quality it gave to their beastly riffing.
Tony Iommi was also the first to put
to frequent use the sinister sound of
the diminished fifth interval, a peculiar
dissonance that has been used (or, more
often, avoided) for centuries in western
harmony because of its tendency to
evoke moral restlessness, outright evil,
or eternal damnation. In the music
of Sabbath it can he heard in many
signature riffs, as well as in Iommi’s everpresent trilled accents and blazing, yet
musical, solo sections.
TONY IOMMI’S GUITARS
Tony Iommi will forever be associated
with the Gibson SG and its appropriately
devil-horned body shape. Some may
be surprised, however, to learn that
he originally began work on Sabbath’s
debut album with a white Fender
Stratocaster. This was his main guitar
at the time, with the SG serving as a
backup, but when the Strat crapped out
early on in the sessions, he picked up
the SG and ended up adopting it as his
main axe from that point forward. Iommi
has periodically used other guitars, but
his Gibson SGs and JayDee Custom
SG replicas (built for him by John
Diggens, a luthier from Iommi’s home
town of Birmingham) have served as the
foundation of his tone and style since
Black Sabbath.
The key to getting Iommi’s sound with
the SG is the use of very light strings
and dropped tunings. Due to his
fingertip injury, the tension of heavy
strings and standard tunings caused
32
TONE TALK //
him considerable pain, so to alleviate
this, he began using sets of 8’s for halfstep dropped tunings, and sets of 9’s
for C# and other tunings lower than a
half-step. At this time, light gauge string
sets weren’t commercially available for
guitar, so Iommi assembled his own sets
using banjo strings, until he eventually
convinced the Picato company in the
UK to manufacture them for him. The
combination of light strings and low
tunings made for a doom-laden guitar
tone that instantly set Sabbath apart
from the pack of blues-based English
hard rock bands.
TONY IOMMI’S AMPLIFIERS
Like the Gibson SG, Iommi’s Laney
Amplifiers have been the cornerstone
of his rig since the beginning. His
devotion to Laney amps is partly due
to the fact that the company is based
in his home town, but also to the fact
that Laney simply gave him a bunch
of free amplifiers in Sabbath’s early
days. His contemporaries were using
Marshalls and Hiwatts, so he saw this
as an opportunity both to get free
stuff and to set himself apart from
the crowd by using something unique.
Iommi currently has a signature model
Laney, but for much of Sabbath’s reign
he used the 100-watt EL34-powered
Laney Supergroup heads, which he
typically set up by rolling off all of the
bass and turning up the middle, treble,
and presence controls up to 10. And
you may have already guessed this, but
the volume should be turned up as well.
Master of Reality: Sound like Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi