Keith Richards's Late 60s Evolution: From Sideman to Riff Architect with Open G Tuning

By the late 1960s, Keith Richards had quietly taken over as the Rolling Stones’ musical director, though he never used the title. While Mick Jagger became the public face, Richards was the one locking in the band’s sonic direction in the studio, often sketching out the entire arrangement of a song before the others even arrived. His shift to open G tuning—lowering the low E, A, and high E strings to a G chord—started as a technical accident but quickly became his secret weapon.

The breakthrough came with Honky Tonk Women in 1969. Richards had been experimenting with open G after watching Ry Cooder, and one afternoon at Olympic Studios he dropped his guitar into the tuning, grabbed a five-string acoustic (removing the low E entirely for clarity), and nailed that instantly recognizable, slippery riff. The tuning allowed him to play rhythm and lead simultaneously—just by sliding a bottleneck or a capo—and gave the Stones a roiling, almost country-blues grit that no other rock band had. From then on, open G was his default for classics like Brown Sugar, Start Me Up, and Can’t You Hear Me Knocking.

Richards’s method wasn’t flashy; he’d sit in the control room, chain-smoking, and tell everyone what not to play. That instinct for subtraction—leaving space for the riff to breathe—turned him into the band’s central architect. Honky Tonk Women proved that one man with a half-tuned guitar and a sense of swing could define an entire era of rock.