Jordan Rudess interview (excerpts)

Mitch Lafon: So let’s talk about Harmony Wiz, the new app. You’ve described it in an online video as being a minor musical miracle. How is it a minor musical miracle?

Jordan Rudess: It kind of is in the sense that it is able to produce really amazing results from just a very simple kind of input, whether it’s drawing a beautiful line on the painting area or just using your keyboard. I’ve worked with technology for a long time and synthesizers, and personally I could expect something that could harmonize each note of the musical line, but Harmony Wiz goes so much deeper than that. Harmony Wiz is actually able to take your input musical line and flesh it out as a multi-part arrangement. So it’s not like there’s a chord on every single melodic note. Harmony Wiz decides on which notes of your melody to add the chords, and then it has like counterpoint within the different line.

And I always thought that this was possible. You don’t want people to be threatened by this. I’m not saying a computer could replace a musician. Certainly in John Petrucci’s quote about it, he was hinting around and says, “If Jordan keeps making technology like this, he’ll be replaced.”

Well the beauty of it for me as a musician is that to use Harmony Wiz myself makes me really, really smile. One of the things I did to create Harmony Wiz is I took a simple melody and I recorded it in about 30 different ways. I just took the same melody and played all these different harmonies and sent it to my developer. Then we talked about it and he basically coded it so it would use some of the possibilities, so it’d kind of be like in the mind of Jordan Rudess for when it kind of decides on what chords to play.

There’s a couple of ways to think of this. One is it’s something that purely can bring the joy of music to somebody. If you don’t know anything about music, you paint a line on your screen, the notes fly up to the staff, the next thing you know, you’ve got something that really sounds really good. If you’re a musician like myself or whatever level, you can put in a line and get some really interesting ideas. You might say, “You know what? I’m just curious what Harmony Wiz would do if I put in these few notes repetitively. What is it going to do? Maybe it will kind of like offer some options that I wouldn’t have thought of before.” And that’s totally possible. Harmony Wiz might come up with something that you didn’t think of. You could use that either by massaging Harmony Wiz and using the editing tools to create something, or just use it in your own creation.

The other way that Harmony Wiz can be really cool is that after Harmony Wiz creates this multi-part arrangement, it offers what we call the figured bass, which is the theoretical way of showing the different chords in a key. So it might say, “This is the one chord. This is a five chord. This is the three chord and second inversion.” So there’s a lot of information there. For a music student it’s really, really cool because all of a sudden they’re getting to really see what’s happening with the theory behind these moving chords in the classical style. Because really in what we call the Baroque style, its following some very specific rules of harmony.

ML: Is the Harmony Wiz app something that you might actually consider using in making new music with Dream Theater? Could you come up with a whole piece on this or is it just sort of more of a play kind of app?

JR: I would use it personally as inspiration. I would take a melody that I’m writing and put it in Harmony Wiz and see what it does and then get inspiration from it.

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ML: Before we wrap up I think we should ask one obligatory Dream Theater question: what’s happening with the band? What’s next? The last album came out last year; what’s up for the band?

JR: We’re getting ready to go continue our world tour. We actually had a nice, two month break. Nice in many ways, to get a chance to do everything else we needed to do. Like in my case release Harmony Wiz took a lot of energy. So we had a little break, but we really are in our touring cycle, so we have a lot more touring to go. We’re gonna be doing a month in Europe and then it looks like we’re gonna be probably heading down to South America. We’re going to Asia, the Loud Park concert has been announced – a big festival over in Asia – and probably fill in some shows there, and there’s more ground to cover. So that’s what the immediate plan is. The band’s in a great place. I just feel so grateful and thankful for it, because Dream Theater has kind of risen above what’s going on in the music business, really, which upsets me and is very scary. But we have our own world; we worked for so many years touring and recording that I feel like we kind of developed this nice solid structure and foundation to what we do. At this point, even though the business is tough, I feel like we’re in a good place. We’re definitely gonna continue touring and then we’re gonna stop, may take a little break and we’ll start working on another album and just continue as usual.

ML: I just gotta say I’m amazed with the Dream Theater story because I’ve been following rock bands for many, many years. I look at some of the bands that started in arenas in the ‘80s and then in the ‘90s they were down to theaters and then by the 2000s they were into clubs and now they’re playing ‘Ribfest,’ and you guys have gone the other direction. When I first saw you, you were in smaller venues, and the last time you were in Montreal, it was the Bell Centre and you’re doing the opposite of bands that have had these long careers. You keep getting bigger and bigger, and kudos to the band. It’s a veryndifficult market place and the fact that you can do that is astonishing. It really is.

JR: Thank you so much. Part of it is the band members and what we do. A lot of it has to do with our team around us. And I’m not just saying that like this make them feel good, but it’s a tour manager and the manager, and the people would go on the crew that we take on tour. Being a band like Dream Theater is so complex; there’s so many elements to it to keep us alive and keep us out there in the road and making money and able to do what we do that it just goes so far beyond the music. I really feel that it’s important for people to understand that that’s just the truth. The Dream Theater organization is a very strong, very friendly, very secure, cool place to be. That’s one of the reasons we’re able to think creatively and to work and to go in the studio and continue doing what we do; it’s a big, big part of it. As far as reaching the next level, one thing I’ve notice since I joined Dream Theater almost 16 years ago is that we were always able to conceptualize or imagine where we want to be in the future, or what kind of impact we want this album to have, this next one. We would literally almost write it down on paper. Through the musical strength and the personal strength of the members, we’ve been able to successfully do that each and every time, and I think it’s amazing, because people say, “A band is stronger than all the individual parts,” and in so many ways it is. Because if you put Petrucci and myself and all the other guys together, there’s a lot of force there in all different ways, and that’s really what makes it work – to be able to work together and to take advantage of those talents. I’m so grateful for the opportunity to be in this band and have this much talent around me and this much support; it’s really, really a cool story.