How Keith Richards invented the five-string open G sound on 'Honky Tonk Women' and 'Brown Sugar'

Richards didn’t just stumble into open G tuning one day. He’d been experimenting with open tunings since the mid-60s, but the five-string version – removing the low E string entirely and tuning the remaining strings to G, D, G, B, D – clicked during the 1969 sessions for Let It Bleed. The idea was partly practical: fewer strings meant less finger clutter, and the open G chord rang out with a bright, ringing sustain that cut through the Stones’ rhythm section without muddying the bass frequencies.

The first major session to immortalize this sound was for “Honky Tonk Women” in early 1969 at Olympic Sound Studios in London. Richards played a stripped-down Gibson ES-345 in open G, capo at the third fret, and the riff came out as a stabbing, syncopated attack that still defines the song. A few months later, at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in December 1969, he used the same tuning on “Brown Sugar,” letting the open strings chime behind the slide and the treble-heavy chords. Both tracks were recorded before the tuning became a permanent part of his rig – he was still feeling out its limitations live, often switching between standard and open G mid-show.

By 1971’s Sticky Fingers, the five-string open G was fully baked. Richards would later say the low E string just got in the way, and that dropping it let him play counter-rhythms against Charlie Watts’ hi-hat without fighting the bass guitar. It sounds like a small adjustment, but it completely changed how he attacked the