Guns N’ Roses Insider Reveals AC/DC Tour Singer

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Filippo ‘SoloDallas’ Olivieri, whose company works with AC/DC and Guns N’ Roses, has appeared to confirm rumors that AC/DC will tour with Brian Johnson back in the fold replacing Axl Rose.

Olivieri posted an article on Facebook about the rumored World Tour with a photo of Johnson and he cryptically wrote, “Yes? What says you, Ken Schaffer? Have you ‘heard” anything? Baci! LOVE TO ALL.”

Someone commented, “Please let it be true Filippo SoloDallas Olivieri!!!”

Olivieri responded, “It will be.”

The Schaffer Replica is used by AC/DC. SoloDallas.com writes about how Olivieri sought to recreate Angus Young’s signature guitar sound which Young had said was from the Schaffer-Vega Diversity System for the effects, “Olivieri at that moment discovered the missing link to Angus’ elusive tone. Flashback to 1975: New York-based recording engineer-turned publicist Ken Schaffer had moved on from the record business in order to focus on being a full-time inventor. Introduced that year, his Schaffer-Vega Diversity System was catching on with some of the big names in rock. One of the early adopters was KISS, whose motivation was one of practicality since guitarist Ace Frehely once had to be revived after having been shocked by a guitar cable connected to an ungrounded amplifier. Within a few years, you couldn’t throw a brick in a room full of household name guitarists and bassists without hitting someone who was using the SVDS in a live setting; Eddie Van Halen, the Rolling Stones, Bootsy Collins, Peter Frampton, Frank Zappa and numerous others were all SVDS users. However, Schaffer designed it to boost low-mid range frequencies usually lost in wireless transmission, as well as to compand (compress then expand) the signal, thus providing the added side effect of enhancing the instrument’s tone. Numerous groups decided that, apart from serving its basic function, the SVDS also sounded good and began using it as an effect in the recording studio – namely Electric Light Orchestra, Pink Floyd (The Wall) and, of course, AC/DC, beginning with 1978’s Powerage.

Says Angus Young, ‘George [Young, Angus and Malcolm’s older brother and first AC/DC producer] had suggested that I use the SVDS in the studio in 1978, then when Mutt Lange came in [producer of Highway to Hell, Back in Black, For Those About to Rock We Salute You], he asked me to use the same stuff that I was using for my stage sound, so we used the SVDS again.’

By 1982, after becoming interested in other endeavors, including intercepting internal Soviet television for the U.S. government in the waning days of the Cold War, Ken Schaffer had stopped producing the SVDS after roughly 1,000 had been built. Thirty years later, he was caught off guard when Fil Olivieri, a total stranger, e-mailed him asking about the long-forgotten SVDS. After many heart-to-heart conversations, Schaffer felt inspired to give Olivieri his last two functioning units. Says Olivieri, ‘I thought that many more people deserve and want that tone. The idea of a one-to-one audio replica of this great system came to be born.’ With Schaffer’s blessing, Fil hired a team of electronics experts to reverse engineer the SVDS to re-create it in the form of a non-wireless unit, under the company name SoloDallas and the first units rolled out in 2014 – The Schaffer Replica was born.

The saga came full circle last year, when Schaffer brought Olivieri to meet his old friend Angus Young at the Warehouse Studio in Vancouver, at the start of sessions for AC/DC’s latest Rock or Bust album. Olivieri presented Young with The Schaffer Replica GT #001, the very first unit produced. The Scottish-born Australian guitarist was so impressed how perfectly this device reproduced his signature tone, he ended up using it all over Rock or Bust. It is AC/DC’s first album since 1983 to employ ‘the Schaffer Sound’ and is now being used on the band’s Rock or Bust World Tour.”

AC/DC recently uploaded surprising videos to their YouTube page as rumors persist about a tour.