John Petrucci interview (excerpts)

Lee Anderton: In these kind of interview things, I like to get to know the player, a little bit about what inspired them to start playing guitar, and just talk through their life and career. So were you born in New York?

John Petrucci: I was.

LA: So New York born and bred.

JP: Yes, on Long Island, New York, if you know the US at all. Long Island kind of sticks out on the East Coast into the Atlantic Ocean. So I’m an Islander.

LA: So sort of late ‘60s – exciting time for music. What was growing up in your family like – were they a musical family?

JP: Not really, not particularly. I was born ‘67 Summer of Love, so you know my childhood was the ‘70s. But besides maybe some Elvis and Paul McCartney and stuff being played in the house, it wasn’t a big musical household. My older sister played organ – we had this huge organ. I’ve told this story many times, but I was very jealous because her organ lessons were at night. So the instructor would come at night – it probably wasn’t even that late but I was little – and I was so jealous. I’d be in bed and hear my sister taking these organ lessons, and I’m like, “Why does she get to stay up late?” So I had this ingenious plan of taking guitar lessons and then I’d be able to stay up late. I was really young, probably 9 – I don’t remember how old – maybe younger. But my lessons turned out to be on a Saturday afternoon, so my plan completely fell apart! [laughs]

LA: ...and you had to cancel the good things!

JP: I had to cancel all the good things. Ironically enough, I hated it. I had this guitar, it had nylon strings and I couldn’t play it and I couldn’t fret the notes and I was so frustrated... The guy – I’m sure he was nice – but he was an older man with a pitch pipe, trying to teach me the Mel Bay stuff. I just was like, “I’m not into this.” And it wasn’t until I was 12 before I got bit by the bug and really wanted to play guitar.

LA: So do you have that moment where you heard a guitar solo or a band, and you just thought, “That’s [what I want to do].” Can you remember what that was?

JP: This might sound strange, but I remember having a reoccurring dream that I was onstage playing guitar. It would happen really often, so it must have been some kind of message. Fortunately enough for me, where I grew up in Long Island, in New York, there was a big music scene, and rock was played on the radio. Everybody in my town played an instrument, so there were constantly bands that you could go see at parties, that were playing at the school ‘Battle of the Bands’. You could walk down the street on a summer day and hear a garage band or somebody... I remember still as clear as day somebody sitting out there with an acoustic playing ‘Stairway To Heaven.’ So it was just all around me, and it was a great environment to grow up in because it was just so readily available. It was the thing to do.

LA: Can you can remember what that first guitar was that your parents bought you, when you were 12?

JP: I don’t know if they have them here, but we used to have flea markets. So it was this big kind of warehouse store with everything you could possibly buy. This one had a music section and they were selling a Les Paul – it was a copy, it was a Suzuki guitar – but it was like the most decked out thing I’ve ever seen, so it had a vine going down the neck and mother-of-pearl binding. I think it might have even had gold hardware, it was black, it was like unbelievable. It was the coolest thing. I think I traded it for an Aria Pro II. [laughs]

LA: Who did you want to be when you were standing in front of the mirror, Les Paul around you?

JP: I was a big, big Rush fan. When I was 12, I would probably say I pictured being Alex Lifeson. [laughs]

LA: I’ve got this kind of funny relationship [with] progressive music. I meet a lot of guitar players that play that sort of style of music, but I’ve always found it not to be the most accessible kind. So I’m really surprised that at 12, you had already decided that that was the kind of music that you wanted to listen to. I got into guitar through much, much more sort of commercial kind of accessible stuff. Why do you think that was? It can’t have been cool at school to listen to that.

JP: That’s the funny thing; there was kind of a progression. So early on I liked AC/DC and stuff like that. I think a lot of the direction that I took has a lot to do with where I grew up, because describing Long Island during that time – ‘70s, early ‘80s – again big rock scene. Music like Rush, Ozzy when he came out with the Blizzard Of Ozz, Iron Maiden, all that stuff was being played on the radio, so I was hearing this stuff, I had access to it. It wasn’t just the pop music or the more commercial music. There was this other stuff, Yes included. All those bands managed somehow to break through, whether it was ‘Roundabout’ by Yes, or ‘Subdivisions’ or ‘Tom Sawyer’ or something like that by Rush, that they had a commercial side that was able to break through, and that enabled me to kind of go deeper. And nine times out of ten, a friend or friend’s older brother – who knew I played guitar – was like, “Dude, you got to listen to this!” That’s how I got turned on to the Dregs, that’s how I got deeper into Rush, that’s how I got turned on to Yes, Al Di Meola, Return to Forever, all those guys. It’s always an older guy that’s like, “All right, you think that’s good; forget about that! You got to hear this!” So a lot of it was environmental where I grew up.

LA: As someone that was learning to play guitar, did you find it frustrating that maybe the music you were into was really quite complex, or did that just drive you to practice more?

JP: It did. Again it was definitely a progression, because I remember trying to learn, for example, the ‘Heartbreaker’ solo and some solos by Boston (Tom Scholz’s solos) and stuff like that, and it was so hard for me. The most frustrating thing that young players of today don’t have to deal with, is that I couldn’t see what the players were doing. I couldn’t watch Jimmy Page on YouTube. “Oh, so that’s how you do it!” So I was sitting there with a record, slowing the speed down, dropping the needle and listening to it over and over. There were so many things about a lot of the solos that I tried to learn that I didn’t know what they were doing. I developed my ear, and I thought I got the notes right, but I didn’t realize that they were bending or there was a double stop.

LA: ...or tunings maybe...

JP: ... anything. Tom Scholz said he was harmonizing and layering – I didn’t know what that was. ‘Eruption’ when Eddie’s doing the hammer-ons and has phaser on it. It just sounded like a keyboard. I had no visualization to understand what they were doing.

LA: Do you think was a bad thing? Because nowadays you magazines will notate stuff, YouTube will put a million things up to almost make it as easy as possible for you to see how the original piece was played. But do you think in a certain way the fact that it forced you to develop an ear and forced you to just practice more was ultimately for the good?

JP: I think so. It’ll be curious as to how this translates when you look back at all this, because maybe players like myself and my generation and before developed our ears better because we couldn’t see what people were doing and we had to use our ears and then kind of develop our technique slowly and develop through practicing hard. When young players are able to watch how something’s done on YouTube, see it broken down exactly, they’re getting there a lot faster, so I don’t think they’re lacking in anything. Obviously if you watch some of these kids that technical abilities are unbelievable, but it’ll be interesting to see if maybe the ear training part isn’t as advanced. I don’t know.

LA: I think there are players of your generation and certainly before where their sound and their style is their own and it’s so distinct, and I see that less nowadays. Maybe that’s because there just are less styles to have; everybody ends up sounding like somebody else, because I guess there aren’t enough different ways. But again, I wonder so much about the fact that you’ve been forced to learn in a way where you had to work out your own way of playing something, rather than being able to go, “OK, I see how he did it, now I’ll do it like that.” You have your own style and your own sound.

JP: Yeah. I don’t know the answer to that. I think that style is definitely something that comes with age though. I think there’s a certain point even when a young player is really good, super developed technique-wise and everything, I think it’s a lot of mimicking for the most part. And then I think style follows as you become older. I think it’s like that with any anything really. It’s the part of the brain that maybe isn’t ready for that yet.

LA: So the guitar bit you bad. Your teenage years were spent pretty devoted to the guitar...

JP: I just practiced all the time.

LA: So what was the point at which you thought, “Right, I want to do this. I want to go to Berklee.” Had you kind of decided that your career was gonna be as a guitar player, and Berklee was just a means to an end?

JP: Yeah. The way I came to that conclusion was like you said: I really got bit when I was 12. I just started practicing all the time, trying to learn as much as I could. In New York soccer was actually a really big popular sport, so I was really into that and once I got into music I kind of dropped that. I just would play guitar all the time. I’d start to listen to more and more challenging music, progressive bands and players; got myself up to where I was learning Dregs pieces and Yngwie when he came out, and all that stuff and really trying to shred. At the same time really into the band angle, so super into Rush, super into Maiden and Metallica early on when they were really young, Yes and Queensrÿche and bands like that. So me and my buddies – whenever these bands would come through the New York at either Madison Square Garden or the Nassau Coliseum – we’d go see them. That was the other bit of the bug that got me was, “I want to be in a band. I want to have an international career.” And I would see documentaries of Maidan in all these different countries and meeting all their fans and being so cool; the interaction. They go to the show, and they have this amazing stage production. That was the life!

LA: Have you got the Dream Theater jumbo jet yet?

JP: [laughs] Working on it. So besides the guitar playing part, the career part – that I really wanted to be in a band – that was a big, big focus. And one of my best friends back then, John Myung, who I met around that age in middle school, is we’re still in Dream Theater together. But as far as Berklee, when I decided I wanted to be really serious, I looked to my idols, and my idea was I’m gonna emulate what they did. What was their path? How to Steve Vai become who he is? How did Al Di Meola...? I started doing some research, and I realized, “Hey, these guys went to Berklee; seems like the place to be.” So I really got my sights set on going to Berklee.

LA: Were you there at the same time as Paul Gilbert? Because I’m just thinking you’re almost exactly the same age, aren’t you?

JP: I don’t think Paul went to Berklee though, he was like an MI guy.

LA: Oh yeah, you’re right. I’m getting my music colleges mixed up.

JP: That’s okay. He went out to the west coast; Berklee’s in Boston. There were probably a bunch of guys there at the same time... Maybe the Living Colour guys. I don’t really know. I mean obviously John and I, and we met Mike Portnoy there. Maybe the bass player was there?

LA: Doug Wimbish?

JP: Maybe. Don’t quote me on that. It was like ‘85-’86.

LA: I think it must be a such a wonderful thing to be best friends with someone from middle school and then join the band with them and make such a success of it as you have. And pretty much the rest of the band you all met at Berklee – if ever there was an advert for going to music college, Dream Theater would be it, wouldn’t it? [laughs]

JP: You know John and I went together, we drove up there, we roomed together, and we started interacting with the other freshmen. Pretty much off the bat, we met Mike Portnoy, who was also a Long Islander, but we didn’t know him. He lived on the south shore further west in Long Beach. We saw this kid playing, and we were like “Wow! He’s amazing!” We started talking and he was into the same bands that we were into, and we started playing together. And that was the nucleus of Dream Theater. Our keyboard player at the time, Kevin Moore, was friend of John and I that we grew up with, but he went to a different school. So after a year of Berklee, we all decided to leave. We went there for a year, and we were practicing all the time. At Berklee, we had to schedule our rehearsal time – you had to reserve the rehearsal rooms, because there were limited rooms. So we’d have to get up and wait in line at like 6:00am to schedule the room, and then after classes we’d set up all our gear and practice and break it down and do it again. During the first winter break (holiday break), we all got together and started recording, and by the time the second semester rolled around, we were like, “We’re ready! Let’s do it!” So then we had to go to our parents and say, “We’re not gonna go to school anymore.”

LA: I love the fact that when it all boils down to it, still there’ll be guys out there now who are 18, 19 years old whose biggest obstacle for not taking the guitar more seriously will be, “What will my parents think? Oh my gosh, shouldn’t I be going to do a more academic path or whatever?” I think now it’s probably maybe more accepted to go into the creative arts as a degree. Back then I can imagine families that are pretty... if you’ve got a hard-working dad and...

JP: Yeah, it was like that. A hundred percent. As supportive as my parents were, and I was a good student in school, so I could’ve gone academically on a different path... I remember having to convince my dad “I wanna do music as a career.” And he would say, “You need something to fall back on.” He was really concerned about that. I was like, “I’m not gonna fall back, you don’t understand.” And it was actually a music teacher in high school, he was a band teacher. I wasn’t in a band, but I would always take my guitar to school and I would practice in his band room during lunch breaks or study halls. So he knew me. At one parents’ night, he sat my parents aside and he’s like, “You guys send him to Berklee. You don’t understand.” So I have to thank him a lot for doing that. But it was hard to convince them to send me there.

LA: So did Dream Theater reach the sort of heights that you were hoping relatively quickly, or was it sort of slow burn?

JP: Yes and no. There’s a lot about the way that we came to be professionally that didn’t follow the standard rules. After Berklee, when we started demoing our music and practicing together as a band regularly, the typical thing that a band would do from Long Island is gig. There’s plenty of clubs and you’d go out and gig, and you’d have your demo, but we never did that. We just recorded a demo, sent it out, we got interest and we got signed. So we kind of bypassed the gigging thing. In fact, when we released our very first album, we played very few shows. We never toured for it; we played some local things. It wasn’t until Images and Words came out, which was ‘92 and we’re in the middle of a 25th anniversary celebration tour for that album, but it wasn’t until then that we started actually an international career on that Iron Maiden dream.

LA: I guess back then it was all about the record deal, wasn’t it? [It’s] different maybe now.

JP: It was definitely different. That was basically the only way that you can have some kind of professional career or exposure: you had to get signed. That was the big thing. As much as it was – I don’t wanna say easy, but it was quick for us – it was hard, because we weren’t the norm. Our music was completely wacky. Picture that time period: you’re talking mid-80s...

LA: Guns N’ Roses...

JP: Right, yeah. The music that we played was influenced by those bands that I talked about earlier. We’re playing metal music that kind of sounds like Yes wrote it with the singer from Rush, so it didn’t fit into the normal commercial ‘80s thing.

LA: That must have been tough then, because like you say, you’re heavily reliant on radio airplay then, aren’t you? There’s no Apple Music or YouTube or anything like that.

JP: ...or even social media. None of that. So all of it is reliant on – mostly in Europe – print publications. And actually in the States back then, too – print publications. But radio was the thing or MTV back then – there was Headbanger’s Ball. We got on Headbanger’s Ball with our second album.

LA: Tell me about the video for that then, because I could imagine this is back in the days where bands never really had to make music videos before. Did you have a blast doing that?

JP: It was really quick. I mean after the first album, the second album comes out – Images and Words – again the music on it is not what’s happening at that time. So in ‘92, that was like the era of Nirvana, Pearl Jam and grunge. No guitar solos, all that stuff. Meanwhile, we have songs like ‘Metropolis’ that [have] all these instrumental sections, long songs. ‘Pull Me Under,’ that ended up being our first most successful single was an over eight minute song.

LA: Not very radio friendly.

JP: It was a fluke. We go out there, we start touring, driving ourselves in a van, driving from club to club, playing in front of a couple hundred people, and through college radio requests and stuff, ‘Pull Me Under’ just started to blow up. I guess maybe within the landscape of all those different grunge bands, this stuck out. “What the hell is this? What are these guys doing?” And so it became a rock radio hit – it was being played all the time. So the record label said, “You need a video,” and we were just on a club tour, so they came with a couple of cameras and shot us at a club show, and that’s the video!

LA: Do you remember miming your guitar solo or something for the video? Did you give it the full 110%?

JP: I can’t remember how we did it – if we did it actually during the show... Part of me slightly remembers doing the song twice in front of the audience. Maybe we told them we were shooting a video. It was interesting. Then that van we were driving around in turned into a tour bus, yeah and then that club tour turned into an international tour, and that really sparked our career. It’s fitting that we’re in the UK right now – the guy that signed us is from London. His name is Derek Oliver. He was a writer for Kerrang magazine, reviewed the first album, loved it, got an A&R gig at Atco/Atlantic, and the president of Atlantic at that time was Derek Shulman from Gentle Giant, who I wasn’t familiar with at the time, but Gentle Giant is [a] huge prog band from the UK. Derek Shulman was the singer and he was the president of Atlantic, so Derek came in, took a huge chance on us, pitched this crazy progressive band from Long Island, and it ended up working out.

LA: It’s funny isn’t it? I know when I learned to play guitar in the ‘80s where there wasn’t really anybody to look up to that wasn’t pretty good. [laughs]

JP: Yeah. It’s like there was any given song there’d be a guitar solo and it was like, “Whoa!”

LA: ...and I certainly remember at the time that it’s tough to get to a level where you actually think, “I’m doing okay here.” I guess the positive thing of the whole Nirvana, and over here we had the Britpop thing, happen was that it did become very accessible again guitar – you could have a guitar hero that just played three chord tricks.

JP: You’re right. Back then, whether it was Scorpions or Ratt or whatever you’re hearing at that time, there was always some ridiculous guitar solo that you couldn’t play.

LA: But I think what’s really nice now is what YouTube and music streaming has bought up along is this ability to just pick and choose what you want to listen to, when you want to listen to it, rather than radio stations going, “This is the direction we’re going in.” In fact, one of the things in the US [is] you always had multiple radio stations covering multiple genres. Over here, we literally would have had two or three mainstream radio stations, and so what they were playing was what you listened to.

JP: That was it. Exactly. And obviously that changed also with satellite radio too, because now you have stations that are more specialized to different genres, and bands like us could be played, our songs could be played. Even now it’s hard to get our songs played on traditional radio because we still don’t fit in. We’re not what’s being played, so it’s good to have those other outlets.

LA: How early on in your Dream Theater journey did you start to be recognized as a bit of a guitar hero and had the opportunity to start working with different brands. How long into the Dream Theater thing were you before that started happening?

JP: It was really when we were recording Images and Words, so that was ‘91 – we started recording that where I had started a relationship with a guitar company. It was Ibanez at the time and it’s when I first started my first signature guitar. But I always had this this interest in gear. I think most guitar players do; mine was kind of like on overdrive. I was really, really into Boogie and played Boogies forever. I was really into pedals and gear and delays, and even when I got the first opportunity to have a signature model, I was so into what could be done on the instrument.

LA: Steve Vai was the guy I remember as he had the racks full of all the Eventide Harmonizers, had his own signature guitars and he was doing stuff to them, and his own pickups and all that kind of thing – him more than anybody I think at that time really.

JP: Definitely. Steve Lukather was another guy that was totally into that. There’s certain guys that just have this head, where you’re just really intrigued by a gear and tweaking. When I was given the opportunity to actually have my own say going into an instrument, it was like opening up this huge door. Fast forward to my relationship with Music Man, which is now in its 17th year, that has taken it to a whole different level. Literally all of my concerns, whims, wishes, desires as far as how an instrument should perform and be built have been not only listened to but realized in this whole line of guitars. It’s pretty incredible, it’s very humbling.

LA: There’s so many signature guitars – and this is no disrespect to signature guitars out there – are from a guy who’s played a Fender Strat all his life, then they go, “Hey, do you want a signature deal?” and he’s like, “Yeah, if you could just make me that in my favorite color, that would be awesome!” and then there’s the signature guitar! Nothing wrong with that at all, but your guitars definitely weren’t “Oh could you just make me this Silhouette in my favorite color?” Do you think you might have been a luthier in another life, in a parallel universe?

JP: Maybe. [laughs] I was really into art when I was younger. I used to draw and paint, and I was into mathematics and stuff. So there’s always been a part of me, a creative side and a complex side. I guess that’s kind of what led to me – to answer an earlier question – being into this kind of progressive music. It’s like part of my brain wanted to be challenged.

LA: So what have we got here that’s most similar to the first JP that you would have done?

JP: This would be the most similar – this is a 16. All these guitars started with this kind of shape: the double cutaway, super-strat shape. The big signature from the first JP was this arm slot thing. I’m really into how can not only the guitar, but all the gear that I use and play (even down to the pick) how can that help me as a player? When you’re playing on stage everything’s magnified. You have lights in front of you, people in front of you, you’re playing, it’s loud, you want to be as comfortable as you can. I notice all these tiny little details. So one of the things we did is this arm scoop; when I was playing, I didn’t want my arm to be pushed out like if you were playing an acoustic or a Les Paul. I wanted my arm to be flat and so we had this great R&D moment where Sterling Ball put some hand cream on my arm, and then I played the guitar and the mark that it left was the angle. That was where to start this angle. We started with the JP6 and went on from there and developed into the BFR. Later on the anniversary series, like when I was with Music Man for 10 years we did the JPX; we changed the body shape a little bit and then it turned into a JP11 and 12.

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LA: The Majesty is quite a departure isn’t it? Is the first one that they [said], “Just tell us what you want”? Because this is a cool looking guitar.

JP: It is thank you I’ll tell you the story behind it. Over the course of 17 years, we developed certain things about the guitar through R&D – meaning me playing live or being in the studio and saying, “I wish this was like this.” A lot of those decisions have been consistent on all the models. One of the first things we did, just for a little history, is I’m all about ergonomics, so I wanted the controls to be like in the arc of my hand. That’s why they’re laid out this way in a curve, that’s why this toggle switch is on an angle and not straight up and down, and even the piezo magnetic control up here. So everything is in this sweep – that was the first thing. Things like the neck carve, the fret size, the fretboard radius – these are things that kind of changed and got tweaked ‘til eventually they were just perfect. Even the whammy bar that we designed.

Once we got to that point and everything was perfect, I really wanted to do a neck-through. Up to until the Majesty, everything was the bolt-on. So I had this idea for a neck-through model, and I drew this thing out. I called it the ‘Stallion’ – I figure I’m Italian, I’m from New York, let’s call it the ‘Stallion.’ [I] called up Sterling Ball, like, “I got this idea for a guitar” and of course in true Sterling fashion, he’s like, “Yeah, let’s do it,” and so it turned into the Majesty. Now Majesty – a little history – that was the first name of Dream Theater. We were called Majesty. When we were at Berklee and we started, we came up with the name Majesty, and the symbol that’s on the guitar is an M for Majesty. That was the symbol that we use and it turned into our Dream Theater logo for all these years. So that’s what that is. Anyway I thought it would be fitting to call the guitar a Majesty because it kind of tied in the history of the band. So we did this neck this neck-through, and I have to hand it to Drew Montell, the engineer, who, between him and Dudley, drew up the shape for the guitar, sent me drawings and programs and 3D pictures to hone in on the shape, and eventually come up with this unbelievably easy-to-play instrument.

That’s the whole thing about the Majesty: I wanted it to be the easiest guitar on the planet to play. I don’t want anything getting in my way. Even something like upper fret access, when you play large stretches. Everybody kind of thinks about this bottom access, but Sterling was like, “What about the top? As your thumbs going up, it usually has to stop right there. What if we took out this triangle of doom? So it made the guitar have this very unique look. Honestly, when it first came out, the photos were leaked of the guitar online, and a lot of people were like, “That’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen!” All this criticism, we’re kinda like, “Uhhh!” because we were so excited about it. Now that’s gone complete 180, and I get more compliments about this instrument. I think it’s groundbreaking, I think it is a true testament to the dedication of Ernie Ball/Music Man. How those guys are so they’re so focused on the art and the passion of guitar building, and the fact that all these little things that I have about myself and my playing that I want to see in an instrument, the fact that that translates to something that other people say, “I’m so glad you did that, because I love that guitar. It’s made my playing so much better.”

LA: Some of the Dream Theater stuff where there’s obviously clearly a fairly heavy acoustic influence in the way you’re double-tracking acoustic and big acoustic parts. How did you used to get round that before you had the Majesty? Obviously in the studio I guess you just double-tracked everything. But live, how would you get around that?

JP: I remember again going to see Rush and Alex Lifeson would have an Ovation on a stand that he’d go lean over it and play ‘Closer to the Heart’ and then move off of it and jump into the electric. So there was a little bit of that, or I would just not do it. [laughs] I’d play it on the clean sound. One of the great things about these guitars from the beginning and the Majesty has it as well, is it has the piezo system in it, so you could either have complete acoustic sound, you can have magnetic or you can have both. It’s actually something I use a lot, especially when I’m using playing on a clean tone, because what I’ll do in the studio is I’ll layer clean guitars. So left/right, maybe two or four of those, and then I’ll layer the same thing on an acoustic, and we blend it all together. Probably a really good version that would be ‘Pull Me Under’ when you hear that opening of that track – that’s six different guitarists are playing together, and that’s how you have the weight of the acoustic and the chimey-ness of the...

LA: That must be a huge challenge to interpret your album for a live show, when clearly the guitar parts were – all the parts in fairness, but guitar parts particularly – are so multi-layered.

JP: I’ve learned some tricks, because in the studio, what we try to do is just record the guitar as pure as we can. So guitar, cable, amp – mic it up. Any of the effects or post, usually delays, even compression on the clean guitar and you’re using this studio outboard gear and stuff like that. So to emulate that live, even to try to get that double-track type of sound, I had to come up with a way of doing that. Compression you can do a really good compression pedal. The stereo tracking thing you can do with a delay. I’ll split the sound with a seven millisecond delay with no feedback, so it just sounds like your guitar goes here [gestures wide] widens up, that’s a good trick. Using delay in the effects loop and things like chorus will kind of give that big wide sound that emulates that sort of tract.

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LA: When did you first do the seven string thing? I don’t mean with Ernie Ball, I just mean as a player.

JP: That was when we went into the writing sessions for our Awake album, which is our third album. We were in New York City. I got delivered to me a Steve Vai 7-string – that was the only one that was really around. It was black with green pickups, and I picked it up and we wrote ‘The Mirror’, which is on that album. The way that I kind of look at 7-string guitar, and eventually 8 which we’re working on. The way that I approach it is an extended range of the instrument. So anything I would play on a 6-string, if I was doing a line, but it sounded too wimpy. It just gives me more range. I mean, John Myung plays 6-string bass; he’s able to go down there, so why can’t I? [laughs]

LA: I don’t know whether it’s the width of the fretboard when you get to eight, but I start to find that I just can’t hold the thing. The players that I enjoy listening to that seem to get the most out of 8-strings are almost like the Stanley Jordan-type player, where it’s not really traditional guitar anymore. It’s almost like playing the piano on the guitar. I often think with an 8-string it’s like, “Why don’t you tune the 7-strings down?” But you’re quite comfortable with that wider border?

JP: Well I don’t know, because I haven’t played one. This is my plan: in the same way back in 1994 when that album came out – when I got that first 7-string for the first time – literally in the studio, in front of the guys, “Hey check this out!” We started writing, and that music came out of me playing that guitar. I wanna approach the 8-string the same way. So it’s something we’re developing now. There’s no schedule for it. When it happens one day and I get it, I want to be in the studio, pick it up, and start writing, see what happens, and not really think too much about it. I think of it just kind of as an extension of the range of the instrument.

LA: What’s next for you and Dream Theater and other projects going on? What’s the future?

JP: Well, Dream Theater, right now we’re currently on tour, as I said before celebrating Images and Words, which came out when I was half my age 25 years ago. [laughs] We’re taking that throughout Europe. We just finished a bunch of UK dates. We’ll be in Asia, we’ll be in the US, and that’ll take us through the year. In August of this year, I have my first ever guitar camp. It’s called John Petrucci’s Guitar Universe, and it has a collection of some of the most insanely talented guitar players. So it’s me – I’m not including myself in them – but me, Tony MacAlpine, Tosin Abasi, Devin Townsend, Rusty Cooley, Andy James from the UK here, Andy McKee, Jason Richardson – a ridiculous amount of talent. I think the max capacity is 200. It’s August 7th to 11th in Glen Cove, Long Island, New York, which is not too far from where I grew up. It’s on the North Shore, a bit further west in part we call the Gold Coast because it’s filled with mansions and things like that. It’ll be four days of madness of instruction, of hanging out, barbecue. When I think about the musicianship and the talent and the camaraderie that’s gonna take place, that’s gonna be so cool. So I’m really looking forward to that and that’ll be in August and then Dream Theater will continue on in the fall with this tour, and we’ll probably be in the studio next year.

LA: So the 8-string concept album comes out... [laughs]

JP: Yeah, right. It all depends on the timing, if it links up. I think we got our fill of concept album with the last. The Astonishing was our last album which was a huge, huge project that took many years in the making – not only in making the album, but in the tour and in developing the production for that tour. It was something that was really rewarding, but so much work and time went into that. So the next one will be non-conceptual, probably heavy and use a lot of shred.

LA: Three minute pop songs! [lots of laughs]

JP: Really! We’re gonna get back to playing some metal.