Advocacy/Heavy Metal Trailblazer

There are many influential pioneers of music, trailblazers have developed, impacted, and invented manipulations of tonality, harmonization and composition to influence modern music.

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Traced back to Birmingham, England, Tony Iommi accidentally invented the birth of heavy metal. Tony worked by day in a factory as a welder and at night he played in a blues and jazz type rock band. Tony decided to quit his job and tour Germany with his band. On his last day, the shop foreman asked Tony to work on a sheet metal cutting machine, a devise that he had never operated before. As he cut the first piece of sheet metal, he also cut off the tips of his two middle fingers of his left hand. Severed permanently, Tony believed he could never play guitar again.

Greatly driven and an extremely talented guitarist, Tony would not give up. He developed his own prosthetic fingertips by melting plastic bottle caps onto the end of his disfigured fingers and wrapped these finger extensions with leather to grip the strings. The prosthetic fingers caused sharp pain while playing, but he soon discovered that by tuning the guitar down to a lower scale, the more loosely stretched strings did not cause as much pain. This lower tuned guitar also produced a thicker, heavier, darker sound. He also created a new style of guitar playing known today as heavy metal.