There is a moment in Start Me Up — the first 4 seconds, before Mick Jagger sings a single word — that contains the entire Keith Richards philosophy of rock and roll guitar.
A single chord. Open G tuning. Five strings. A 1953 Fender Telecaster modified with a humbucker in the neck position, run through a cranked Fender amp. The chord rings and decays with a particular kind of authority — present, rhythmically inevitable, occupying exactly the space it needs to occupy and no more.
Keith Richards did not build his reputation on speed, on harmonic complexity, or on the kind of virtuosity that guitar magazines typically celebrate. He built it on something more fundamental and more difficult to teach: the ability to make a rhythm guitar part feel like the most important thing in the room.
He is, without argument, the greatest rhythm guitarist in the history of rock and roll. And the tools he used to achieve that — the Open G tuning, the five-string approach, the specific guitars and amplifiers that define his sound — are among the most studied and most imitated in the entire vocabulary of the electric guitar.
The Genesis of the « Human Riff »: Keith’s Rhythm-First Philosophy
Weaving Guitars: The Dual-Guitar Dialogue with Brian Jones and Mick Taylor
The Rolling Stones were built on a specific approach to two-guitar interplay that Keith Richards and Brian Jones developed in the early 1960s, drawing from the Chicago blues records they studied obsessively — the interweaving guitar parts of Muddy Waters and Jimmy Rogers, the way two guitarists could occupy different registers and rhythmic positions simultaneously to create something richer than either could achieve alone.
With Brian Jones, Richards developed what he has called the « ancient form » of the two-guitar approach — not lead and rhythm in the conventional sense, but two rhythm parts that weave around each other, neither fully subordinate to the other, both contributing to a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Jones played more melodically, more texturally. Richards drove the harmonic and rhythmic foundation. Together they produced the sound of the early Stones — raw, blues-rooted, rhythmically propulsive.
When Mick Taylor replaced Jones in 1969, the dynamic shifted. Taylor was a formally trained blues guitarist with technical ability that Jones had never possessed — and with the capacity for extended melodic playing over Richards’ rhythm foundation. The Stones of Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main St., and Let It Bleed are the product of that specific chemistry: Taylor’s fluid lead work floating over Richards’ immovable rhythmic architecture. It is the period many serious Stones listeners consider their finest, and it is inseparable from the particular tension between those two guitar approaches.
The influence of Robert Johnson’s open-tuning vocabulary on Richards’ approach to rhythm guitar is direct and documented. When British players like Keith Richards first heard Johnson’s recordings in the 1960s, it completely reshaped their approach to tone, phrasing, and the possibilities of acoustic and electric guitar — particularly the use of open tunings to create drone-based, rhythmically driving chord patterns. Read the full story of that Delta foundation in our article on Robert Johnson: The Delta Blues King.
Rhythm as Lead: Driving The Rolling Stones Engine
Richards has spoken extensively about his philosophy of rhythm guitar, and the core of it is consistently the same: the rhythm guitar is the engine of the band, not the decoration. The lead guitar ornaments what the rhythm guitar establishes. Without a great rhythm part, the lead has nothing to respond to and nothing to push against.
This is not a modest philosophy. It is, in practice, an extremely demanding one — because a great rhythm guitar part requires complete rhythmic authority, harmonic clarity, and the ability to lock with a bass player and drummer so tightly that the three instruments function as a single organism. Richards achieves this with a consistency that has made the Rolling Stones, despite every personnel change and every era of fashion, one of the most identifiable bands in music history. You can identify a Rolling Stones record from a single bar of rhythm guitar. That is not an accident. It is the result of a specific approach to what the instrument is for.
The Secret Weapon: 5-String Open G Tuning Explained
Ditching the Low E String: GDGBD Tuning Breakdown
The most distinctive element of Keith Richards’ guitar approach — the one that more than any other defines his sound on the great Stones recordings — is his use of five-string Open G tuning.
The principle is straightforward. A standard guitar in Open G tuning is tuned to DGDGBD from low to high — the open strings form a G major chord. Keith Richards takes this one step further: he removes the low E string entirely, leaving only five strings tuned GDGBD.
The practical effect is significant. Without the low E string, the lowest note available is the open G — which means that every chord Richards plays has G as its foundation. The bass register is always G, always rooted, always the same. This creates an inherent drone quality that makes even simple chord movements feel harmonically grounded and rhythmically inevitable.
The five-string approach also changes the available chord voicings. In standard Open G with a low bass string, the player has to be careful about accidentally striking that low note when it’s not wanted. Remove the string, and the problem disappears — every string you can hit is part of the harmony.
Richards typically plays his five-string Open G without using his index finger to barre at the first fret. Instead, he uses his remaining four fingers to voice chords in the upper strings, leaving the open strings to ring as drones beneath. The result — audible throughout Honky Tonk Women, Brown Sugar, Start Me Up, Tumbling Dice — is a guitar sound that seems to breathe and ring with a self-sustaining resonance that standard tuning cannot produce.
Key Riffs in Open G: « Start Me Up, » « Honky Tonk Women, » and « Brown Sugar »
The Open G tuning is not a curiosity or an occasional technique for Richards — it is the primary language of his most famous work.
Honky Tonk Women opens with a cowbell hit and then Richards’ guitar, in Open G, playing the two-bar riff that has become one of the most recognizable openings in rock history. The riff works because of the tuning: the open G drone string sustains beneath moving chord fragments, creating a layered texture that a single guitar in standard tuning cannot replicate.
Brown Sugar uses Open G to drive a relentlessly energetic rhythm part. The chord shapes Richards uses — fragments rather than full voicings, emphasizing the upper strings while the open G strings drone beneath — give the song its particular rhythmic snap and momentum.
Start Me Up demonstrates the sustaining, authoritative quality of the tuning at its most elemental. The opening chord rings with a fullness that comes directly from the Open G configuration — every string contributing to a harmonic whole that fills the sonic space without any additional processing or studio treatment.
To get started in Open G: tune your guitar to DGDGBD, remove the low E string or simply avoid playing it, and try barring at the fifth fret with your ring finger. That’s a C chord. Move to the seventh fret — D chord. Open — G chord. Three positions, three chords, the foundation of half the Rolling Stones catalog.
Keith Richards’ Legendary Guitars
Micawber: The 1953 Fender Telecaster with a Neck Humbucker
Micawber — named after the Dickens character from David Copperfield — is the guitar most associated with the Open G five-string approach and with the sound of the Rolling Stones at their peak.
It is a 1953 Fender Telecaster that has been modified in ways that significantly alter its original character. Most notably, the original single-coil neck pickup has been replaced with a Gibson PAF-style humbucker — a modification that warms the normally bright, twangy Telecaster neck tone into something thicker and more sustaining, closer to a Gibson in character while retaining the Telecaster’s inherent snap and articulation through the bridge pickup.
The guitar is also, like many of Richards’ instruments, set up for five-string Open G — which means no low E string, a modified nut, and string gauges chosen to balance tension and playability in that specific tuning.
Micawber has been Richards’ primary guitar since the early 1970s. It appears on Exile on Main St., on Some Girls, on Tattoo You, and on virtually every significant Stones recording and performance since its acquisition. It is not a museum piece — Richards plays it, abuses it, and continues to use it as a working instrument because it does what he needs it to do better than any other guitar he has found.
Malcolm: The 1954 Telecaster Backup
Malcolm — Richards’ backup primary Telecaster, named after his friend Malcolm Davies — is a 1954 model that functions as Micawber’s immediate stand-in for live performances and recording sessions when the primary guitar needs maintenance or restringing.
The relationship between the two guitars is itself instructive about Richards’ approach to his instruments. He names them, refers to them as distinct personalities, and is deeply attached to specific instruments in the way that a craftsman is attached to specific tools. He is not a collector who acquires guitars and displays them — he is a player who finds instruments that work for him and then uses them until they are thoroughly worn in.
Gibson Les Pauls, Ampeg Dan Armstrong, and Epiphone Casino Eras
Before the Telecaster period that defined his mature sound, Richards moved through several important guitar relationships that shaped his development.
The Epiphone Casino — the semi-hollow guitar that the Beatles had also adopted — was a Richards staple in the mid-1960s. Its bright, slightly compressed tone suited the Stones’ blues-rock of that period, and it contributed to the sound of early Stones recordings before Richards began his serious investigation of the Telecaster and Open G tuning.
The Ampeg Dan Armstrong — a transparent acrylic-bodied guitar with interchangeable pickups — appeared during the Let It Bleed and Exile era and can be heard on several recordings from that period. Its hard, percussive attack suited the loose, swampy atmosphere of those sessions.
The Gibson Les Paul appeared in various periods, particularly in the early years when Richards was absorbing the Chicago blues vocabulary. The heavier, warmer Les Paul tone appears on several early Stones recordings, though the Telecaster eventually displaced it as his primary voice.
Amps and Effects: Achieving That Raw Vintage Crunch
High-Powered Fender Tweed Twin Amps
Keith Richards’ amplifier approach is, like his guitar approach, fundamentally about finding the right tool and then running it hard.
His primary amplifiers have historically been Fender Twin Reverbs and earlier Fender Tweed-era amps — American amplifiers known for their clean, extended headroom and their particular way of breaking up under high-input conditions. A Fender Twin driven by a hot Telecaster into the upper range of its clean channel produces a specific kind of natural compression and saturation — not the gain-stage distortion of a British amp, but the harmonic saturation of tubes and a transformer being pushed to their design limits.
This natural saturation — the way the amp responds to hard playing by compressing and adding harmonic content rather than simply distorting — is central to the Keith Richards sound. The chords don’t clip and distort in a conventional sense. They bloom and sustain, with a quality that experienced players describe as the amp « working. »
Cranked Tube Saturation vs. Fuzz Pedals (The « Satisfaction » Maestro Fuzz)
The most famous Keith Richards guitar sound in history may also be the most accidental.
(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction — recorded in 1965 — was built on a fuzz tone produced by a Maestro Fuzz-Tone pedal, a primitive early fuzz unit that Richards intended as a rough sketch of a horn part he heard in his head. He expected the fuzz tone to be replaced by actual brass instruments before the final recording. The band and producer decided the fuzz version was the record.
The resulting guitar tone — buzzy, aggressive, slightly broken, with the particular character of that specific pedal — became one of the most imitated sounds in rock history. But it was a happy accident, not a deliberate tonal choice, and it represents an exception rather than the rule in Richards’ approach.
The rule is natural amp saturation, the Telecaster’s inherent snap and articulation, and the Open G tuning that makes every chord ring with sustaining harmonic richness. The fuzz was a mistake that became a masterpiece. The rest of the catalog was the result of deliberate, sophisticated choices about how to get a guitar and an amplifier to work together in a specific way.
How to Dial In Keith Richards’ Tone Today
Amp Settings and Pickup Choices
The Telecaster remains the starting point — either an original vintage instrument or one of the many excellent Fender reissue models that capture the character of the early 1950s design. The bridge pickup is the primary voice: bright, percussive, with the particular snap that makes chord fragments cut through a band mix without getting muddy.
For the amplifier, a Fender Twin Reverb or Deluxe Reverb at moderate volume, pushed to the point where the clean channel begins to compress slightly, is the most direct route to the Richards tone. The key is not to use the gain channel or any significant overdrive pedal — the saturation should come from the amp responding to the guitar signal, not from an additional gain stage.
Set the amp clean, then push the volume until it starts to breathe. That’s the Keith Richards approach.
String Gauges and Setup Tips for Open G
Open G tuning places slightly different tension demands on the guitar compared to standard tuning, particularly on the middle strings which are being tuned up from their standard positions. Richards typically uses relatively light strings — 0.010-0.046 or similar — which balance playability with enough tension to stay in tune under the physical demands of rhythmic strumming.
The nut needs to be checked and possibly adjusted when moving to five-string Open G — the string slots may need to be widened slightly to accommodate any string gauge changes, and the intonation should be set for the new tuning if the guitar will spend significant time in that configuration.
Most importantly: practice the tuning acoustically before plugging in. The Open G chord vocabulary, and particularly Richards’ approach to chord fragments and partial voicings, becomes intuitive fairly quickly — but the hand positions are different from standard tuning, and the adjustment requires time.
Conclusion: The Enduring Legacy of Keith Richards
The great irony of Keith Richards’ career is that the guitarist most celebrated for his rhythm playing is also, quietly, one of the most influential figures in the history of the electric guitar as a tonal instrument.
The five-string Open G approach changed the way thousands of players think about tuning, about drone strings, about the relationship between rhythm and harmony. The Telecaster-through-Fender-amp setup that defines his mature sound became a template that continues to appear on recordings across every genre that touches rock and roll. The rhythm-first philosophy — the insistence that the rhythm guitar is the engine and not the decoration — has influenced every band that has tried to capture the feeling of a great live rock record.
Keith Richards is not the fastest guitarist, not the most technically accomplished, not the most harmonically sophisticated. He is, by any honest assessment, the most rhythmically authoritative guitarist in the history of rock — the player who proved that a chord, played in the right tuning with the right feel at the right moment, is worth more than a thousand notes.
The riff is everything. The rest is commentary.
When British players like Keith Richards first heard Johnson’s recordings in the 1960s, it completely reshaped their approach to tone and phrasing. Read the full story of that Delta foundation in our article on Robert Johnson: The Delta Blues King. And explore more legends and gear deep-dives in our Blues & Rock Legends section.
Tags: Keith Richards, Keith Richards guitar tone, Micawber Telecaster, Keith Richards Open G tuning, Fender Twin Amp Keith Richards, Rolling Stones guitar style, 5 string Telecaster Keith Richards, Blues & Rock Legends
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