Keith Richards plays five strings, not six: the open-G setup behind every Stones riff

The Rolling Stones launched their first official podcast this week, a six-part series called Speaking in Tongues, narrated by Norah Jones, built around new interviews with Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Ronnie Wood ahead of the band's new album due July 10 (Premier Guitar). It is a listen-along, not a gear story. But it is the perfect excuse to settle the most misunderstood string trick in rock.

Here it is, in one sentence: Keith Richards plays five strings, not six. He pulls the low E string off his Telecaster, tunes the remaining five to open G, and that is the engine behind half a century of Rolling Stones riffs. People know the open-G part. They miss the part that actually matters, which is the string he leaves in the packet.

This is the rare signature sound you can copy for free. No pedal, no boutique pickup, no vintage guitar. Just a tuning and a missing string. So let us take it apart properly.

Open G means the open strings, strummed with nothing fretted, ring a G major chord. A six-string player gets there by tuning D-G-D-G-B-D, low to high. Three strings move from standard: the sixth drops from E to D, the fifth from A to G, and the first from E to D. The fourth, third, and second stay put.

The payoff is that chords become one-finger shapes. Lay a barre straight across any fret and you get a major chord: third fret is Bb, fifth fret is C, seventh fret is D. That movable simplicity is why open G is the backbone of slide blues, and why it suited a riff writer like Richards who wanted his left hand free to stab and choke chords rather than fret full barre shapes. Our open G tuning guide walks the full retune string by string.

Now the part people skip. In six-string open G, that low D on the sixth string just doubles the root an octave below the fifth-string G. It does not add a new note to the chord. It adds weight, and for Richards's percussive, midrange-forward rhythm style, that weight reads as mud (Open Culture).

So he removed it. With the low E gone, the lowest note he plays is the open G on the fifth string, and every chord he grabs is rooted on that same low G. That is the bass-pedal anchor you hear under "Honky Tonk Women" and "Start Me Up": the riff moves around the neck, but the ear keeps hearing G as home. Richards has said across interviews that the sixth string was simply getting in the way. Five strings, no low E, open G. That is the whole secret, and it is mechanical, not magic.

There is a second detail that gets lost, and it lives on the third string. In a standard light electric set, the G string is plain steel. Richards keeps a wound G in his open-G setup, and it matters more than it sounds (Equipboard).

In open G the third string is one of the chord's defining tones, and a plain G can ring sharp and thin against the wound strings around it, especially when you choke a chord or dig in with a pick. A wound third sits better in tune across the neck and gives those open-G chords their thick, slightly compressed bark instead of a glassy chime. If you copy nothing else from his rig, copy the wound G. It is the difference between sounding like open G and sounding like the Stones.

You do not need a custom set to start. Take a standard Ernie Ball Regular Slinky (.010 to .046), leave the low E in the packet, and tune the other five to G-D-G-B-D. Richards is a long-documented Ernie Ball player running custom gauges in roughly the .011 to .042 range, but the brand and the exact gauge are not the point. The missing low E and the wound third are (Ground Guitar).

A note on that wound third: a standard .010 set gives you a plain G. To match the Richards voicing exactly you want a wound G, which a standard set does not include. The honest workaround for most players is to live with the plain G to start, and only chase a wound-third set once you are sure the five-string sound is your thing. The tuning and the missing string get you ninety percent of the way; the wound G is the last ten.

If you keep a guitar in open G full time, give it a quick setup check. Dropping three strings a whole step lowers total neck tension, so the relief and intonation can shift. Heavier strings, like the .011 set, restore some of that tension and are the better choice if you play slide or want a firmer ring. Make those open strings last by reading our coated versus uncoated guide, since droning open strings show their age fast.

Both are nickel-wound workhorses and both cost about the same. Start with the Regular Slinky if you are new to the tuning, and step up to the Power Slinky once you know you want more tension under your slide or your pick.

The setup is most famous on Micawber, Richards's butterscotch 1953 Telecaster, named after a character in Charles Dickens's David Copperfield. It is not a stock Tele. The neck pickup is a Gibson PAF humbucker, the bridge carries a brass plate, and it wears five saddles for its five strings (Equipboard). He runs a near-identical 1954 Telecaster called Malcolm as its twin.

Here is the freeing part for the rest of us: none of those mods are what make the sound. The PAF and the brass bridge shape the tone at the margins, but the riff lives in the tuning and the missing string. You can set up any guitar this way. A cheap Telecaster copy in five-string open G with a wound G will get you closer to "Brown Sugar" than the nicest six-string Strat in standard ever could. The full documented rig lives on our Keith Richards rig page, and the band context on our Rolling Stones page.

Be honest with yourself about what changes. The five-string open-G setup hands you the voicing and the bass-pedal anchor, the architecture of the Richards sound. It does not hand you his right hand, which is where the swing and the choke and the lazy push-pull of his rhythm actually live. The tuning is the easy ninety percent. The feel is the part you earn.

That is also the good news. The expensive parts of most signature tones, the amps and the vintage guitars, barely matter here. The cheap part, a tuning and a string you remove, is the part that matters most. So the next time a Stones riff comes on, you will hear it differently: not a wall of guitar, but five strings, rooted on a low G, played by a man who decided the sixth one was in the way. For the rest of this week's guitar news, our June 26 briefing has the full rundown.