I don’t know where I’d be without Keith Richards and Flecton Big Sky.
Next year will mark a decade since I put out my first Area Resident album. I’d been making low-fi home recordings for years, but it wasn’t until I met Ottawa singer-songwriter Jim Bryson in December 2015 that I was inspired to make a proper album. I visited Jim at his home studio and showed him some of my demos, which he said were worth pursuing. He also suggested I connect with his friend Miche Jette, aka Flecton Big Sky, whose style he thought might complement my own.
So, I wrote to Miche and said: “Jim Bryson says we should make music together. Will you be my friend?” He was game, and we made a date. On the way to Miche’s place a few days later, I drove past a man pulling a brand new toilet in a child’s wagon and immediately started writing a song about it as I drove. Miche and I exchanged pleasantries and decamped to his basement where we worked out the song, which became True Story. I’d brought my laptop and audio interface along with me, so I got Miche to actually record some guitar parts for two other songs I’d already mostly recorded — Two Mile Road and Holy Hell And Holy Days. He had two solid bits of advice for me that night — think about writing pre-choruses, and try using open-G tuning.
Miche is probably the biggest Keith / Rolling Stones fan I’ve ever met. He also possesses the same feel. Miche’s tuning suggestion was made after I admitted that I don’t know how to play guitar. I’m a bass player and drummer. I know one proper chord. So for years, in order to record guitar parts, I’d either just play the two lower strings, or fashion some sort of open tuning to make it sound like I was playing chords.
But there wasn’t really any rhyme or reason to it. Miche told me about Richards’ preferred tuning — open-G with the low E string removed. Just five strings, tuned like a banjo: G-D-G-B-D. Miche said he always kept at least one guitar tuned this way. So, when I returned home I did the same, and took the E string off my beloved 1987 Squier Strat. It’s never gone back. Keef even goes so far as to take the saddle for that string off his guitar, so it doesn’t rattle with no string tension there to keep it snug. Perhaps if I ever played guitar live, I would do the same, but I only ever play guitar to record.
Let me be clear: This approach makes it possible for me to be a guitarist, even though I still have never bothered to learn how to actually play chords with standard tuning — E-A-D-G-B-E. I have three guitars and none of them are tuned this way. My Strat is tuned Keef-style, the J Mascis Jazzmaster I bought off Bryson is tuned to open-E, my Gretsch Jim Dandy acoustic is tuned to open-D, and my Eastwood baritone tenor is either tuned like a bass (because it only has four strings), or in open-D.
I use these guitars, in these tunings, on all my songs regardless of what key they end up being in. This is the heart of my sound, and it helps me play cleanly. The problem with playing anything other than slide in open tuning, is trying to avoid hitting a discordant, neighbouring string. But, when you remove that low E string, this is no longer a problem. In open-G, with five strings, you only have three notes — G, D and B. It’s almost impossible to sound a bum note. But not only that, it’s incredibly fertile ground. I find unintentionally struck strings usually create a welcome harmonic drone in this tuning. Keef writes about this at length in his memoir, Life. Even with his skill and adeptness with standard, six-string tuning, he found a whole new world and way of playing. For him, open-G brought the kind of simplicity and spaciousness he wanted. He started employing this approach on 1968’s Beggars Banquet and it very quickly defined his sound. He literally found his groove.
In Life, Keith puts it this way, “Only three notes, but because of these different octaves, it fills the whole gap between bass and top notes with sound. It gives you this beautiful resonance and ring. I found working with open tunings that there’s a million places you don’t need to put your fingers. The notes are there already. You can leave certain strings wide open. It’s finding the spaces in between that makes open tuning work. And if you’re working the right chord, you can hear this other chord going on behind it, which actually you’re not playing. It’s there. It defies logic.”
Richards says he picked up open-G from playing with Ry Cooder, who routinely employed the tuning, except with all six strings.
So, this wonderful gift from Miche and Keef has brought me to a place where I no longer have to tell people I’m “not a guitarist.” I am. And I quite like the stuff I’ve done. One of the most fun aspects of working this way is watching your bandmates try to learn the songs not knowing they’re recorded using open-tuned guitars in either open-G, open-D or both. There’s a passage in Keef’s book where he recalls an exchange with Waddy Wachtel, the lead guitarist in his solo band The X-pensive Winos. On a visit to Keef’s place, Wachtel spotted the famous Micawber Telecaster sitting in a stand with just five strings and missing one of the saddles on the bridge. Wachtel thought it was a project guitar, until Keef explained it to him. “That’s my whole deal,” Richards told him. “The five-string. Five-string open-G tuning.”
It wasn’t the first time Wachtel had encountered the tuning. Years earlier he was having a drink with Don Everly and asked him about the guitar intro to Bye Bye Love. There was a lick that Wachtel couldn’t figure out. Everly took his guitar and showed him — by tuning it to open-G. Everly told him he learned the tuning from Bo Diddley.
Wachtel is five years younger than Richards and played lots of Rolling Stones covers as a young musician — but something always sounded off. It wasn’t until he tried them with open-G tuning that everything suddenly started to sound right. The example given in the Life memoir is Can’t You Hear Me Knocking, from Sticky Fingers (1971). It’s far more difficult to play this song with standard, concert tuning than it is to play it in open-G on five strings. And it sounds so much better.
Richards often uses a capo at various places on the neck, altering the tuning from open-G to, open-B, B♭, C and D. He further tweaks and refines his sound via electronic modifications. For example, since 1972, Keef had Micawber’s original single-coil pick-up swapped out for a 1950s Gibson humbucker which he had installed backwards — with the magnet pegs facing away from the neck. The other pickup, by the bridge, was replaced with one from a lap-steel guitar.
I did something similar to my J. Mascis Jazzmaster, swapping out the P90s it came with, for traditional Fender Jazzmaster pickups. I also almost never change my strings and use a tonebar or vape battery instead of a traditional finger or bottleneck slide. What can I say? I’m an artiste.
Here’s a playlist of songs featuring a five-string guitar tuned to open-G:
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Area Resident is an Ottawa-based journalist, recording artist, music collector and re-seller. Hear (and buy) his music on Bandcamp, email him HERE, follow him on Instagram and check him out on Discogs.
