Every aspiring metal guitarist needs to know the main riff from this song. It is a pure Sabbath classic, and easy to learn. The band recorded the original in C# tuning, but we're going to show it in standard tuning to keep things simple. It's all played the same way, just sounds higher. Here we see the main rhythm guitar, check out the subsequent ActionTabs for the lead stuff.

Intro - The intro is just the main riff, except it starts with open string strikes followed by a hammer onto the first powerchord. If this gives you trouble, just play the normal main riff, apart from that hammer they are identical.

Main Riff - Instead of playing the hammer, simply start the riff by sliding up the D5 powerchord. This is how he plays the main riff throughout the rest of the song. It's a very straightforward powerchord riff. Nice and short, and repetitive. Although Tony Iommi does use some palm muting, notice that everything is played with downstrokes. This makes things simpler for your strumming hand.

Chorus - There is a lovely jazzy chorus played with a clean guitar sound here. There are only 2 chords: Am9 and G major. However, they are quite tricky to fret with your fingers.

You can cheat if you find them difficult. You can play the Am9 as shown, except remove your 2nd finger and play the low open A string instead. And for the G major, just fret across the 12th fret with your 3rd finger and skip the note on the highest string. Both will sound very close to the original. We've tacked these variations onto the end of the ActionTab to show you: Am9 and G major

There are some clean guitar fills played on lead guitar over the chorus, you can see those in these separate ActionTabs: Clean Fill 1 - Clean Fill 2

Little Bridge - Coming out of the Choruses into the main verse riffs again Tony Iommi plays this little bridge on full distortion. Just bounce between the D major and A add4 chords a few times.

Middle Bridge - This bridge is used to transition to the (following) heavy riff played towards the end of the song.

Heavy Riff - Metal or what. This chunky baby is all based on powerchords. The riff itself is very short and repetitive.

Last Bridge - A lot of bridges in this song. This is the last one, it is used to usher in the outro riff. Guess what? More powerchords.

Outro Riff - Typical Iommi riff here, nice and simple stuff but played quite fast. He only uses 3 notes here. This riff just keeps repeating until the end of the song, so we've also included the little lead guitar fill that appears right at the end, just in case you wanted to learn it too.