Every guitar player I know, including me, seems to envy that sick Iommi tone. With Vol. 4 being my personal favorite Sabbath album, I was searching for a tone sounding similar to the fuzzy, ahead-of-its-time guitar of Tony. I think I may have found a good runner-up to a Laney stack and wah: I ran my Marshall MS-2 pocket amp (with drive), with volume at about 5 or 6, and tone cranked, through my Fender Champion 100 on the jazz amp setting (a clean channel), with treble at 6, mid at 7, and bass at 5. For such a DIY-esque setup, it sounded fairly accurate to tones you find on Wheels of Confusion, or Snowblind. What do you think? What else should I try, and/or does this sound legit? Please feel free to share your thoughts! Cheers!

link one is an interview to what he used
link two is just a list of what he used.
as far as what you use. I've never used any of that stuff so no idea.

http://www.musicradar.com/totalguitar/t ... ath-310167

https://www.groundguitar.com/tony-iommi ... -and-gear/

Correct me if I'm wrong, but he also used quite thin strings despite playing in the C# standard tuning. If you downtune to C# on a Gibson with 10-46 set, and adjust your playing to the slackness of the strings, you might get a similar sound. I haven't tried that, and I wouldn't want to either, but just a though as to what the missing ingredient might be.

that makes a good point^^ cause with playing i feel it's like 50/50 40/60 gear versus playing style. if you can't even cope the style of the guitarist you are mimmicking you will never get the same tone.

My two cents on this after playing in a Doom/Rock band for a few years and basically low key trying to emulate Iommi's style and tone is that its actually really quite scratchy.

Everyone thinks Tony had this huge fat sound on his SG but I think a lot of that heaviness and fatness comes from the truly excellent way that Iommi worked with Butler and Ward to arrange rhythms.

Geezer's tone is massive in Sabbath and really, really loud in the mix. Listen to Supernaut!

I use a Gibson SG with mini-humbuckers and I find I get really rather good Iommi tone by having the gain fairly low down, mid at around 3pm/6pm and Treble at around 12pm/1pm. You can role the gain up a bit for some more heft and roll the Mid and Treble up/down depending on where you want to sit in the mix.

To get that sort of dirty sound Iommi had try rolling your tone nob down half a way. He also played light gauge strings as some other peeps have said and I remember him saying that he played fairly lightly too as it hurt his fretting hand.

That's an excellent point, and it's not just Iommi, either. People wonder why their guitar doesn't sound big and heavy enough, because their idea of a guitar sound is based on the full mix of an album, with bass guitar, several guitar tracks, and careful mixing and mastering too.

You can't get a guitar sound that sounds like guitar and bass together. You can't get a single guitar track to sound like something that was multi-tracked, panned and mixed. You have to know what to listen for in the guitar tracks, set up your guitar track in a way that it sits in the optimal frequency range, and work together with the rest of your band to find sounds that create a big, heavy sound together. It's not possible to create a dream guitar sound that already sounds like a full mix.

I know it's not the iconic heavy Iommi tone album, but Sabotage has parts where you can hear Iommi's guitar sound alone, and then together with bass, and the difference is huge, even though it's double-tracked and panned left and right.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jfox9Gt0Ulw&t=4m35s

Butler's significance is especially great because of his ability to support Iommi's riffs in the most perfect ways when it comes to timbre. Supernaut is a good example of subtle but effective work that ends up making the guitars sound much heavier. Many bassists would simply drone on the lowest possible notes for a heavier sound, which separates the instruments in the mix when the guitar plays higher up, and exposes the lack of low end warmth in the guitar tone.

If you absolutely must have a big, fat, round, warm guitar sound by itself, tune like 10 half-steps down, and play through two guitar cabs that are positioned at the far ends of the room.

You can get close with just about any setup these days, given the amount of tone-shaping options out there, but if you want to really nail the golden era Sabbath tone, you need:

(in order of importance)
P90 pickup(s)
A 'plexi' style amp - Tony started with a Marshall, but only recorded with Laneys until 1975.
High-impedance wiring - Tony used 1 meg volume pots and completely bypassed his tone control.
Signal boost between the guitar and the amp's front end - Tony used a modified treble boost, but any boost pedal will work to front load the amp.
.009 - .042 strings

EDIT: I should also point out that Iommi's amp EQ was bass at 0, everything else to 10.

Very interesting, thanks for sharing! Apparently the extreme EQ of 0-10-10 was quite a common thing with plexi-style amps.