Falling Into Place

John Petrucci & Dream Theater accept the challenges of songwriting

by Jon Chappell

Though New York City’s Avatar Studios has been open only a year, having taken over what was Power Station, it has played host to a cavalcade of stars, including Aerosmith, Bonnie Raitt, Dr. John, B. B. King , Joe Jackson, and Harry Connick, Jr., as well as such guitar luminati as Robben Ford, Mike Stern, and Pat Metheny. Situated on the western edge of Hell’s Kitchen, Avatar’s unimpressive edifice looks a bit dowdy and, on this blistering summer day, more than a little wearisome. But once inside the doors, the building transforms into a cool, high-tech music-making environment thrumming with creativity and professionalism. Inside Studio A, one of the big Neve-equipped tracking rooms, sits Kevin Shirley, who must be experiencing déjà vu, having produced Aerosmith’s Nine Lives here not long before. In addition to Aerosmith, Shirley has produced mega-hits for mega-acts like Journey, Rush, and Silverchair.

This time, the band commanding Shirley’s attention – not to mention, filling out Avatar’s considerably well-appointed live room and adjacent iso-rooms – is Dream Theater, the quintet that essentially defines the modern-day rock ensemble approach to virtuosity. In their six-album span, from 1988’s When Dream And Day Unite to 1995’s A Change Of Seasons, the band has single-handedly supplied the lifeline to prog fans in the decade between the decline of solo metal instrumentalists and the post-grunge, chops-challenged scene we find ourselves in today.

Guitarist John Petrucci, who met fellow thespians John Myung (bass) and Mike Portnoy (drums) at Berklee over a decade ago, had been playing studio rat all day when we caught up’ with him. He welcomed the chance to take a break and listen to some of the just-finished mixdowns of the tunes that will comprise Falling Into Infinity, Dream Theater’s first album in more than two years. Negotiating through the huge live room where the rest of the band is camped, we make our way to guitarland, a glassed-off annex where Petrucci has set up shop.

Though the more familiar phrase is “a wall of Marshalls,” Petrucci has decorated his cedar-paneled lair with a wall of Mesa/Boogies. A half dozen or so full-stack amp setups are positioned side by side in a semicircle so that the guitarist can change his sound at will. “For a live approach,” he explains, “I need to have everything set up and ready to go, so that I can change sounds completely just by taking my cord out of one amp and putting it into another.”

As he wrapped up the final mixes on Falling Into Infinity, Petrucci sat down with us to explain how Dream Theater has evolved beyond the scope and limitations of the prog-rock label to offer an album replete with not only exemplary musicianship, but a keen songwriting sensibility.

Jon Chappell: How does Falling Into Infinity differ from Dream Theater’s normal approach to albums?

John Petrucci: It’s totally different. This won’t be the conveyer-belt method of recording songs. We wanted each song to have a separate identity. We wanted to be able to use a different drum set altogether on each song. That’s why I have the amps all set up in a row in my own room of the studio, so I can go from one setup to the next. We have everybody in the studio at the same time so that if something came up that we wanted to change – something that clashed with the vocal or another part – James LaBrie would be able to go in there and sing it again. It’s more of a group effort, and the song comes out better because of that. And the songs become very different from one another.

JC: What specific issues did you address when altering your approach?

JP: We were concerned with economy and structure. We never lost sight of the fact that there was always a song going on, so far as the melodies, the vocal lines, some sort of continuity with structure.

JC: Are you saying that you may have ignored some of those issues before?

JP: No, we’ve always tried to do that, but it’s just a matter of getting to that point – maturing as a writer. When we first started writing, we were, like, 18. We were kids. Ten years later you learn a lot about what is self indulgent and what’s not. But now I just try to write a great song, whatever format I’m in – a conventional one or an unconventional one.

JC: What you say is true of any growing artist. But have you received specific criticisms to tone it down because you guys are the Berklee monsters?

JP: It’s usually the opposite. The fans come up and say, “Aw, man, don’t lose that 13-minute track. Don’t tone it down.”

JC: Do you find it hard to keep up that killing pace, like the epic pyrotechnics of, say, ‘Metropolis’ or ‘Lie’?

JP: No, in fact, to be quite honest, the progressive stuff is easier for us to do, because you can do whatever you want. It’s the songs that are hard to write. When you listen to Peter Gabriel or Sting or the Eagles and guys that write these great, great songs, you think, Where does that come from? That’s what we try to strive for, but we do have that original identity, and we never want to lose that.

JC: ‘You Not Me’ strikes me as a real song, somewhat unlike the typical Dream Theater approach.

JP: Yeah, well wait till you hear ‘Just Let Me Breathe.’ It’s pretty relentless. I don’t know if you’ll consider us songwriters after that. [laughs] You’ll hear a couple of songs that are like ‘You Not Me.’ We’ve always tried to do that, but we just never got there. It’s like anything else: You get better at writing songs the more you do it. We’ll have these meandering passages when we first demo the songs, and then we’ll get into the studio and say, “What are we doing here?” and then we just trim the fat.

JC: What effects are on your guitar for that track? It sounds almost too regular to be a wah.

JP: It is a wah, but the thing was, it was two guitars, and one doesn’t have a wah and the other does, and that’s why it sounds kind of funky. I doubled my own part, and it’s just my guitar through a Crybaby, but I wasn’t opening it up all the way, so it wouldn’t get all hissy.

JC: Tell me about the blinding back-and-forth interplay on ‘Just Let Me Breathe.’

JP: There’s this little conversation with keyboard and guitar where it’s just recorded on one track. Derek Sherinian and I are always playing at the same time. It’s just that it’s going back and forth. We recorded just guitar and keyboards on one track, and it was always panned to the left. It was actually a bitch to record. It’s a whole line that’s just constant 16th notes. But we just broke it up into five-note sections. On one track we record the first five notes, then on another track the next five. The producer was having a fit, because after a while we were just doing two notes, and they were on separate tracks, so you’d have to punch in and out like this. [mimes spastic button-pushing technique]

JC: Kevin Shirley’s rhythmic ability would have to be almost equal to your own then.

JP: Oh, sure. Kevin had charts and everything. He had to read and follow all the stuff.

JC: What about that backward envelope effect?

JP: It’s guitar and keyboard, and the guitar is just doing a harmonic pulling up on the bar, and the keyboard is going down using the wheel to do a downward pitch bend. It’s a sound we use throughout the album.

JC: How did the strange off-kilter riff for this song come about?

JP: I was doing this tapping thing inspired by Van Halen’s ‘Mean Streets.’ And I always had this rhythm that I did, like a five rhythm. And we just made a whole groove based on that, sort of like a Santana groove.

JC: ‘Peruvian Skies’ is more like Dream Theater.

JP: We have longer, more epic songs like that on the album, too, ones people usually think of when they hear our name. There are about three songs that are typical for Dream Theater, and the rest are song-oriented.

JC: Your lead guitar sound is pretty straightforward here as it is on most of the album.

JP: I’m running a Crybaby through a Boogie with my Ibanez guitar. The only other thing I used in this song was a Boss NS-2 as a noise gate, which I put right after the wah.

JC: So it’s the basic Hendrix setup, with the wah right into the amp.

JP: Yeah, ‘cause then you get the natural sound of the amp. Unless it’s some weird effect that’s interacting with itself and the speaker, I like to do it that way: just dry, and we can add delay to make it sit in the mix just right.

JC: The solo has a rich-sounding reverb. What did you use?

JP: You know, I let Kevin handle all that stuff, so it’s probably a Lexicon PCM-90 and a PCM-70 delay.

JC: How involved are you in the mixing?

JP: We leave him alone on that, too. He knows what he’s doing. He doesn’t need five guys telling him the vocals aren’t loud enough or the guitar isn’t loud enough or make sure you put me up during this fill, and all that. I’ll tell him if there’s a delay setting I have in mind, but he knows my sound and what I like.

JC: And if you have a rhythmic setting on your delay?

JP: Actually for that stuff, anything that’s interactive, then we’ll record that with the delay. In ‘Peruvian Skies,’ for example, there was a distant slide part. It was an Ibanez Talman set up with high action into an Ibanez phaser – this new line of retro effects they have – into the NS-2, into a Boogie Rectifier Trem-O-Verb, into a T.C. Electronic 2290 delay. That’s stuff you can’t really add later or it will sound too processed or artificial, whereas, when you have a phaser and delay on an amp, it’s majorly distorted, and you’re playing slide with lipstick pickups. It’s going to sound dirty and out of tune, and that’s the whole effect I was going for. That’s a good example of how it works when you record but it would sound totally different – and be totally wrong – to add later.

JC: Your acoustic guitars have a very pure sound. Are they miked?

JP: Just miked. No pickups.

JC: You don’t hear that very often in heavier rock. Most people use a little pickup to cut through.

JP: I defer to Kevin on that one. He prefers just to mic everything. I don’t know that he even added anything. He’s into dry sound and just adds delay when I ask him to. I was out there moving around with the acoustic going, “Is this okay?” and “How about this sound?” and he’s like, “Just stand in front of the mic and play, will ya?”

JC: Are you using stock Boogies?

JP: Yeah, I called [guitar tech and Boogie specialist] Mark Snyder, and he loaded up his van, and I just went through a bunch of them.

JC: You get some ripping metal sounds, like in ‘Burning My Soul,’ and Boogie’s are not known for stun crunch.

JP: Oh, I don’t know. That’s the Metallica sound, right? I can get any sound I want out of them.

JC: Where did you come up with that African feel for ‘Take Away My Pain’?

JP: I wrote this for my father, who passed away recently. It originally started as an acoustic thing on the demo, just acoustic and vocal. And it sounded a little too much like an ‘80s power-ballad. So I listened to The Lion King a lot. I love Peter Gabriel, and I love that soundtrack.

We had been talking about changing the direction of how we recorded the song. We used a couple of things as reference, one of which was the guitars and drums in ‘Follow You, Follow Me’ by Genesis. We use the guitar with just little ostinato figures. There’s a jungly drumbeat that’s going on that we use as a loop. It’s very rhythmical: the guitar ostinato, two drum kits, and other percussion, like triangle. It has a tribal feel. I tell you, it was tough to keep up that little arpeggio thing for the whole song. My left hand started to hurt half-way through the song.

JC: What’s the story behind the graphic design on your Ibanez?

JP: [There] is a guy who did some independent design for Ibanez. I just picked it up one day and liked the guitar, and it had this graphic on it. Now it’s kind of associated with me.

JC: Do you run a standard five-way switch, or are there coil taps on your humbuckers?

JP: There are no taps, but in the middle position you get the single coils of the bridge and middle, and they’re hum-canceling, so it kind of makes a pickup out of these two. [indicates the adjacent inside coils of the bridge and middle pickups] It scoops the midrange out and sounds very crystally. It’s good for clean chordal stuff, which I do a lot of.

JC: Your setup here has been optimized for a live performance. Even the sightlines allow everyone to see each other.

JP: It’s completely changed the [way] we record together. It’s changed the way I record with the band.

JC: And does that result in a different approach to performance from the band as well?

JP: Totally. What you get is us playing live...but a really good recording. [laughs]