Keith Richards

Biography

Keith Richards, born in Dartford, England in 1943, is the riff-making heart and soul of the Rolling Stones and arguably the most influential rhythm guitarist in the history of rock and roll. The very image of rock and roll cool, Richards built the Stones' sound not on flashy solos but on indelible, swaggering riffs and a loose, swinging rhythm feel that no one has ever quite copied, earning him a place as the gold standard for what great rhythm guitar can be.

Richards is a riff machine, the author of some of the most recognizable guitar hooks ever written, from the fuzzy snarl of Satisfaction to the strut of Honky Tonk Women, Brown Sugar, Gimme Shelter, and Start Me Up. He plays with a raw, human, slightly behind-the-beat feel that makes the songs swing and breathe, and his interlocking, conversational style of trading parts with his fellow Stones guitarist, which he calls the ancient art of weaving, blurs the line between rhythm and lead in a way that became hugely influential.

Here is the gem at the core of his sound. Many of Richards' greatest riffs were written and played in open G tuning, and crucially, he removed the lowest string from his guitar entirely, playing on just five strings. This stripped-down, retuned setup gives his guitar a bright, ringing, distinctive jangle and forced him to find chord voicings and riffs that a standard six-string in standard tuning would never produce. He has joked that his whole approach comes down to five strings, two fingers, and one chord shape, a typically self-deprecating description of one of the most fertile riff-writing systems in rock. That five-string open G is the secret behind a startling number of the songs you know by heart, often played on his beloved battered Telecaster nicknamed Micawber.

A second gem shows how happy accidents fed his genius. The famous fuzzed-out riff on Satisfaction was something Richards reportedly intended only as a rough placeholder, imagining a horn section would eventually play that part, but the fuzzy guitar version became the hook heard round the world. He also keeps a famously vast collection of vintage guitars and an encyclopedic love of the old blues, country, and R&B records that taught him everything.

Beyond the music, Richards is a legend of pure survival and attitude, the embodiment of rock and roll's wild spirit who has outlasted every prediction of his demise and kept the Rolling Stones rolling for more than sixty years. A Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, he remains the patron saint of rhythm guitar, the man who proved that the right riff, played with the right feel, can be more powerful and more lasting than any amount of technical fireworks.

Legendary Performance

Rolling Stones at Madison Square Garden

July 26, 1972 · Madison Square Garden, New York City

The Rolling Stones' 1972 North American tour, the "Exile on Main St." tour, was the band's first major American tour as the biggest rock and roll band in the world, following the commercial triumph of an album that had been received with critical ambivalence on release but had already begun its revaluation. The Madison Square Garden show on July 26 was among the most widely covered concerts of the year: the guest list included Carly Simon, James Taylor, Woody Allen, Bob Dylan, and Truman Capote, and the performance itself was filmed for what would become the "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Rolling Stones" documentary.

Keith Richards's guitar playing in this period, primarily on his 1954 Telecaster "Micawber," tuned to open G and played with five strings after the removal of the low E, defined what rhythm guitar meant in rock music for the generation that grew up on it. His parts on "Tumbling Dice," "Happy," and "Rip This Joint" are not the most technically demanding guitar playing of the era, but they are among the most structurally essential: without Richards's rhythm guitar, the Stones' music has no centre of gravity. The 1972 tour documentation is the most complete record of this contribution in its most fully developed form.

Gear

"Micawber", 1954 Fender Telecaster (5-string, open G) (1954)

Known for: "Brown Sugar", "Honky Tonk Women", "Start Me Up"

"Micawber" is a 1954 Fender Telecaster that Keith Richards has played in modified form since approximately 1970: the low E string is removed, leaving five strings, and the guitar is tuned to open G, G-D-G-B-D from low to high. This configuration, which Richards did not invent but has popularised beyond any other player, produces a specific harmonic character: the open G chord rings with three strings unstretched, giving the chord a resonance and sustain that standard-tuned playing cannot equal. The five-string configuration simplifies the fingering required, allowing Richards to play full chord voicings with fewer fretting-hand fingers, and produces the driving rhythmic quality that defines his playing.

The riffs on "Start Me Up," "Brown Sugar," "Honky Tonk Women," and "Can't You Hear Me Knocking" were all written and recorded in open G on five strings. Richards has said that removing the low E string clarified the harmonic picture for him, the remaining strings produce the chord tones he needs without the bass register complication that the sixth string introduces. The technique has influenced more rhythm guitarists than any other single approach in rock music.

Fender Twins & Various British Amps

Known for: Rolling Stones studio and live recordings

Richards's amplification has varied across his career but has consistently favoured clean headroom over driven saturation: Fender Twin Reverbs for the clean, even frequency response that lets the open-G chord voicings ring without compression, and various British amplifiers, including Marshalls and Vox AC30s, for sessions where a warmer, slightly driven character suited the material.

His approach to amplification is the same as his approach to the guitar: the equipment serves the part, and the part serves the song. He has resisted the association of tonal identity with specific equipment that many guitarists cultivate, his tone is produced by the combination of open-G tuning, the Telecaster's character, and his right hand's specific attack, none of which is replicable through equipment choices alone.

Signature Technique

Open-G Five-String & Drone-Based Rhythm

Keith Richards removes the low E string and tunes the remaining five strings to open G, GDGBD, then capos at the second fret to play in A. This arrangement means that the open strings form a G major chord without any fretting, and any pair of adjacent strings produces a meaningful harmonic interval from the home chord. The result is a tuning system that makes rhythm guitar a fundamentally different experience: instead of constructing chords note by note, Richards works with the drone of open strings against moving melody notes, creating a layered, constantly resonating texture that sounds simultaneously loose and locked-in. The music feels like it is breathing.

The legendary riffs that came from this setup, "Start Me Up," "Brown Sugar," "Honky Tonk Women," "Tumbling Dice", are essentially accidents of the tuning's natural resonance. Richards has said that he finds the riffs rather than writes them: the open-G guitar in his hands tends toward certain shapes, and the shapes that feel right under his fingers happen to be the shapes that become Rolling Stones songs. His rhythm playing is not technically demanding in the conventional sense, but it is irreproducible in the deepest sense, it requires not just the tuning but the exact physical and musical relationship with the instrument that he has spent sixty years developing.