Andy Marsh interview (excerpt)

Australian Guitar: What led you to the style that you have now?

Andy Marsh: I don’t like doing things I’m not good at, which has led to the happy coincidence that I’m good at most of the things I do. I just have a lot of tolerance for the things I don’t have an aptitude for. Anything I do I try and be as good as I can at it. With guitar it was like, “I’m playing Bodyjar covers in the garage with my friend, but I want to be more proficient”. So I had my arsenal of guitar magazines. If you could have a Google search through the guitar magazines, I was doing that manually looking for the word ‘shred’. I discovered John Petrucci probably three or six months into actually having a guitar, which was pretty early on, but there wasn’t anything that was gonna stop me. So I went out to the local Leading Edge independent music shop and found a Dream Theater CD, Images & Words, and was like, “Oh, this looks a bit dated” and then started playing it and the snare drum told me it was so dated, but when he started soloing it was like, “What the f**k was that? That’s impossible. No one can play like that”. Then I bought the Live At Budokan DVD because I had to see if this was even possible before I dedicated my life to trying to play like this. And the first song they played is ‘As I Am’ off Train Of Thought. I was like, “Right, solo’s coming up. This is gonna be so hilarious”. And then he nailed it and I thought, “F**king hell, I’ve got some serious time to put in”.