shut up and listen

The track begins with two electric guitars playing a riff with fairly open ringing chords. There is warm amp distortion on the guitars, most noticeable when they come together to strum the main chord. The guitar playing the more rhythmic part is panned left, and the other guitar playing the more detailed fiddly bits is on the right. This is actually the stereo position that the two guitars stay in for the whole track (and practically every other AC/DC track ever recorded!) but it is subtle in this intro because the material they are playing is pretty much the same – it is only differentiated by the extra detail in the playing of the right side guitar (we’ll call this the lead guitar and the other we’ll call the rhythm guitar even though they both play rhythmic material at different times).

After a short pause the drums enter and the lead guitar begins the main riff – this odd unbalanced section, with just one guitar hard right, drums and vox centre and no bass is particularly strange in headphones. No one would mix like this today – well except for AC/DC who just keep remaking the same songs over and over again. The guitar playing is in the classic AC/DC riff style of short bursts of guitar, each chord cut short and not allowed to ring out. After eight bars the vocal enters with the first verse – both drums and vocal are dead centre. Half way through the verse the second guitar joins on the left doubling the main riff (but still no bass guitar).

The bass finally joins in the pre-chorus which is a short 2 bars long. The guitars here are played with a more open sound, filling in the gaps and making for a bigger sound as the band builds up to the chorus.

The chorus is the full band playing full chords and the vocals are added to with harmonies. The vocal harmonies are of a group and set back in the mix with either reverb or distant miking.

The instrumental break is the one time the hard panned guitars switch to both being centred – so the rhythm guitar (doing a choppy riff for the first half then sustained chords in the second half) is filling the centre and the lead guitar is mixed to sit on the top but also in the centre. So here the mixing technique changes from using stereo to separate the guitars to using volume to separate the guitars.

Overall a big guitar focused production, but notice how there is little use of big stadium reverb. The guitars are remarkably dry. And the vocal too. Only the drums have much in the way of a big verb sound. Notice the reverb on the very last moment of the track – it sounds like spring reverb???