AC/DC once commissioned a two-ton bronze bell, hung it up like it was no big deal, and then let Angus Young answer it with roughly six notes. That's the entire flex of Hells Bells: the most menacing opening in rock history is basically an A chord being played very, very slowly by a man dressed as a schoolboy. If your amp has a reverb knob, it has been waiting its whole life for this riff.
This little clip is Riff #17 in my series. I isolate the tolling intro of Hells Bells — the opening track of Back in Black — so you can see exactly how that slow, ominous figure sits on the fretboard, with nothing but ringing strings doing the heavy lifting. Same energy as a good sad arpeggio intro, just wearing a much bigger hat.
How the Hells Bells intro riff works
The whole secret is space. The intro lives around A, and instead of strumming a chord you take it apart — you pick the notes one at a time and let each one keep ringing into the next, so the strings stack up and decay like an actual bell. Angus keeps the tempo funeral-slow, well under 50 bpm, which means every single note is naked and exposed; there is absolutely nowhere to hide a lazy fret or a buzzing string. That slow, deliberate rolling-arpeggio approach is what turns a simple shape into an atmosphere.
Concrete takeaway: do not lift your fretting fingers. Hold the shape, let the notes overlap, and let them ring together — the menace comes from the sustain and from the silence between phrases, not from speed. Get the dynamics and the clean tone right before you ever touch the distortion; the quiet version is the genuinely hard part, and it's the part that makes people shut up when the song starts.
If your neighbours haven't filed a noise complaint by the third bell, you're honestly playing it too politely. Grab the PDF and the Guitar Pro file over on my Patreon and go toll for thee.