10 Guitarists That Changed Rock Music Forever

10. Tony Iommi

Most of the '60s era of rock and roll tends to still feel like the Flower Power period of rock and roll. No matter how many bands like the Who and Led Zeppelin may have been pushing the barriers for how heavy you could get in mainstream rock and roll, this was still the Summer of Love, where acts like Jimi Hendrix were playing songs that felt like an era of peace might actually fall upon the world. That was the ideal version of the '60s, and the next decade gave us a nice dose of reality through Tony Iommi's guitar.

Being influenced by the traditional blues of the day, Tony went in a different direction by playing much darker riffs on his guitar, giving way to the heavy metal movement which would be underway in the next few years. Even if Tony himself didn't identify as a metal guitarist in the early days, all the seeds for the genre are there in his playing, from the gritty tones that he gets on songs like Children of the Grave to his underrated solos, where he makes his guitar sound like it's pleading for mercy.

To ease up tension on his fingers after a sheet metal factory incident, Tony's decision to tune down his guitar also opened up a world of possibilities for bands to play with how gutteral their guitars could be. The minute that you heard a song like War Pigs, you knew that the era of Hendrix was dead and the scene was about to gets its real bite.