Tone spotlight: Dimebag Darrell
Legendary late guitarist of heavy metal bands Pantera and Damage Plan always had his distinct and guitar sounds featuring techniques of unusual (at the time) whammy harmonics and extreme pitch shifting. Dimebag Darrell Abbott possessed a tone that was very bright and harsh with distortion utilised through solid-state guitar amplifiers, as opposed to tube amplifiers, and fat sounding in the low-end region of the frequency spectrum (Prown, & Sharken, 2003).
"Like a jackhammer digging into your brain"-Dimebag explaining his tone in his own words (Prown, & Sharken, 2003).
Heavily influenced by metal forefathers such as Eddie Van Halen and Tony Iommi, Dimebag Darrell's playing style has always amazed listeners as to how hard yet heavy his playing style was, being it fast guitar licks or chugging riffs. "The harder stuff has always done it for me...Man, if it rips, I'll give it a thumbs up!" Said Dimebag on his influences. Tony Iommi was cited as a huge influence in tone and techniques with a monstrous tone and slow vibrato with occasions of detuning guitars, which all are utilised and feature in many Pantera songs. Eddie Van Halen influenced his love of using dive-bomb techniques and fast lead playing. "He made me look at the instrument in a different way—more as a tool to screw around with than something you must play very carefully." Stated Dimebag (Kitts, 2015).
Across many albums of his bibliography, Dimebag would use altered and unusual tunings to challenge the standards of how a guitar should be tuned. Any albums that had the assumed standard (E) tunings, most notably in 'Cowboys From Hell' and 'Reinventing the Steel', was actually tuned half-step down (D#) and tune it upwards to +40 cents on the grid on a tuner. The reason was for his influence of Eddie Van Halen as 'Van Halen' I and II were tuned similarly. Other albums such as 'Vulgar Display of Power' and 'The Great Southern Trendkill' were tuned to D and Drop B respectively because of his influence of Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi (Marano, 2012).
References:
Kitts, J. (2015). Pantera's Dimebag Darrell Chooses His 12 Favorite Songs in 1993 Guitar World Interview. Guitar World. Retrieved from http://www.guitarworld.com/prime-cuts-dimebag-darrell-chooses-his-12-favorite-tunes-1993-guitar-world-feature
Marano, S. (2012). Guitar Strength: 10 Commandments of Playing Guitar in the Style of Dimebag Darrell, Part 2. Guitar World. Retrieved from http://www.guitarworld.com/guitar-strength-10-commandments-playing-guitar-style-dimebag-darrell-part-2
Prown, P., & Sharken, L. (2003). Gear secrets of the guitar legends (1st ed., pp. 81-83). San Francisco: Backbeat Books.
