Angus Young told Guitar Magazine why he can’t play Les Pauls and SG’s in a new Guitar Magazine interview.
“Really, again, Malcolm. I had a Hofner guitar at the time, and Malcolm also gave me that because one of my older brothers, the guy in his band, had the Gretsch guitar, which was what he gave to Malcolm.
“And so Malcolm said, ‘You have this, this is my Hofner,’ which he had got off my other brother.
“So it was a case of Malcolm gave me the Hofner, and then I had the Hofner. And then one day, Malcolm came in and he said, ‘There’s a little shop up here, the guy’s got a lot of great guitars. He’s got Les Pauls, he’s got Strats, he’s got everything in his shop.’
“And he went through them all, and he said, ‘But there’s this really nice SG guitar. Go down there, try out the other guitars, but make sure you try out that SG.’
“So I went through, and I went and picked up the SG, and I went, ‘Wow!’ Because it just felt so good and I could play it so easy. And then I went and tried the other ones again, but I went, ‘No!’
“I went back to that SG and I thought, ‘I’ve got to get this SG.’ So I ended up getting that SG. But again, through Malcolm finding it and telling me, ‘Go to this shop and try it out.’ And I was glad I got it, I was over the moon when I got it.
“I play it on all the studio albums. Now what I do is I only bring it out for the studio because after a while when I was performing live, it used to get so many bumps and cracks. I get so nervous about it because I use it all the time in the studio.”
I would cherish that guitar as well.
“Yeah because it has its own… I’ve got lots of other SGs, there’s another SG I’ve also used in the studio but again, it’s also one that is roughly close to the same year as mine, maybe a year older, maybe even earlier.
“But it’s also got a good sound about it, so I always kind of stuck to those three of them. But the main one still is the first guitar. It has its own unique little sound.”
Let’s take one more minute with the sound, it’s interesting you use the special wireless device which is called Schaffer-Vega Diversity. There’s a lot of fuss about this in the guitar scene because there’s a pedal as well right now available that kind of like replicates the sound of the wireless device. How important is that particular device for you?
“Well, the original ones, the Schaffer, the man who built them, I think the first time I use it was when we made the [1978] album ‘Powerage,’ it’s the very first one. And it really came down to when we were going to do some guitar overdub, some solos, and that.
“And Malcolm had said to my brother George because he and Harry Vanda were producing the album, and Malcolm had said, ‘Get out the Vega system and let him hear how it works with your guitar.’
“Because sometimes what we used to do is go into the live room, and then just play in there with headphones on. But sometimes my brother would say I come in the studio and get a long cable, and then we would go in. But sometimes the cable being that long, you’re losing some of the power of the signal.
“So it was Malcolm’s suggestion, ‘Get your Schaffer-Vega in, and we’ll dial it in.’ So that’s what happened when I got it out, and because you could boost the signal on it.
“But really, I would say a lot of that signal, because I’ve seen it with other people match up, it’s got a kind of compression about it. Some people dial-up to get a compression to try and match up. You could match up the sound. And for some reason, it has its own kind of compression in it. That’s the original ones.
“And I used to like it for the stage. Again, it was Malcolm who even got the system, he even found the guy Schaffer, he found the guy in New York because a few shows I had got electric shocks. So Malcolm didn’t want me getting a bad shock one night, so he’d heard about it from someone that a guy had a new system.
“The wireless system he’d been out before by various people but it only worked on one special system. The difference between Schaffer was he had perfected, he’d got two signals going, and they called it ‘dual diversity’. So he had perfected that and that started off the modern range of people starting to make transmitters and stuff.
“Malcolm tried it for me, we were playing in New York in a theater called The Palladium, Malcolm said he took it and he walked around the whole block outside with the guitar, and he said he didn’t hear the signal drop. He said it was that powerful.
“He said, ‘You are gonna love it because you won’t have to crank up your amp to boost it a bit. It’s got a natural boost to signal, you can boost the signal and get a little bit more drive in it.'” Ultimate-Guitar transcribed his comments.
