On the first page of my master thesis, instead of acknowledgements, it says:
"You've got to stick to what you believe in, just carry on and don't change because you think that's what people want. That's how something new comes up. Doing what everybody else is doing is the easy way out; you've got to do your own thing."
Tony Iommi, guitarist and co-founder of Black Sabbath and the father of heavy metal
What's Tony Iommi or Black Sabbath got to do with electrical engineering and its master degree? Well, the approach to the problem (as the title says). The whole story of creation of Black Sabbath and its sound is just amazing to me, so today, I decided to share the story with you.
So, Tony Iommi is considered to be one of the best guitarists in the world (especially when talking about his riffs) and its playing style started a new generation of guitarists with much heavier and more aggressive style than before. But what most people don't know is - Tony Iommi lacks two fingers on his hand!
Well, not two whole fingers, but still enough not to be able to play the guitar! At least that's what people were telling him.
He lost his two fingers while working on a huge metal press in a sheet metal factory. The press crushed two of his fingertips like this:
When he arrived at the hospital, the doctors told him they can't sew the fingers back on his hand and that his playing days are over.
After he heard about Django Reinhardt (Belgian jazz guitar player who played without two fingers due to their paralysis), he was determined to somehow play the guitar again.
First he melted a dish soap bottle and created two little plastic balls that he put on his fingers and tried to play the guitar like this. Of course, the plastic balls didn't have good friction and were slipping of the strings all the time, and also didn't really look nor feel like fingertips.
That's why he shaped them in a fingertip shape with a bit of sandpaper and glued a bit of leather from an old leather jacket on top of the plastic fingertips. Now the grip was just right and the feeling of the tips was like he had fingers again, but guitars had heavy-gauge strings those days, so the strings tore the leather off very quickly.
That's why Tony asked a pretty good amount of string companies to make him lighter strings. The companies said no, mostly because nobody would buy those strings, and they also said it's impossible to make lighter strings.
Therefore, Tony tried to put banjo strings on the guitar (because banjo strings are much lighter than the guitar strings from the 60's). And that actually did the work, but the guitar should have been tuned down then (because otherwise they would be too loose). And that's how light gauge strings and the down-tuning were created.
After the strings felt right, Tony still had a problem playing regular tones and chords the way he played them before the accident. So, he improvised and created something that's nowadays known by the name "power chords".
But still, as Tony wanted darker and more aggressive sound, he started plugging the guitar into the bass input of the amplifiers from those days (as oppose to Lemmy Kilmister plugging the bass into the guitar input a few years later, but I digress here).
And that's how the Black Sabbath sound got created.
And the last thing that Tony discovered happened after Black Sabbath was formed and started playing is - distortion.
When they were a new and unknown band, they played in a pub once, where people were mostly talking and not paying the attention to the band. So the band was like, "fuck them, let's get as loud as possible, and then let them try talking and not listening!" Of course, as they exaggerated with that, the amps started distording the sound, and the band, as well as the audience, liked it. So afterwards, they just continued playing like that.
As Black Sabbath was becoming bigger and bigger, more and more bands emerged with a similar sound and heavy metal was born. And all the metal bands from today list Black Sabbath as one of their main influences.
And all because Tony Iommi couldn't and wouldn't accept the fact that he can't play anymore (what everybody was telling him)! He had a problem and he solved it step by step. A genuine example of an engineering approach (of course, he could learn to play the guitar right-handed; as he was playing left-handed before; but that's the other side of engineering - once you learn something, you don't re-learn it because you're lazy - as engineers sometimes are)
Now, after I told you this story, get back to the beginning and read the quote again. Now you can see why I love the quote so much.
That's all from me for today. See you soon! I'll be back.
Pero