Black Sabbath (Official Thread)

[Musikwala]

Hope that makes more sense.

It does, actually. I understand what you're saying.

Well anyway, I hear quite a bit of Sabbath in Soundgarden's music. I really do... whatever the explanation for it is.

 

[Musikwala]

Found some info on the net...

Soundgarden were pioneers of the grunge music genre, which mixed elements of punk rock and metal into a dirty, aggressive sound. "Soundgarden are quite good…" remarked Black Sabbath's Tony Iommi, "It's very much like the same sort of stuff that we would have done." Soundgarden's sound during the early years of the Seattle grunge scene has been described as consisting of "gnarled neo-Zeppelinisms." The influence of Led Zeppelin was evident, with Q magazine noting that Soundgarden were "in thrall to '70s rock, but contemptuous of the genre's overt sexism and machismo." According to Sub Pop, the band had "a hunky lead singer and fused Led Zeppelin and the Butthole Surfers." The Butthole Surfers' mix of punk, heavy metal and noise rock was a major influence on the early work of Soundgarden.

Black Sabbath had also a huge impact on the band's sound, especially on the guitar riffs and tunings. Joel McIver stated: "Soundgarden are one of the bands I've heard closest to the original Sabbath sound". Soundgarden, like other early grunge bands, were also influenced by British post-punk bands such as Gang of Four and Bauhaus which were popular in the early 1980s Seattle scene. Cornell himself said: "When Soundgarden formed we were post-punk - pretty quirky. Then somehow we found this neo-Sabbath psychedelic rock that fitted well with who we were".

I knew I was not imagining things!

 

[Big Ears]

I don't know anything about guitar techniques, but the question is a good one. I do not think Tony Iommi and Black Sabbath invented grunge, although they had a clear influence on the key bands, such as Soundgarden, Temple of the Dog and Pearl Jam. The reason is that there were other influences on the grunge bands, besides the blues-inspired heavy rock groups of the seventies, namely punk rock and subsequent developments.

Grunge was created as a reaction to the synthesizer bands of the eighties and, to a certain extent, a few West Coast hippy bands.

I liked some grunge bands, like Soundgarden, because they resulted in a resurgence of heavy and progressive rock in the UK in the early nineties - which was long overdue. Chris Cornell could scream like the best of them and there are several strong tracks (Jesus Christ Pose, Hunger Strike, Reach Down). Nevertheless, Soundgarden lacked the bite of Black Sabbath and the seventies bands, perhaps because they were often diluted by the other styles.

Soot and Stars is a Smashing Pumpkins fan and there are others here.

As noted, one of the elements in the grunge bands is the influence of Iommi's guitar playing. To my knowledge, the down-tuning of guitar and bass guitar is the same for the copyists as for Sabbath, in that all the strings are released slightly (I am open to correction here). I have heard, I think in a BBC interview, that the down tuning took the tension out of the strings for Iommi's home-made prosthetic finger tips. He has said these plastic tips gave him his characteristic clear note picking.

 

[Big Ears]

I've just watched a TV documentary on Paranoid and I think I've got this wrong. Tony Iommi's prosthetic finger tips are on his right hand and, missing tips or not, he and Geezer Butler created a big sound by bending the strings. Interestingly, Bill Ward referred to Butler by his real name of Terry.

On reflection, Neil young probably created grunge in the late seventies.

 

[Khor1255]

This bit might be relevant:

In an industrial accident at the age of 17 on his last day of work in a sheet metal factory, Iommi lost the tips of the middle and ring finger of his right hand.[5] After the injury Iommi considered abandoning the guitar entirely. However, his factory foreman played him a recording of famous jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, which encouraged him to continue as a musician. As Iommi would later write:

My friend said, "Listen to this guy play," and I went, "No way! Listening to someone play the guitar is the very last thing I want to do right now!" But he kept insisting and he ended up playing the record for me. I told him I thought it was really good and then he said, "You know, the guy's only playing with two fingers on his fretboard hand because of an injury he sustained in a terrible fire." I was totally knocked back by this revelation and was so impressed by what I had just heard that I suddenly became inspired to start trying to play again.[6]

Inspired by Reinhardt's two-fingered guitar playing, Iommi decided to try playing guitar again, though the injury made it quite painful to do so.[1] Although it was an option, Iommi never seriously considered switching hands and learning to play right-handed. In an interview with Guitar World magazine, he was asked if he was "ever tempted to switch to right-handed playing." Iommi responded:

If I knew what I know now I probably would have switched. At the time I had already been playing two or three years, and it seemed like I had been playing a long time. I thought I’d never be able to change the way I played. The reality of the situation was that I hadn’t been playing very long at all, and I probably could have spent the same amount of time learning to play right handed. I did have a go at it, but I just didn’t have the patience. It seemed impossible to me. I decided to make do with what I had, and I made some plastic fingertips for myself. I just persevered with it.[7]

Yet, in his autobiography, he writes:

Probably the easiest thing would have been to flip the guitar upside down and learn to play right-handed instead of left-handed. I wish I had in hindsight, but I thought, well, I've been playing for a few years already, it's going to take me another few years to learn it that way. That seemed like a very long time, so I was determined to keep playing left-handed.[1]

In any case, he decided to continue playing left-handed. To do so, he fitted homemade thimbles to his injured fingers to extend and protect them, which created two technical problems. Firstly, the thimbles prevented him from feeling the strings, causing a tendency to press down very hard with them. Secondly, he had difficulty bending strings, leading him to seek light-gauge guitar strings to make it easier to do so.[8] However, Iommi recalls that such strings were not manufactured at the time, so he used banjo strings instead, until around 1970-71 when Picato Strings began making light-gauge guitar strings.[9] Furthermore, he used the injured fingers predominantly for fretting chords rather than single-note solos.[1] In 1974, Iommi told Guitar Player magazine that the thimbles "helped (him) with his technique" because he had to use his pinky finger more than he had to before the accident.[10] Later, he also began tuning his guitar strings to lower pitches, sometimes as far as three semitones below standard guitar tuning (e.g., on "Children of the Grave," "Lord of this World," and "Into the Void," all on Master of Reality). Although Iommi states that the main purpose of doing so was to create a "bigger, heavier sound," slackening the strings makes it easier to bend them.

You've probably already heard this, but I thought I'd put it here anyway.

 

[Big Ears]

^ Thanks for this - so the key to his sound is lighter strings and down tuning. In the Paranoid documentary, Geezer Butler said Tony Iommi was influenced by Django Reinhardt, who also suffered an injury, and Joe Pass, hence the jazzy feel on tracks such as Planet Caravan.

I don't understand what they mean by fretting chords.

 

[Khor1255]

I honestly had to Google the term to refresh my memory but fretting a chord is basically using your (usually index) finger as a capo so you can move an e shaped chord (for instance) all the way up and down the neck and thus achieve rather simple chord progressions. I do the same thing with open strings quite a bit when I play because I'm not very good at all and this allows me to get pretty creative with my limited talent.

In Iommi's case it is likely the way he got around a lot of the pain of making typical chord progressions with missing fingertips. I'm not sure about that last bit but that would be my guess.

 

[Big Ears]

Well, it makes sense.

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

I always felt the day of that accident should be the true birthday of heavy metal, if the exact day were known.

It was certainly a day that changed history.

 

[Khor1255]

That is somehow sadly correct. The basic ingredients were already there, but it took Iommi and Sabbath to finally bring it out.