Iconic Guitar Tones – AC/DC’s “Back in Black”

Guitarists use lots of technology to get guitar tones today — pedals galore, modelers, and IRs. But some of the greatest classic tones were just a guitar into an amp — that’s it. One of the best examples of that is anything by AC/DC but especially their Back in Black album. It’s not only great sounding, but it’s also the best-selling hard-rock album of all time, right above Led Zeppelin IV. For that album, Angus and Malcolm Young plugged their Gibson and Gretsch guitars straight into Marshall amps and cranked them up. Done. There’s actually more to it than that, as we discovered, but the signal path was surprisingly straight ahead. And the key to the AC/DC sound that they wanted to achieve? Angus said it best himself in a recent radio interview.

When I was younger, the radio’d be on, and then something would catch your ear, and immediately you went for the volume switch and went ‘BOOM!’

Well, they certainly managed to achieve that “BOOM” on the song “Back
in Black.” It was April 1980 when AC/DC showed up at Compass Point Studios in
the Bahamas with producer Mutt Lange and engineer Tony Platt to record their
seventh studio album.

Photo Credit Sound on Sound

At that time, Compass Point was equipped with an MCI 536 console and MCI tape machines. For the guitar tone, the amps were Marshalls, and the mics were Neumann 67s and 87s, according to Platt. When asked how he got the amazing guitar tones for Back in Black, Tony Platt answered plainly in this revealing Sound on Sound interview:

“I know this [specific gear] is of
great interest to a lot of people, but it honestly wouldn’t make the slightest
bit of difference if somebody recreated the exact same combination. There have
been so many times when people have asked me to get them a sound like Angus,
and I’ve generally said, ‘We’ll need a Marshall head, we’ll need a Marshall
4×12, we’ll need a Gibson SG and we’ll need Angus. Without them we just won’t
have the right combination.'”

That’s what our research told us before
we headed to the studio to see if we could re-create that guitar tone.
Undaunted (and without Malcolm [RIP] or Angus), we wanted to find out how close
we could get to the “Back in Black” tone with the gear we have here at
Sweetwater. Could we match that sound? Well... challenge accepted. Game on.

The Guitars

We started with the obvious guitars, and that, as it turned out, was the easy part. We grabbed a red Gibson SG for Angus’s part, and, for Malcolm, it had to be the Gretsch Malcolm Young  G6131. Those had exactly the right sounds. The only thing we changed on the guitars were the strings, opting for the Ernie Ball Super Slinky.009–.042s that Angus uses on the SG and swapping Gibson Accessories Vintage Reissue pure nickel.011–.050s onto the Gretsch. Malcolm used a custom-gauged.012–.058, which more than likely allowed him to hit the low strings harder, but heavy, pure-nickel strings got it done. Research suggests that both Malcolm and Angus used a heavy Fender pick at that time.

The Amp and Cab

Options, we’ve got options. If there’s one thing we have at Sweetwater Studios, it’s lots of different guitars, amps, and cabs. And we take advantage of that, like when we did the guitar cabinet shootout with 25 amazing cabs. For this experiment, we started with a handful of likely amps and cabinets, shown below.

After auditioning all the amps and cabs, we decided that we could get closest with the Marshall 1987X 50-watt Plexi tube head paired with the handwired Marshall 1960AHW 120-watt 4×12 cabinet.

The Mics and Signal Chain

We experimented with combinations of microphones, including Neumann U 67 and U 87s, but ended up preferring a pair of Neumann U 47 FET mics on two speakers in the cab alongside a Neumann U 67 positioned to the right, as seen below. (We ended up not using the U 87 seen in the photo below.) We also used a Telefunken U47 for a room mic, blended in.

We auditioned a host of preamps, but many of the high-end preamps we had available were just too “polite.” They sounded wonderful, but the guitars didn’t jump out of the speakers and grab you by the neck. We needed something angrier, grittier, ruder — more “BOOM!” We found the perfect sound in (you may be surprised) the SSL SiX desktop mixer. It had the right aggression and a sound that was really close to the original MCI console.

And, for good measure and a tip of the hat to vintage MCI (and MCI founder Jeep Harned), we ran through Glenn Coleman’s Coleman Audio CA500EQ, a 2-channel reproduction (and it is a straight, “right down to the resistor” re-creation) of the original console EQ. It’s a very powerful sonic tool that really allowed us to nail the AC/DC sound.

Here are the signal paths for the
four mics that we ended up with, that you’ll hear in our sample. No compression
was applied in the SSL SiX at all.

Mic 1: Neumann U 47 FET > Solid State Logic SiX > Coleman Audio CA500EQMic 2: Neumann U 47 FET > Solid State Logic SiX > Coleman Audio CA500EQMic 3: Neumann U 67 > Solid State Logic SiXMic 4: Telefunken U47 > Chandler Limited TG2-500

Settings on the Coleman EQ were as
follows:

Malcolm

Mic 1Mic 2Hi+2 @ 10kHz Peak+2 @ 10kHz PeakMid 2+2 @ 3kHz+2 @ 3kHzMid 1+6 @ 150Hz+6 @ 150HzLow+0 @ 150Hz Shelf+4 @ 150Hz ShelfHighpass45Hz45Hz

Angus

Mic 1Mic 2Hi+2 @ 10kHz Peak+2 @ 10kHz PeakMid 2+6 @ 3kHz+2 @ 3kHzMid 1+0 @ 150Hz+6 @ 150HzLow+0 @ 150Hz Shelf+4 @ 150Hz ShelfHighpass45Hz45Hz

NOTE: Many people believe that Angus’s sound on the tracking dates was a result of the Schaffer-Vega Diversity System, but the sound that we achieved didn’t use that system. We found a quote from tracking engineer Tony Platt stating that Angus used the SVDS only on the solos. In Platt’s own words: “Angus used a radio transmitter when doing the solos. His guitar was the only overdub and he would then play rhythm after the solo, all the way to the end so the dynamics didn’t drop. However, the sound that his radio transmitter gave the guitar was quite different.”

In the Mix

To put the final polish on the mix, Shawn used Fabfilter Pro-Q 3 to fine-tune the sound of the guitars, adding some
tape compression with Universal Audio’s Studer A800. We also auditioned several
reverbs (almost a dozen) before deciding that the Eventide Pro Reverb 2016
Stereo Room got us closest to the reverb
sound in the original track.

Take a Listen

Here is the sound we came up with. In the first clip, you’ll hear our guitar sound alternating with the sound of the original guitars.

In this second clip, you’ll hear just the guitars played by Don Carr soloed with no backing tracks at all.

What Don Carr Learned... after 40 years of playing “Back in Black”

In the summer of 1980, I bought a brand-new copy of Back in
Black (BIB), dropped the needle on the stunningly wicked opening riff of
side 2, and exclaimed, “Whoa! I gotta learn that!” Of course, the goal
was to learn it well enough to jam with my friends and play the handful of gigs
we had. When we decided to re-create that iconic riff in 2020, the microscope
came out. I had to transform my mindset from “I know how this goes” to exacting
performance details, and here’s what I learned along the way.

I had been playing the fret-hand position wrong
for the unison walk-up lick! I was playing the entire lick on the sixth string;
they play the B on the fifth string, pedaling back and forth between the fifth
and sixth strings. This gives so much more weight to the B pedal point and adds
the right amount of “swing” to the rhythm, simply due to the way your hand
moves. I discovered it watching the official BIB video, probably made around
the time the album was released.Accent the downbeats, especially beats one and three.
It puts the “heavy” in the right spot.The picking/slur/bend pattern on the “Angus”
lick that happens every other bar is very specific. For example, the first two
notes are picked, the third note is picked, and the fourth is a pull-off.Finding the balance of how hard to hit the
strings was critical. It was easy to overplay, even on the Malcolm guitar with
heavier-gauge strings. The key for me was a firm grip on the pick and a short,
solid wrist motion.The tuning among both guitars and the bass is
impeccable. A detail you might take for granted, but it’s no small feat with
heavy, slower, open-string riffs. This also determines how hard to strike the
strings.Use lower gain on both guitars. These tones are
about impact, and too much gain compresses the initial attack of a note. Less
gain makes you play differently, as well, because the note decays quicker and
the front edge of the note has more detail.Mystery Note: Who played the C# in the A chord?
The answer is likely Cliff Williams, AC/DC’s bassist; but, when I played the
guitar parts in isolation with no bass, it didn’t sound quite right without the
C#, so I put it on the “Malcolm” part.

I’m always amazed at what I learn and how much I learn when going down to the microscopic level on guitar performances. Even on a song I’ve known most of my life!

What Lynn Learned

One thing I noticed about the Malcolm guitar was the sympathetic
string vibrations coming from behind the bridge. The additional harmonics (not
enharmonic) were very audible, and we decided to muffle those since their
ringing through the silence between the riffs was very noticeable. We tried a
rectangle of foam between the strings and the body, but that muffled the
resonance of the top too much. So, Don sliced a very thin block of acoustic
foam and interlaced it between the strings behind the bridge (photo below).

The other thing that was hugely significant was mic placement. At
one point, I had Shawn go out in the studio and move the mic around by eighths
of an inch while I listened in the control room, waving hand signals to him.
“Go back. No, too far. Back the other way. Stop!!” Getting the mic positioned
in exactly the right place was paramount to achieving the right sound.

What Shawn Learned

Simplicity
is the key. Sometimes expensive gear isn’t always the best, like the preamp in
this case. Use what sounds best, even if not’s what you expected. We chose the
amps and guitars that we knew would work. I was curious enough to listen
through all of the amps that I had set up and, by doing so, realized that my
initial suspicions were confirmed. If you want to sound like AC/DC, get a
Marshall — a big one!

Oh, and that Coleman EQ is ____ing
awesome. There’s nothing I couldn’t do with it.

Conclusion

It’s always such a fascinating exercise to try to re-create classic tones. We previously did John Mayer’s “Slow Dancing in a Burning Room.” Take a listen to hear how close we got on that one, and stay tuned for more. We’re headed back into the studio again soon.
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