Mike Portnoy article-interview (excerpts)

Mike Portnoy has been a busy drummer recently, seizing the opportunity to wear many different hats: The Winery Dogs (classic rock); the Metal Masters show (thrash and metal}; the Tama 40th Anniversary Show at NAMM with supergroup PSMS (instrumental prog); the Bonzo Bash (Zep); and sailing the Caribbean on the Progressive Nation At Sea cruise. Scheduling is always an issue, but the challenge of playing with all of these great musicians has Portnoy psyched. “I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I’m totally enjoying being a free agent and being able to play with a multitude of bands. That’s kind of what I was shooting for and what I was hoping to do post DT [Dream Theater]. I currently have five or six or seven different projects all happening at the same time. I’m a fan of all of these styles: from the thrash stuff to the prog stuff to the classic rock stuff. This is where I’m at in this stage of my career.”

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A quick listen to ‘Vertigod,’ however, reveals time signature and feel changes and an atypical, meandering song structure. You might guess this type of complexity requires working out parts in advance, but Portnoy’s approach is surprising. “Odd-time signatures are such a natural part of what I do that, to me, playing in five and six and seven and nine is just as easy as playing in four. it’s just numbers. Four is just patterns of two. So when you play in five or seven, you’re doing patterns of twos and threes. I don’t look at it like odd numbers – I just look at it as patterns, and riffs, and parts. I’m not the type of drummer who goes into a session and spends time working it out. I go in there and jam. A lot of times, I’ll do three different takes, and each take, each fill, and each groove will be completely different each and every time, and there it is for all eternity.”

Even with Portnoy’s penchant for winging it, he’s developed a charting system to give him an edge in the studio. “Usually my charts have basically two things: the left column is the arrangement of the song, and in the right column, I’ll put kind of what I want to do in that section. Be it on the hi-hat, the ride, doing upbeats, doing downbeats.”