How the Stones' Open G and Zeppelin's Alternate Tunings Defined Their '70s Touring Sound

The biggest difference you’d hear between a Stones and Zeppelin show in the 1970s came straight from the guitarists’ hands — specifically, how they tuned their strings. Keith Richards stripped his five-string Telecaster down to open G (D-G-D-G-B-D) around 1968 and barely looked back. That tuning let him play chord shapes with just one or two fingers, freeing his right hand to lock into a hypnotic, percussive chug that became the Stones’ rhythmic backbone. On stage, it meant songs like “Brown Sugar” and “Honky Tonk Women” hit with a loose, swampy drive that felt almost like a single-note riff played across a full chord.

Jimmy Page, by contrast, treated alternate tunings as secret weapons for specific songs. He’d drop to DADGAD for “Kashmir,” open G for “In My Time of Dying,” or a double-drop D for “Ten Years Gone.” But live, this made Zeppelin’s set more episodic — Page would pause between songs to retune his Les Paul, and the band often covered those gaps with a Bonham drum solo or Jones’s keyboard interludes. The result was a show built around distinct, heavyweight riffs rather than a continuous groove. Where Richards’s open G turned the Stones into one relentless engine, Page’s tunings let Zeppelin shift gears dramatically, from the medieval modal drone of “Kashmir” to the bottleneck slide of “In My Time of Dying” — but at the cost of momentum.

Both approaches were brilliant for what each band needed. The Stones’ sound lived in the pocket; Richards’s tuning made sure that pocket never wavered. Zeppelin’s sound lived in the peaks and valleys; Page’s tunings built each peak from its own foundation.