How does an artist develop their signature sound? It’s hard enough trying to make a guitar sound decent when playing any riff, but if you make the best riff known to man, you need to add that one element that makes it yours. And while Angus Young is a guitar player whose sound is unmistakable, he knew some people could make their trademark in one second.
Compared to every other rock and roll band, though, Angus’s guitar tone feels like it should be the most easy to nail down. AC/DC aren’t known to play the most complicated music in the world, and since he and his brother Malcolm always played loud ringing chords, it feels like it should be a cakewalk. It seems easy, but have you ever tried to play it right?
No, I mean it. The whole premise of listening to AC/DC is about getting those first chords under your fingers, but the main focus should always be on nailing the perfect groove behind everything. Malcolm knew that if a riff didn’t work when locking in with the drummer, it wasn’t worth building a song around, and when listening to an album like Back in Black, every lick that comes out of their amplifiers has a great pocket to it without even having any percussion added to the mix.
And that’s often how Angus sees his solos as well. There are a handful where he likes to go off the rails and play as much as he can, but the real power behind his playing is being able to write solos that have melodies that people can sing along to. Since he was taught the importance of good rhythm playing from his brother, it’s no surprise that most of the guitarists Angus has the most reverence usually know the importance of that groove.
Chuck Berry certainly had that flair when he was starting out. The rhythmic pulse of ‘Johnny B Goode’ was what made it leap out of the speakers, but rock and roll was a much different groove than its musical grandaddy, the blues. Everyone from Muddy Waters to BB King knew that it was about making the audience feel something whenever they played, and listening to Keith Richards, Angus felt that the Stones guitarist had cracked the code on how to perfectly blend blues and rock and roll into pure guitar swagger.
While Richards could play intricate stuff when he wanted, Angus felt that the best moments was when he leaned back, saying, “Just listen to the opening chord in ‘Honky Tonk Women.’ I’ve always admired someone like Keith Richards who, instead of playing six notes or chords, plays just one note and gets the same feeling across. Often, by simplifying you focus in on something and make it even better, more direct.”
And even without ‘Honky Tonk Women’, there are half a dozen Stones songs that can have that same effect when Keef starts a riff. There’s the ringing opening chords of ‘Start Me Up’ that gets people going at the top of the tune, or even the strange wobbling effect that kicks off ‘Street Fighting Man’, which may be one of the single strangest guitar tones to ever come out of the 1960s.
But the beauty of Richards’s playing a lot of the time is that he probably didn’t realise what he was doing. He followed his ear because the sound that he heard felt right to him, and in doing so, he created a small army of players that felt that they could make their own masterpieces by thinking outside the box.
