Brian Jones's Instrumental Alchemy: Marimba, Dulcimer, Sitar, and More

Brian Jones wasn’t just the Stones’ second guitarist—he was their secret weapon for weird, beautiful sounds. While Keith Richards locked down the riffs, Jones roamed the instrument aisle, picking up whatever made the band sound less like a blues cover act and more like a psychedelic circus. He turned the Stones from a rhythm-and-blues band into a band that could suddenly sound like a Balinese gamelan or a medieval folk group.

The most famous example: the marimba on Under My Thumb. Jones played it with mallets, giving the song that bright, percussive lilt that turned a bitter lyric into something almost playful. For Lady Jane, he used a hammered dulcimer—a medieval string instrument—giving the track a courtly, Elizabethan feel. And on Paint It Black, he switched to sitar, which he’d learned from Indian musician Harihar Rao, creating that droning, hypnotic hook that defined the song. He also brought in recorder on Ruby Tuesday, adding a Renaissance flicker, and Mellotron on 2000 Light Years from Home, which gave the band a space-age texture before most rock bands knew the machine existed.

Jones’s curiosity wasn’t just decorative. These instruments reshaped the band’s identity during the mid-1960s, letting the Stones leap from straight blues to baroque pop without losing their edge. He essentially acted as the band’s unofficial sound effects man—except the effects were real, acoustic, and played live in the