John Petrucci’s ‘Aha’ Moment

John Petrucci is on a mission. On thirteen Dream Theater studio albums, starting with 1989’s ‘When Dream and Day Unite’ and right on through last year’s epic The Astonishing, the guitarist has made good on his goal of expanding the boundaries of progressive metal. But throughout that body of work he’s been chasing another dream, one ruled by seemingly unattainable guitar sounds.

“This is something I keyed into early on,” Petrucci explains. “As soon as I got into the guitar and could play a bit, and I got my first electric guitar and amp, I was right in tune with sound. It was totally something I just gravitated toward. What a guitar sounds like went hand in hand with the notes being played and the music itself.”

Petrucci sat down with Music Aficionado recently to talk about his “tone mission” – how his earliest influences and the amps he played through helped to shape his sonic sensibilities, and how his quest for the ultimate guitar sound led him to design his own signature amp with Mesa/Boogie, the JP-2C.

When did you first become really aware of guitar sound? Not so much the playing, but actual guitar sound itself.

I noticed it very early. As soon as I got into the guitar and could play a bit, and I got my first electric guitar and amp, I was right in tune with sound. It was totally something I just gravitated toward. What a guitar sounds like went hand in hand with the notes being played and the music itself.

Which guitarists stuck out to you as having a really good sound?

Back then I was listening to Ozzy, so there was Randy Rhoads, and I liked the Scorpions and stuff like that. And Eddie Van Halen. Those were the guys who had really good tones in that era when I was a young teenager. Stevie Ray Vaughan stuck out in a different way, obviously, with a more bluesy tone. As far as the more rock stuff, there was Metallica. I listened to all these records and was like “What are they doing? How are they getting that sound?”

So it was all a big mystery for a while.

A total mystery. There were things I heard that didn’t even sound like guitar to me. I didn’t know enough about what they were doing to comprehend the science and technique behind it. Eruption is a good example. Eddie had a phaser and a delay on it and he’s doing the tapping technique, but I didn’t know what he was using at the time. I couldn’t see what he was doing. There were no YouTube videos or anything. I couldn’t figure it out. How was he getting this great flowing, flourish of notes? And what’s that swirling sound in the background? I didn’t get it. I loved guitar harmonies, too. I listened to Boston and Tom Schultz, and I had no idea how those sounds were possible.

What were some of your early guitar and amp pairings? And when did things start crystallizing a bit, where you were able to say, “I think I’m getting this sound thing down”?

When I discovered Mesa/Boogie amps, that’s when it started crystallizing. Those amps really opened the door for me to how the sounds I was hearing could be a reality.

Why those amps? A lot of young guys start out with Fenders or Marshalls.

Oh, sure. Before Boogies, when I was just a young teenager, I had a Peavey combo practice amp and a Marshall combo, and I’d go around with things like that. I was happy enough at the time with them – ”OK, I sound good.” But there was something else I was hearing. Even then with those amps, I would try to emulate what I heard, to the best of my ability. I was shaping the little dials on the Peavey to try to sound like Randy Rhoads, or I’d use a Marshall. I got an MXR Distortion Plus and I played with that – ”OK, I’m getting close to that sound…”

There just seemed to be an aura surrounding the Boogie amps. It was a reputation thing. I was teaching in a music store at one point, so I was in that environment with gear and stuff. It was always like, “Oh, man, if you want to a real tone, you gotta to get a Boogie.” People were coming in to get Boogies, and so eventually I said to myself, “I’ve got to check this thing out.” And I remember going to see a band in Long Island, a Queensryche-ish type band, and the guitar player was using a Boogie – it might have been a Mark IIC – and he had the best sound I ever heard. So there was the reputation, but I was also hearing it and seeing it.

Around this time, you started calling up Boogie to order gear.

Yeah, the sound started to come together now. I got a little inheritance money when my grandfather passed away, and I said, “I know exactly what I want to with that money. I’m not saving up for college; I’m going to buy gear.” I got a rack, a Mesa Quad Preamp, a stereo simul-class power amp – I forget the name of it. I just ordered the whole thing – a Mesa MIDI Matrix pedalboard. I was probably 17 or 18. I had gone to Berklee already, and the band was like, “Oh, we’re going to leave Berklee and do this.” Buying all the gear happened around the same time as that.

Getting the Mark IIC+ was a real “aha” moment for you.

It was, yeah. Master of Puppets came out, and I discovered that amp was used on the album. Then it was like, “All right, I got to get one of those.” I met my friend Mark Snyder at Mesa. He was heading up an East Coast satellite office in Brooklyn. I just called him and he said, “Forget about everything else. You’ve got to check out this amp.” He had a nice collection, and he turned me on to the Mark IIC+, and that was it – I was hooked forever.

What about that amp struck you as something you could use?

The sound became something I could visualize and work with. I could see these big things – ”It sounds like you’re standing on top of a mountain with the eagles flying by” – but with the C+, I could do what was in my head. I started getting into heavier music like Metallica, and I knew that I needed this aggressive sound, but I was also really into playing. I was into Steve Morse and Al Di Meola, guys who had strong picking techniques. I wanted the notes to come out – the articulation.

I discovered Yngwie, too, and he had that fluidity, you know? So I needed a certain type of gain from the amp to go there. The IIC+ does all of that stuff. It does that Metallica heavy-percussive thing, and it has the liquidy gain for the articulation.

How would you say your live sound has evolved?

My live sound has evolved to a point where I could’ve only have dreamed as a kid who ordered the first Boogies to the point where I have my own signature at C+, the JP-2C. Talk about evolution. Randall Smith designed a C+ reissue with my name on it, but it’s been upgraded with features that the other ones never had. That’s how it’s evolved, but over the years, using Boogie on tour and in my live sound, I tried all different things. I tried really big rigs in the studio where it was like a Rectifier for this part, a C+ for this solo, a Boogie combo for this part. So then I said, “Well, let me bring all those out on tour. I’ve had rigs that have had an amp switcher – a Mark IV, a C+, a Rectifier rack mount, things like that. I’ve done that method, and those are great. I’ve also tried to shrink it down by using a Mesa TriAxis preamp – you can have all those sounds programmed into it, and that shrinks your rig from a 22 to a 10 space or something like that. I’ve done things where I’d focus on only one amp and do a wet-dry-wet – I had a big rig with Road Kings. I really got into the Boogie Road Kings, which is their mothership Rectifier series. I had this rack that had two Road Kings and wood cases, and there was a third one underneath, with drawers on the side.

Through all of these experiments and setups, did you always feel as though you had nailed the live sound, or did you ever feel like you were losing the plot?

No, it never got far away from that. It was always fun, all of these things I’ve been fortunate to experiment with. On my website, johnpetrucci.com, you can see some of the rigs that Mark and I have built. Every one of them was different, and they all put a smile on my face. I had a C+ rig that was all just classic C+ amps, G3 rigs with Mark IVs, and what’s that one that Andy Timmons uses? The Lone Star! They were all wonderful. The latest one, the latest few, my tech, [Matt] “Maddi” [Schieferstein], has built, and he’s done an amazing job. You can see the one I’m touring with on my site.

A lot of guitarists treat live and studio sound as two separate animals. To my ears, though, you seem to take your studio sound to the stage.

Totally. Absolutely. In the studio, let’s say I record a clean sound for a part; I’ll double track or multi-track it, and I have a chorusing on it. Then I back that up with a double track of acoustic, and that creates this wonderful arpeggiated clean sound. I try to do that live with the Ernie Ball Music Man guitars. The piezo systems through the Boogies give you this incredible clean sound. So by using those guitars and amps, I can create this beautiful clean sound where I’m trying to emulate what I did in the studio by multi-tracking acoustic.

What about the interaction of the speaker and the amp? You’re using just 1x12 cabinets right?

Actually, I’m not – I’m back to 4x12s. For part of the tour I was using 1x12s, and it felt a little… they have a focused sound. For live, I tend to crank it up, and I wanted more of that beefy 4x12 thing, so we switched to that, which I prefer. Another thing about trying to emulate the studio sound live, we even use the same mics. We’re using Mojave FET 301s and Royer 121 Studio mics. It’s the same setup as in the studio.

It seems as if you keyed in to your sound very early on in your career. For a lot of players, it takes them years and years to find their signature sound.

It’s hard to get to that point, and it’s been a mission of mine, a tone mission. Tone Mission is actually a company I started – I like using that term. It’s been a tone mission of mine to get the sound that’s in my head out into the world.

As far as searching for the tone and trying to get an identity, I’ve always had this philosophy that all of the pieces of your puzzle have an influence on the other ones. If you have a great guitar that sounds really great, and you put it through an amplifier that sounds really great, that’s how you get your pure tone, your pure sound. Anything else you add into that can and will affect it. So that enhances it.

That’s a philosophy I’ve always had, where you can’t take crappy gear and stick it into a situation where you have good gear. You’re only as good as the weakest link, whether that’s your cable or the speakers, or if it’s pedal that’s noisy or one that sucks out your tone. I got really used to hearing things the right away. Knowing how things should sound, you can plug in a pedal and go, “Something doesn’t sound right. Take that thing out. Oh, there it is.”

Some players, once they find their signature sound, they try to turn it upside down. You read interviews where they say, “I don’t want to sound like myself.” You never really seem to do that.

Not really. It’s stayed in my head, this sound. It’s how I imagine it. The goal is to always try to sound like that. There are times when I’ve experimented. On the Falling Into Infinity album, we had lots of different Boogies, and we even had a guitar synth thing. [Producer] Kevin Shirley and I were trying all different things, and it was fun, but at the end of the day I was like, “I just like the pure sound. I like plugging into my amp, recording it, tracking it left and right, and it sounds so huge.” So I wanted to stay there. You work so hard to define your sound, and it’s an extension of your personality. It’s as much a part of your music as the music itself.

You mentioned some of the classic guitarists who influenced your sound, but who are some newer players who you think really get it right?

That’s hard for me because some of the influences of my sound are collective. I like certain qualities that this guy or that guy has. It sounds like a simple question, but it’s hard to answer. You can’t listen to the first Van Halen record without being in love with that sound. And I can’t listen to ‘Master of Puppets’ without feeling the same thing. Those are some of the classic ones that influenced me and so many other guys. I mean, there’s David Gilmour – talk about a guy who’s all tone and feel. Oh, and Alex Lifeson with Rush. He’s been a huge part of my playing and my sound. Those big chords with the chorusing on them? Unbelievable. He made a three-piece like Rush sound so massive. I love his sound on the first Rush album on songs like Working Man.

And then there’s Joe Satriani. Joe’s tone is uniquely expressive, no matter what he’s using. He has the ears and the knowledge to get what he’s hearing out of his gear. His sound is always big, bold and beautiful.

Of some newer guys, I like Mark Morton from Lamb of God and Peter Loeffler from Chevelle. They’ve both used the Mesa Mark IV on their records. Mark’s tone is really rich and punchy, and his articulation is spot on, especially when he’s playing the type of tight metal riffs he does so well with Lamb of God. Peter’s tone through the Boogie with his baritone tuned to Bb is really inspiring to me. His sound with Chevelle is aggressive and very distinct. It helps make that band sound enormous.