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themselves after the cinema’s main fea-
ture - the 1963 Boris Karloff horror classic
Black Sabbath - and the rest is history.
General guidance:
Studying Iommi’s style is a great oppor-
tunity to work on tightening up your
heavy riffing, because rhythmic accuracy
is crucial to sounding authentic. Listen
closely to almost any early Black Sabbath
track, and you’ll notice that Tony Iommi’s
massive riffs are the tonal and rhythmic
anchor amidst the frenetic (occasionally
chaotic) groves of Butler and Ward. This
is pretty much the polar opposite to con-
temporaries Led Zeppelin, with Bonham
and Jones’s tight rhythms underpinning
Jimmy Page’s loose swagger, but it’s no less
impactful.
It’s worth noting that, despite the im-
mense weight of his tones, Tony Iommi’s
touch is light and controlled. Suffering
an industrial injury that severed the tips
of his 2nd and 3rd fingers, Iommi com-
pensated by tuning his guitar down and
switching to lighter strings, which neces-
sitates a more measured pick attack - it
also goes to show that you don’t need big
strings for big tones! Speaking of which...
Tone:
In the pursuit of authenticity, we used
the classic Iommi setup of a Gibson SG
plugged into a cranked Laney amp - in
this case, the LA30BL, which shares a
lineage with the Supergroup heads used
by Tony throughout his career. We tried
a number of boosts and fuzzes and settled
on a Gamechanger Audio Plasma Pedal,
which sounded suitably rough and omi-
nous. In reality, though, any guitar with
two humbuckers will do the trick, espe-
cially if you plug it into a vintage-style
British amp. You might consider using a
fuzz or a Rangemaster-style treble boost
(such as Laney’s TI Boost), but it’s not
completely necessary.One thing worth noting is that there’s not
a massive amount of bass in Iommi’s tone- in fact, I rolled the bass to zero on our
Laney head. This lets the growling mid-
range speak more clearly, and leaves plenty
of room for the rhythm section.
As far as guitar settings go, it’s the bridge
pickup with volume and tone up full for
the majority of this session, but for the
cleaner passages I switched to the neck
pickup with the volume already rolled
back - a clever way of getting your single-
channel amp to behave like a channel
switching model simply by using your
guitar’s controls.Bars 1-4:
This first riff makes use of two classic
Sabbath ideas: sliding power chords and
tritone riffs. The latter, sometimes referred
to as diabolus in musica, (Latin for “the
devil in music”) is a very sinister sounding
interval found three whole tones »TONY IOMMI TECH SESSION