Larry Tarnowski

Larry Tarnowski — born in the United States in 1966 — was Iced Earth's guitarist between 1998 and 2003, a period covering the band's phase of greatest visibility. He was on Something Wicked This Way Comes (1998) and Horror Show (2001), concept albums that consolidated the group's format. It is also the period in which the band began touring Europe regularly, where it would find its largest audience. His function is to share the guitars with Jon Schaffer in a relationship of deliberate asymmetry. Schaffer plays the galloping riffs of mechanical picking that form the backbone of the repertoire and rarely plays solos; it falls to the second guitarist to supply the melodic lines and solos that break the repetition. It is a division of roles more rigid than usual in metal, and the second guitarist has to accept working within a space delimited by another composer. He left in 2003, in the same period in which Matt Barlow was also leaving the band, which closed the line-up of the Something Wicked phase.