Keith Richards

Keith Richards is the guitarist of the Rolling Stones, and his relationship with effects is unusual for a player of his stature: he has mostly run his guitar straight to the amp¹, and he says he has only ever used foot pedals twice². His one landmark pedal moment, the Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz-Tone riff on "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" in 1965, introduced the sound of a fuzz pedal to a worldwide audience³ and made the Fuzz-Tone the "it" pedal almost overnight².

Straight into the amp: distortion from two amps

Richards' distortion comes from amps, not boxes. In a 1992 GuitarPlayer interview he explained his approach:

The idea is to overdrive one amp while keeping a cleaner signal from the other, so the distortion and the clarity of the part each come from a different place and get mixed together⁴. Part of that sound is a specific amp: he owns a Fender Twin with serial number #A00003, an amp he describes warmly:

For context on where pedal distortion comes from instead, most distortion pedals use a hybrid design of op-amps and diodes to clip the signal⁵, and Dunlop's guide describes pedal distortion as coming from clipping the signal before it runs out of headroom, or from transistors acting as imperfect amplifiers that generate extra harmonics⁶. Richards' two-amp method sidesteps all of that by pushing real amps into overload.

The Maestro Fuzz-Tone on "Satisfaction"

The one pedal every player associates with Richards is the Gibson Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz-Tone, the earliest germanium fuzz pedal, introduced in 1962⁷. The floor pedal version followed a built-in bass effect, and before Richards it was a commercial failure⁸. He used it in 1965 on "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction," the Rolling Stones' first number one hit⁹¹⁰, and after that Gibson sold out around 5000 units and released the FZ-1A⁷.

Before the fuzz, the session had a problem. Richards was after a specific kind of grit for the riff:

The FZ-1 gave the riff the distortion it needed⁴, and MusicRadar describes it as giving the riff "something that no riff had had before"¹¹.

Was the fuzz meant to be a horn part?

Yes, and Richards has told the story himself. He laid down a scratch track for the song as a guide, with the fuzz effect standing in for a full brass section, but the planned brass was never used and, against his own wishes, the original fuzz track remained on the record¹². MusicRadar reports the same account: he used the FZ-1 for temporary sax tones on the demo, ended up keeping it in, and started a chain reaction for fuzz tones that continues today¹³. In his 2010 autobiography Life, Richards says he used the Fuzz-Tone to emulate a horn². Guitar.com's history adds that he figured the squawky sound of his guitar through the box could act as a sketch for the horn sound he could sort out properly later¹⁴.

The sound has since been revisited in pedal form: the Electro-Harmonix Satisfaction fuzz is an homage to Richards' FZ-1 tone, with a stripped back setup of just Volume and Attack controls¹¹.

The rest of his pedal use

Richards' own tally is blunt:

Beyond the FZ-1 and that XR delay on Some Girls, the record of his gear use is short:

• An MXR Phase 100, which JHS Pedals' history says he used a lot and which is on a ton of Rolling Stones hits¹⁵.
• A Palmer speaker simulator on the 1992 track "999," which he described as "a little box, no speakers"⁴.

That is the whole picture: a player whose tone was built on cranked amps, with two foot pedals in a lifetime and one fuzz riff that changed what a guitar could sound like on record.

Questions