Track By Track: Dream Theater – A Dramatic Turn Of Events

John Petrucci talks us through every song on Dream Theater’s latest masterclass in progressive metal

Interview: James Uings

Dream Theater’s new opus might just be their most important release to date – coming after the departure of the band’s founding member, spokesperson, songwriter and drummer extraordinaire Mike Portnoy. There’s all to play for and John Petrucci hasn’t disappointed: it’s a triumph of composition and musicianship. Now the guitarist, who also produced the album, is here to walk us through it.

On The Backs Of Angels

“The intro to this song is really layered. I used my Taylor acoustics, I can never remember which model [they are]. I need to put that on my iPhone, because I’m always being asked! I recorded two standard-tuned guitars, panned left and right, and then I did a Nashville tuning, panned left and right as well. We recorded each guitar with two mics on them, and then they were blended and used as a mono sound [rather than the traditional practice of panning the two mics left and right]. The imperfections of the two performances make the stereo imaging. I added two electrics – one was dry and the other used a phaser pedal.”

Build Me Up, Break Me Down

“This is one of three tracks that I use a seven-string on. We worked hard to capture the best guitar tone we could, but it’s really too broad for an actual mix. It has tons of bottom end, so the mix engineer will inevitably carve out some bottom end and add some highs. Unless you make those adjustments, you can’t even get the guitar to a good volume in the mix, because as you’re bringing the volume up, you’re dragging up all this bottom end, which is stepping on the vocals and kick drum.

“I did what I do with every mix engineer – I told Andy Wallace, not that you have to tell him anything: ‘I really, really love my guitar tone. Please do as little to it as possible’. He was totally respectful of that and he only made subtle changes.”

Lost Not Forgotten

“The unison part is guitar panned far right, Jordan [Rudess, keyboard] harmonised it, and he’s panned far left. When it repeats, I added a third harmony on the left. The end result is an insane diminished passage that almost makes me want to laugh.

‘When I wrote the guitar solo, I wanted it to go into three different moods. The first one was more of a traditional, melodic mood. Next, it goes into a more bluesy section, with the third section getting into something more syncopated, almost like a tango feel. I wanted to write something that moved through different styles.”

This Is The Life

“There’s a part in the solo that has slides that move across many frets, and switches between two strings. Everything I do starts from a melody, even really fast stuff, so once I had the melody and decided to use that technique to play it, I had to work on nailing it. It could easily have sounded incredibly sloppy, because you could miss notes by a half step when you slide up and down. I ended the phrases with trills, because I felt that the phrasing was too similar to the previous part of the solo, since I kept ending on the root, so I thought that I’d give it a little ‘flavouring’.

“That first solo is more of an ensemble part, because it’s more melodic. The guitar tone isn’t really any different from the rest of the tracks but it’s mixed differently. When we mix a guitar solo, we want it so that it’s featured like a vocal part, so it’s the main thing that’s going on. In this case, the guitar is more of an ensemble role in that it’s part of the orchestration, so it’s mixed back in the track more. We also supported it with a string line and I played an octave below too, which is quite subtle. It doesn’t scream, ‘Here is the solo!’”

Bridges In The Sky

“Generally, I go for the same tone on double-tracked heavy, syncopated guitar parts, like the ones in ‘Bridges In The Sky’. I’ve experimented before with different tones; I tried using one amp on one side and one on another and I never really liked it. It throws off my whole need for symmetry, because it leans to one side. It’s fine if you’re going for that effect, but when I’m doing that kind of syncopated part, which I do all the time, the goal is to have the guitar surround your head in stereo, and I don’t want to mess with that. The only time I’ll do it is if I’m adding a phaser or chorus pedal, and I’ll only do it on one side. I do this so the tone of the guitar doesn’t change but the texture does. It makes more of a stereo picture. For some reason, two performances with the same pedal just doesn’t sound as wide.”

Outcry

“With any song, we have a very specific focus about what kind of song it’s going to be. With ‘Outcry’, we knew it was going to be an epic. We knew we wanted to go insane and we knew we wanted it to be very anthemic. When the song kicks in, it had to be the type of guitar riff and cinematic string part that you could picture in slow motion with the [stage] lights, hands in the air and people singing. It was a matter of capturing that in the guitar riff.”

Far From Heaven

“This was always a piano song. It’s really part one of ‘Breaking All Illusions’, which develops the themes in this track. Jordan and I wrote it together; and I decided not to put any guitar on it because it didn’t need it. It’s really beautiful as it is.”

Breaking All Illusions

“I wanted to have a section somewhere on the album where there was an extended guitar solo that had breathing space, so that I could put in a bluesy breakdown. I’ve done it on my solo album, live or when I jam, but it’s not something I do a lot on albums. I wanted that ‘La Villa Strangiato’ breakdown big solo. When it came to the melody part, I was thinking ‘David Gilmour’ and I tried to play melodies that were as beautiful and soaring as I could make them. I drew on my past Italian heritage! It re-states and develops a theme that happens earlier. It doesn’t just go by noodling along, it’s a valid, important part of the whole composition.”

Beneath The Surface

“This song came along much later in the whole process. I tried some free writing before the sessions and came up with a few stanzas of poetry and then forgot about them. Later on, I decided that the record needed some balance, almost like a melodic release, something that wasn’t so complicated and technical. I had an acoustic guitar line that, at the beginning of the sessions, I hadn’t used. So I matched the part to the lyrics I had written. I said to the guys, ‘We have an 11th-hour contender here’.”

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Pre-Production

“Before recording, we set up in the studio, sans drummer. I used the Axe-Fx straight into the board. A guy from Fractal came down and really closely modelled my mic’d Boogie sound. I used that as a working sound to demo and write. It was incredibly convenient, sounded great. I could switch patches and effects on the fly, and I didn’t have to have an amp anywhere in the room. I used the [Toontrack] DFH Superior program for the drums. I told myself I wouldn’t go crazy, but as I got used to it, I got more fancy – though nothing like [drummer, Mike] Mangini could do! The demo phase was total pre-production; I had to map all the tempo and time signature changes into Logic, as well as naming the sections. They were so detailed [that] we used them in the main recording. The demo versions sound pretty cool. You might have to hear them one of these days.”

Delay

“When it comes to delays, I use plug-ins. They would normally go after the preamp, so it’s not an integral part of the sound that needs to interact with the speakers. When it comes to solos and I want to add stereo delay, I’ll use a Pro Tools unit, because they sound beautiful. I always make the engineer scroll through all the other boutique plug-ins, but I never like them – I always go back to the first one they set up. I never set my delays to sync with the track, like quarter notes or eighth notes, because I don’t like the way the notes stack up on top of each other. I always use the same settings regardless of the tempo of the track. One’s a little shorter than the other. I hassled Joe Satriani for his delay settings and, although they are different from mine, they are very precise and he uses the same settings all the time, like I do.”

Amp Mics

“Our whole setup, with micing amps, is pretty simple. The key, to me, is to have the correct components. I have my MusicMan JP-11, the Mesa/Boogie MKV and the Boogie cabinets, which I love and know are perfect. It’s just a matter of capturing that sound. This time around, we experimented with mics and mic preamps. For the last few albums, we’ve been using a Shure SM57 and the Sennheiser 421 through an API or Neve preamp. I wanted to see if there was any new cutting-edge stuff. So we got in six or seven different mic pre’s. We came up with some pretty cool combinations. One was a Shadow Hills that was really killer, and we also used a Universal Audio. Once we’d decided which preamps and mics sounded the best. we had to find the best place on the cab. We used the new Shure ribbon mic, which is better nearer the middle of the cone and was really warm and broad and had a lot of detail in it, whereas the SM57 needed to be away from the centre by a couple of inches.”