🌟 The Riff Machine is Born
There are guitarists who play fast. There are guitarists who play loud. And then there is Keith Richards—who plays just enough to make a riff stick in your bones for the rest of your life. From the moment he picked up a guitar as a kid in Dartford, England, Keith wasn’t aiming to impress with speed or technical wizardry. He wanted something else: feel. That raw, blues-soaked pulse that could make even a simple chord progression sound like the world’s heartbeat.
By the time he and Mick Jagger formed the Rolling Stones, Keith was already experimenting with tunings, tone, and rhythm in ways that would change rock music forever. His guitars weren’t just instruments; they were weapons, companions, and storytellers.
🎸 The Five-String Revelation
Ask any Stones fan what makes Keith Richards’ guitar sound so unmistakable, and you’ll hear one word: open G tuning. In the late 1960s, Keith discovered that removing the low E string and tuning the guitar to an open G chord unlocked a whole new world of riffs. Suddenly, songs like “Brown Sugar,” “Start Me Up,” and “Honky Tonk Women” weren’t just rock songs—they were Keith songs.
“It’s like you’ve been driving a car with three wheels your whole life,” Keith once said, “and then you discover the fourth.”
By stripping his guitar down to five strings, he found clarity. Each riff became tighter, fatter, and more primal. It wasn’t about playing more notes—it was about the right notes, at the right time.
🎸 Micawber – The Holy Grail
Among Keith’s legendary guitars, one stands above them all: Micawber. A beat-up 1953 Fender Telecaster that he received from Eric Clapton in 1970, Micawber is Keith’s Excalibur. He modified it—removing the low E string, swapping the bridge pickup for a Gibson PAF humbucker, and restringing it for open G tuning.
Micawber was there for “Brown Sugar.” It was there for “Before They Make Me Run.” It was there for “Start Me Up.” If a riff defined the Rolling Stones in the 1970s and beyond, chances are Micawber was the weapon of choice.
Keith once joked: “Micawber is always tuned and ready to go. I just have to pick it up and let it do the talking.”
🎸 A Love Affair with Telecasters
While Micawber is the king, Keith’s collection of Telecasters reads like a museum catalog. There’s Malcolm, another early-’50s Telecaster often paired with Micawber onstage. There’s a black ’72 Tele Custom he used during the Exile on Main St. sessions. Each Tele had its own attitude, but they all shared the same principle: stripped-down simplicity.
Keith has never been a flashy guitarist. No Floyd Rose tremolos, no racks of pedals, no endless effects chains. His philosophy is simple: plug in, turn up, and play. The guitar’s soul should come through the amplifier, not a machine.
🎸 Guitars with History
Keith isn’t sentimental about much, but his guitars carry stories of their own. His Gibson Les Paul Standard, nicknamed “Keith-burst,” was stolen in 1971—an event he still laments. His Ampeg Dan Armstrong plexiglass guitar became iconic during the late ’60s for its raw, cutting tone.
And then there’s the ES-355, the big red Gibson semi-hollow that Keith wielded like a weapon during the Stones’ notorious 1969 Altamont concert—a night that would go down as one of rock’s darkest moments. The guitar became part of the myth.
🎸 More Than Instruments – Partners in Crime
What sets Keith apart is not just his gear, but how he treats it. To him, a guitar is a living thing. He gives them names, personalities, even moods. “They’re like women,” he once quipped. “You have to treat them right, or they won’t give you what you want.”
For Keith, guitars are accomplices in crime. They have seen the backstage chaos, the endless tours, the fights with Mick Jagger, the late nights with Jack Daniels. Every nick, every scratch, every cigarette burn is part of the story.
🎸 Crafting the Stones’ Signature Sound
Without Keith’s approach to the guitar, the Rolling Stones might have been just another British blues band. Instead, his riffs became the foundation upon which Mick Jagger could strut, Charlie Watts could swing, and Ronnie Wood could weave.
Keith didn’t just write riffs—he wrote cultural anthems. From the swampy swagger of “Honky Tonk Women” to the jagged punch of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” his guitar told the story of rebellion, survival, and unfiltered rock & roll.
🎸 Survival Through Strings
As much as the world jokes about Keith’s indestructibility—outliving drugs, arrests, and even falling out of a palm tree—it’s the guitar that has been his true lifeline. No matter how chaotic his personal life became, the guitar kept him grounded.
“The only things that have kept me alive all these years,” he once said, “are music and my guitars.”
🎸 Legacy of a Riffmaster
Keith Richards isn’t just a guitarist. He’s the guy who taught the world that less is more. That one chord, played with swagger, can change the history of music. That a five-string Telecaster in open G can build a riff so iconic that stadiums still shake to it 50 years later.
His guitars aren’t locked in glass cases—they’re still onstage, still screaming, still carrying the weight of the Rolling Stones’ legend.
🎵 A Song to Remember
The song that best captures Keith Richards’ five-string magic? “Brown Sugar” (1971).
It’s dirty, it’s dangerous, it’s irresistible—and it wouldn’t exist without Micawber and that stripped-down, open G swagger.