Like BB King famously said to Billy Gibbons about heavy strings, "Why you workin' so hard son?" Back in the '70s I used 8's on everything electric, now I use 8's on my Fenders and 9's on my Gibsons.
The theme from "Twilight Zone" started playing in my head when I read your post, I started doubting everything I thought was true; Is the earth really flat? Does the sun really revolve around the earth? Was Leo Fender really design the Les Paul??? Thank god for cerebral gasket bringing me back to reality!
8's on my SG, mainly because it's a '67 which has low frets (measurement is very close to what the 'fretless wonder' LP had, making bends more challenging than something like medium jumbos).
That's a Billy Gibbons quote. Funny enough I was watching BB himself talk about his guitars and string gauges last night on a random video. He said he uses 10s on the bottom and very thick low E on top. He seemed pretty committed to his string gauge in this interview. I think Billy was blowing smoke up our collected back sides. Video starts here. It's 5 parts and I'm not sure which part it was in.
I use Gibson Vintage Reissues 10s on my SG and 11s on my 335 and 10s on Fenders when I used to play them. The choice of string gauges, brands and materials choice involves a balance of comfort and tone shaping for each instrument.
Bottom, top? I missed that lesson. I had a gig. I'm still calling the strings on top the top strings. I hope we can wade through the confusion. Personally I've used everything from 8 to 11. The lower the action the thicker I like the string. My newer '61 stopbar likes 10s. My older special which has the best fret action I've ever touched in 30 years of playing likes 11s. My les paul likes 10s. My strat is not played much, but it likes 9.5 which is a pain.
When I used to play on a regular basis I used 10s, considering going to 11s...lifestyle changed, put the guitars down for playing just for practice (you know how practice sometimes goes) and while picking it up again, the 10s were kinda tuff... I thought of going with the 9s that came in the kits I was building...buuuut, playing the guitars with 10s a bit more seemed to be tuffenin' my fingers up, so I'll stuck with the 10s. Do what's comfortable, bottom line.
I found D addario has a set of 9.5 to 44. Exl 120 +. I find they are all around good feeling on all of my guitars. This way i get a similar feel when I swap guitars .
I'm in the process of switching to 10-38 on everything. The feel and the sound are really amazing. I bought a bunch of .015's so I could swap out the G string on my remaining stock of .009's and .010's, and that works nicely, but not as nicely as the Hendrix set. So far I've used Pyramid, GHS, and Stringjoy and they all work just fine.
