Dan Auerbach (The Black Keys) Guitars & Gear: The Complete Guide to the Garage Blues Chameleon’s Oddball Rig

Before listing specific instruments, the foundational principle: “Whatever guitar has the best character for the song is the one I want to use, because if you’ve got a style, you’re going to sound like yourself no matter what guitar you play.” This is not false modesty but genuine operational philosophy. Auerbach’s guitar collection spans Teisco Del Ray, Harmony, Supro, Silvertone, National, and Guild instruments alongside more conventional Gibsons and Fenders — a collection built on the principle that character and suitability matter more than brand and value.

One of Auerbach’s most iconic and most historically consistent guitars is the Harmony hollowbody equipped with vintage DeArmond gold-foil pickups. The Guitar Marketplace documentation: “One of Dan’s most iconic guitars is a Harmony H78-style hollowbody, often associated with vintage DeArmond gold-foil pickups. These pickups deliver a wide, microphonic, slightly unruly tone — perfect for the Black Keys’ stripped-back duo format. They shine when pushed through fuzz and small amps, forming the backbone of many classic Black Keys recordings.” The Harmony Company of Chicago was a major manufacturer of affordable guitars in the 1950s and 1960s — instruments sold in department stores and through mail-order catalogs, not in music stores. The DeArmond gold-foil pickup (the gold-colored, high-output single-coil with the specific flat, slab construction) produces a specific wide-frequency, slightly microphonic character that suits aggressive garage blues playing.

Guitar Marketplace: “Auerbach’s love of Supro guitars is legendary. Models like the Supro Martinique played a huge role in shaping tones on tracks like Howlin’ for You, delivering snarling, compressed fuzz with minimal effort.” Supro guitars — made by the Valco company of Chicago, distributed through mail-order catalogs in the 1950s and 1960s — are associated with the specific “snarling, compressed” character of their high-output lap steel-derived pickups through small amplifiers. Jimmy Page used a Supro amp as a primary recording amplifier; Dan Auerbach uses Supro guitars. The specific Supro character — the pickup’s output combined with the guitar’s relatively simple construction — provides exactly the fuzz-ready garage blues tone that the Black Keys’ sound required.

Guitar Marketplace: “Alongside Supro electrics, Dan has long used National Reso-Glass guitars. These fiberglass-bodied instruments produce a punchy, slightly hollow tone that sits perfectly between bass and drums, especially in a two-piece band.” The National Reso-Glass — National’s fiberglass-bodied electric guitar from the early 1960s — has a specific acoustic character from its fiberglass construction: the material’s different density and resonance from wood produces a “punchy, slightly hollow” quality that gives single-note lines and chords a specific midrange presence that suits the two-piece Black Keys format (where the guitar must fill sonic space normally occupied by bass in a conventional band).

Guitar Marketplace: “The Guild S-200 Thunderbird is a standout. Its unique pickups and offset styling deliver a thicker, darker sound than a Fender, while retaining clarity under fuzz and overdrive.” The Guild S-200 Thunderbird — a 1960s offset-body Guild solidbody — provides a different tonal character from the Supro and Harmony instruments: darker, thicker, with the clarity that allows it to be distinctly heard through fuzz and overdrive without becoming undefined or muddy.

Guitar Marketplace: “Dan has frequently used Gibson SG Juniors, favouring their P-90 [pickups].” The Gibson SG Junior — the simplified, budget version of the SG with a single P-90 in the bridge position — provides the specific P-90 character (aggressive midrange, bright single-coil with the warmth of a large pickup area) in a lightweight, accessible format. P-90 into fuzz is one of the classic garage rock tonal combinations, and the SG Junior’s simplicity (one pickup, minimal controls) suits the Auerbach “character” philosophy.

The Equipboard documentation: “In the video you can see Dan Auerbach using a white Ibanez Custom SG with three humbucker pickups, while his band ‘The Black Keys’ perform ‘Set You Free.’ During 2023 and 2024, Auerbach uses white Custom SG mostly for ‘Gold on the Ceiling.'” The white Ibanez Custom SG with three humbuckers is a more recent and more visually distinctive stage guitar — its three-humbucker configuration providing more pickup selection options than a standard two-humbucker SG.

Guitar World: Auerbach is “known for manhandling a motley assortment of electric instruments with brand names like Teisco Del Ray, Harmony, Supro, Silvertone and National onstage with the Black Keys.” The complete list of his “oddballs” — Teisco Del Ray (Japanese budget guitars of the 1960s, often with foil or lipstick-tube pickups), Silvertone (Sears-branded instruments made by Harmony and Danelectro), Danelectro (cardboard-body guitars with the specific “lipstick tube” single-coil character) — documents a guitarist whose collection is an American music history museum of budget and forgotten instruments.

Guitar World’s El Camino interview captures the most specifically memorable amp story in Auerbach’s documented career: “For El Camino, I used a Magnatone and an Ampeg V-92 with a JBL D-130 speaker. I blew the speaker, and in three or four songs you can hear it rattle, like at the beginning of ‘Lonely Boy.'” The Magnatone — a vintage American amplifier company known for their specific tremolo circuit (a true pitch-modulating vibrato rather than the volume-modulating “vibrato” of Fender) — is the primary studio amp for El Camino. The blown JBL D-130 speaker creates the specific rattling character heard at the beginning of “Lonely Boy” — the album’s most commercially successful track, and the rattle is part of the recorded tone. He did not replace the speaker before recording. The character was the point.

The Victoria Amp documentation: “Dan’s been using a Victoria Double Deluxe for his clean tones on his most recent tour.” The Victoria Dual Deluxe is a boutique American amplifier builder’s reproduction of the vintage Fender Deluxe circuit — warm, clean, natural tube saturation with the specific American character of 6V6 power tubes. Victoria’s amplifiers are known for their exceptional build quality and fidelity to vintage Fender circuit designs.

The Premier Guitar 2014 Rig Rundown documents: The only amp from the previous Rig Rundown is a Fender Quad Reverb that had speaker surgery since then and now has four 12″ Tubby Tone Alnico 25W Hempcone speakers because the Celestion Greenbacks and Vintage 30s locked up and stopped working. The Fender Quad Reverb (four 12-inch speakers, 100 watts) with the custom Tubby Tone hemp-cone speakers — an unusual speaker modification chosen specifically for their tonal character — provides the large-stage clean foundation for his live guitar signal.

Premier Guitar 2014: He originally had a Marshall JTM45 head, but that was swapped out for a 50-watt plexi in the need for added stage volume. The Marshall 50-watt Plexi (the handwired, Plexiglas-panel Marshall from the late 1960s) provides the British tube saturation dimension alongside the Fender Quad Reverb’s American clean character.

The Premier Guitar 2014 Rig Rundown: Replacing the Victoria Dual Deluxe is a pair of vintage 6V6-powered Danelectro combos. This one is a 1958 Commando accordion amp that is loaded with eight 8″ speakers — four original ceramic speakers and four replacement alnico speakers from Weber. A 1958 accordion amplifier repurposed for electric guitar — loaded with eight 8-inch speakers from two different speaker types — is one of the more specifically unusual amplifier choices in live rock guitar history. The accordion amp’s specific voicing (designed for the frequency range of an accordion, not a guitar) produces a different character than a conventional guitar amp.

Premier Guitar 2014: There’s a Fulltone Custom Shop Tape Echo (with a Strymon El Capistan standing by as a backup) going through it for a continuous tight slapback effect. The Fulltone Custom Shop Tape Echo — a high-quality tape echo unit — provides the specific warm, slightly degrading tape echo character for the Marshall-driven portion of his four-amp live setup.

Dan Auerbach’s most consistently documented and most personally celebrated effect is the early-1970s Ibanez No. 59 Standard Fuzz. The Equipboard quote from the 2010 Premier Guitar interview: “I’ve got shelves of pedals — sick amounts of pedals. But I swear, I use the same pedals I’ve always played. I bought an early-1970s Ibanez Standard Fuzz pedal — the octave fuzz with the two sliders. I’ve been using it since the first record, and I cannot top it.” The Ibanez No. 59 is a vintage Japanese octave fuzz pedal — a specific circuit that combines standard fuzz clipping with an upper-octave harmonic component (producing notes one octave above the fundamental note simultaneously with the fundamental, creating the specific “octavia”-like quality). “I cannot top it” is the complete product review. Thirty-plus years of pedal development, shelves full of alternatives, and the 1970s Japanese octave fuzz remains the one he uses.

Guitar World: “The Shin-ei Companion Fuzz and the Marshall Supa Fuzz are my favorites.” Both are vintage Japanese/British fuzz pedals — the Shin-ei Companion Fuzz (a Japanese octave/fuzz pedal with a specific compressed, slightly synthetic character) and the Marshall Supa Fuzz (Marshall’s own branded fuzz pedal from the late 1960s, related to the Supa Fuzz circuit) representing different fuzz characters that Auerbach deploys for different tonal applications.

Guitar Lobby: “Dan mostly used this pedal for the earlier years of Black Keys.” The EHX Big Muff Pi provided the smooth, high-sustain fuzz character of the early albums before the Ibanez No. 59 became the definitive primary fuzz.

Equipboard: “When touring Attack & Release in 2008 and 2009, Dan Auerbach used a Analogman Sun Face Fuzz Pedal.” The Analogman Sun Face is a boutique recreation of the original Dallas Arbiter Fuzz Face circuit — using vintage germanium or silicon transistors — known for its exceptional tonal quality and dynamic responsiveness to picking attack.

Premier Guitar Rig Rundown: “A Boss RE-20 [Space Echo] — the more I use it, the more I’ve grown to love it — the perfect amount of bounce for echo effects. It’s forever inspiring and reliable.” The Boss RE-20 is Roland’s digital recreation of the Roland RE-201 Space Echo (a tape echo unit from the 1970s) in pedal format — providing the warm, bouncing echo character of tape delay without actual tape maintenance. Combined with the Fulltone Custom Shop Tape Echo in his live four-amp setup, delay and echo are consistent elements of his live rig.

Guitar Lobby documentation of Dan Johnson (guitar tech): “I used to use it as a splitter when we had only two amps. It has such a warm boost that I have in there now just for the boost so that when we use that, which is something we kick on very often, it’s not like a lot of other boost pedals that add a lot of top-end to them.” The Radial Tonebone’s warm boost character — adding volume without adding excessive brightness — is consistent with Auerbach’s preference for natural, character-preserving amplification of his already-characteristic guitar tones.

The Premier Guitar Rig Rundown captures the specific tuner comment: “Next, the Boss TU-2 — god knows how old it was when it got to me (I rarely buy new), but I’ve had it for at least a good 15 years.” The Boss TU-2 is the standard professional chromatic tuner pedal — and his characterization (“I rarely buy new”) is entirely consistent with a guitarist who collects budget vintage guitars and uses a second-hand tuner of unknown age for fifteen years.