gibson and a steel pinky slide, later marketed by Dunlop.
caption: Winter playing a Gibson Firebird in 1990
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