Why we have chosen Black Sabbath?

For our performance we have chosen to do two songs by Black Sabbath as we wanted to do something heavy but also related to the 60's. I remembered when I was younger I used to listen to Black Sabbath a lot as not only did they create heavy metal but I really liked their music, then I had realised that they have formed in 1968 as a blues rock band. After reading that I knew that we will do at least one song by them for our performance.

Black Sabbath tend to use plenty of slides on guitar which can be seen in the war pigs intro, which is also a common technique used in blues. Another technique that Tony Iommi uses that is common in blues is the pause that he does in between chords, for example in war pigs in the bridge riff. Tony Iommi also happens to use the "devil's tritone" a lot along with power chords for his songs, in fact he is rarely seen using open chords in his songwriting. He tends to do this as he likes to hammer on and pull of chords which can be seen in Paranoid intro Tony Iommi also tends to play in Eb and not E standard, this is mainly because he had lost the tip of his fingertip in a metal sheet factory. After this incident his boss had shown him Django Reinhardt who played jazz and had lost the use of two of his fingers because of a fire. This had had motivated Tony to continue to play guitar and overcome his barrier. Lastly Tony Iommi is known for making repetitive but catchy riffs which would be frequently used in the same song without having the listener get bored of them.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sabbath#Musical_style

https://www.guitarplayer.com/technique/10-things-youve-gotta-do-to-play-like-tony-iommi