Paranoid

Paranoid is composed of multiple riffs in the key of E, each equally fun to learn and to play. That means you can really put your focus on each of these riffs, one at a time, instead of tackling the whole song at once if you want to!

The intro

The intro starts with an E5 powerchord position on the 12th fret. We’re going to play the E and A strings on fret 12, and hammer on from fret 12 to fret 14 on the A string to “build” the powerchord shape. Repeat that three times, and you’ve got the first part of the intro!

Then, staying on shape 1 of the E minor pentatonic scale, we’re going to hammer on from fret 12 to 14 on the A string, followed by 12 to 14 on the D string. We then go back to the A string where we play the same hammer-on from 12 to 14, before playing fret 12 on the D string and finishing on fret 14 on the A string.

The verse

In the verse, we’re going to need to play the chords E5, D5, G5 and D.

We start by playing E5, with a slight palm muting. We’re going to play this E5 for two bars, only strumming downstrokes. We then move on to D5 that we play for a bar, which is played with the same shape as our previous E5, but played on fret 10. Here again, we’re only playing downstrokes!

The next part of the verse is played without palm muting, and we’re going to play G5 with just one downstroke, before jumping to our D, and back to E5. To finish off, we’re going to hit the 12th fret on the D, G and B strings!

The break

Let’s move on to the break! We’re going to need three chords, E5, C5 and D5.

We’re going to play E5 for a bar (four beats), with just one downstroke played on the first beat, and let the chord sustain! We then play C5 on beat 1 of the second bar, and D5 on beat 3 of the same bar.

After these two bars, we go back to E5 that we play for two bars this time, with palm-muted downstrokes.

The chorus

The chorus is a pretty straightforward part of the song that gives us a bit of space to breathe! We only need three chords, E5 and D and E.

We start by playing E5 for two bars, just strumming it once on the first beat of the first bar. We then do exactly the same thing on D. After that, we jump to E (major and not 5!) and then repeat the same thing on D5.

The outro

The outro riff is very similar to the verse riff, the only difference being the end of it! Everything’s the same as the verse, but the second time we play it, after playing the D5 for a bar, we jump to shape 1 of the E minor pentatonic scale lower down the neck.

We’re going to play the 2nd fret on the A string, followed by the 3rd fret on the low E string with a slight bend, and we finish with the open E string.

The solo

To improvise over the solo, we can use the E minor pentatonic, and add the 9th (the 2nd), which is the note F# in the key of E. Of course, we can mix that up with some classic blues licks.

You can also have a look at Iron Man’s solo, which might be helpful as lots of phrases are very similar to this. And just as Jed said, “Playing around with those kinds of ideas can develop your own Iommi style solo.” So experiment with this!