10 Amazing Musicians We Lost In The 2010s

With Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin taking rock music in a heavier direction, Deep Purple took a much more sophisticated approach. Their songs were meticulously crafted and had an eclectic musicality which touched on classical and jazz music.

The sophistication seemed to come directly from keyboardist Jon Lord. In Lord, Deep Purple had their resident Beethoven. When many bands were using keyboards to add textures, Lord plugged his Hammond organ into a Marshall stack and created a heavy distorted sound. On songs like "Space Truckin" and "Smoke on the Water," his organ sounds could easily be mistaken for your typical rhythm guitar. Apart from his sound, Lord also used different classical scales that were pulled from artists like Bach and Beethoven that made heavy metal seem much more civilized. This had a huge influence on the more operatic metal bands like Epica and the classical ventures of Evanescence.

If you were playing rock, keyboardists tended to be put on the side as a small adornment that compliments the guitar and vocal. Thanks to Jon Lord, more attention was paid not just to the keyboard, but to the entire musical arrangement in general.