Legendary Tone: Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath

Legendary Tone

Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath

Tony Iommi has been one of my favorite players since I was about 13 years old and I heard Black Sabbath for the first time in my life. I'll never forget when my buddy Spence played their record the first time. I was blown away by Iommi's playing but his tone especially. No one I had heard before seemed to be able to quite capture that type of sound. 

First let me explain that there is a reason for his sound being so "metal". This is because he is the reason for the term heavy metal. When he was working in a metal shop in Birmingham, Engl he accidentally cut off his finger tips on his fret hand. He then melted metal bottle caps to his fingers in order to continue playing. This is where to term "heavy metal" came from.

Iommi is famous for using a Gibson SG. This is a heavy sounding guitar with hollow sounding pickups inside. It gives him that raw edgy sound when played with some distortion added to it. Many metal players of the time were sporting an SG similar to Iommi's. But he has a signature model with a signature set of humbuckers inside.

Tony Iommi Sig Gibson SG

Tony was known for mainly using an amp by a company called Laney. To my knowledge, there aren't many famous player accredited to using this particular brand of amp. However, Tony used them almost exclusively. These amp were darker sounding english amps that gave off a heavy growl type of distortion. These were perfect for the type of tone Tony was going for; and no one else was getting it. Like many guitarists of the 70's, Tony was using his amp to supply him with most of his distortion tones live and in the studio.

  

Sig Tony Iommi Laney Amp Head

Like I stated before, most of Tony's tone was coming from the amp he used but like other players of the time, if he wanted to send it a bit over the edge every once in a while for a hook or guitar solo he would utilize a distortion pedal of some kind. A good fuzzface and a hot overdriven amp will put you into metal territory as far as tone is concerned. This will nail riffs on songs like National Acrobat and the Wizard.

Tony wasn't known for using much modulation but he definitely used a wah pedal. Like many players of the time, the wah peal was heavily utilized as there weren't many pedals to choose from at the time. While he didn't use it often he made very subtle and useful pieces for it in songs occasionally. A good choice for a wah pedal in this department would be a vox wah pedal.

In short, it is fairly easy to attain Tony Iommi's sound with just a few stompboxes and a good Laney combo. As far as a budget set up, Tony is definitely one to look into as it would not cost much money to sound like him.

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