Malcolm Young's guitar strings: the AC/DC rhythm rig, sourced

Malcolm Young was born on January 6, 1953 in Glasgow, Scotland, and moved to Sydney, Australia with his family in 1963. Ten years later, at 20, he formed AC/DC with his younger brother Angus, taking rhythm guitar himself and handing Angus the lead role and the schoolboy uniform. He was also a songwriter and backing vocalist, and by his brother's own account, the band's real foundation. "Mal's the band's foundation," Angus has said. "He's rock solid and he pumps it along with the power of a machine."

Malcolm was a member of AC/DC from its 1973 formation until his 2014 retirement, missing most of the 1988 Blow Up Your Video World Tour for alcohol treatment before returning. He was diagnosed with dementia in 2014 and retired from the band that September, replaced permanently by his nephew Stevie Young. Malcolm died on November 18, 2017, at age 64. AC/DC was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2003, and Rolling Stone ranked Malcolm and Angus jointly the 38th-best guitarists of all time in 2023.

An unusually heavy Gibson set on a stripped-down 1963 Gretsch Jet Firebird, run straight into a 1971 Marshall Super Bass with the guitar's tone controls bypassed entirely.

The exact Gibson set is long discontinued. If you want to try a similarly heavy gauge in standard tuning, Ernie Ball's Not Even Slinky Cobalt (.012–.056) matches the outer gauges, though it's cobalt-wrapped rather than plain nickel: Buy on Amazon.

Malcolm's most-documented string set comes from Ground Guitar's archive, which describes "a pretty heavy set of Gibson guitar strings, where four of the six strings were wound," gauged .012, .016, .025 (wound), .034, .044, and .056. Guitar Player's own technique lesson on his style independently confirms the shape of that set, "huge .012-.058-gauged Gibson strings (including a wound G)," but gives a heavier top-line number on the low E. Both accounts agree on what matters most: a heavy, pure nickel wound set, and a wound G string, the detail worth pausing on.

Most guitar sets, heavy or light, keep a plain third string and only wind the bottom three. Winding the G as well trades some brightness for durability and a rounder tone under a hard right hand, exactly the kind of tradeoff a rhythm-only player who never bent that string would make without a second thought.

Ground Guitar itself hedges the exact model name with "apparently," its way of flagging that the claim comes from period photos and secondhand accounts rather than a tech's own equipment list or a store receipt, the kind of harder evidence that pins down, say, Kurt Cobain's Dean Markley sets. Whatever the precise Gibson catalog number, the gauge and the wound-G detail are consistent across every account of Malcolm's rig, and the set has been out of production for years with no current retailer listing anywhere.

Malcolm's whole signal chain optimized for one job: hold a riff down, all night, without drifting out of tune or getting buried by Angus's leads and a wall of Marshalls. The heavier gauge helps with the first problem. Thicker strings resist the small pitch shifts a hard-strumming rhythm player can induce over a two-hour set, and the low string's extra mass adds low-end weight that a lighter gauge doesn't carry at the same tension.

The Beast's construction helps with the second. Guitar Player calls it a "semihollow" guitar, and a semihollow body resonates more than a solid slab. With the neck and middle pickups gone, the guitar's entire output comes from one Filter'Tron at the bridge with no tone control to thin it out: pickup, volume, output, nothing else in the way. Guitar World's own read on the rig calls the signal path "renowned for simplicity," crediting the Filter'Tron's clarity and headroom over a full humbucker for a balanced, present rhythm tone that sits under Angus's leads instead of fighting them.

None of this is subtle gear-nerd optimization. It's the same instinct behind Angus's own bare-bones rig, one guitar type, one amp type, almost no pedals, aimed at a different job. Angus needed headroom for bends and solos; Malcolm needed a rhythm tone that would hold up, night after night, without drawing attention to itself.

Three things about Malcolm's playing, mostly in his own bandmate's words.

1. He gave up leads on purpose. Early on, Malcolm played some lead guitar himself, until he told Angus, "No, you take the solos. I'll just bang away back here." Everything about his rig, from the heavy strings to the stripped-down Gretsch, follows from that one decision.

2. Rhythm as the riff, not the backdrop. Angus has said Malcolm "actually plays rhythms. He just doesn't make a noise; he works them out, and he knows when not to play." The intro riff behind "For Those About to Rock" changes bar to bar rather than looping, the difference between a riff and a vamp.

3. The reputation problem of being the rhythm guy. Angus has called Malcolm's playing more unique than his own, "with that raw, natural sound," and said flatly, "Mal's the band's foundation." That's a rare thing for a lead guitarist to say about a rhythm player, and it lines up with a rig built around one job: hold the riff down, exactly, every night, for four decades.

The core electric stable, sourced from Ground Guitar's archive, Guitar World, and TheStoryInst.com.

A handful of other guitars pass through the record too: a blonde Fender Telecaster on the 1977 tour, a Gretsch White Falcon Jr repainted black in 2001, and at least one more JayDee Jet Custom built as an early-1980s backup, all sourced to the same Ground Guitar archive.

Ground Guitar also flags a popular online claim that Malcolm switched to a 1960s Marshall JTM45/100 during the Ballbreaker era, but says it hasn't found an interview where Malcolm confirms this directly, so treat that one as unconfirmed rather than settled fact.

The documented set, why sources disagree slightly on its exact gauge, and the closest thing you can buy today.

CYS's own review of that modern set notes that .012-.056 produces 70-plus pounds of tension in standard tuning on a 25.5-inch scale, stiff enough that it's recommended mainly for Drop C, Drop B, or C standard instead. Gretsch Jet-body guitars run a shorter scale than that, so Malcolm's actual tension was somewhat lower, but the direction is the same: he ran a gauge most players reserve for detuned rhythm work, in standard E, for decades. That's the whole story of his rig in one data point: durability and low-end weight over comfort.