John Petrucci, James LaBrie update from studio

James LaBrie: John and I are at the studio. We've been here for one week and it is going sensational. Everybody is in the one room and we're all interacting with one another. I gotta tell you that if the first week is any indication of where this album is going, you're in for a treat!

John Petrucci: Yeah, the vibe is really cool, the hang is cool, the atmosphere, the inspiration. It's been great; there's a lot of ideas flowing. It's already been really productive, only a week in.

JL: Not to mention just the style of the music, which I think a lot of people will stand up and applaud at this point. There's a heaviness to it, there's an aggression to it. But you mentioned something earlier when we were talking about this and you said, what was it? The five...

JP: [laughs] “The five pillars of DT.” I think everyone's on the same page with the type of record this is gonna be. So far the music is heavy, it's progressive, its melodic, it's shredding, and it's also epic. So it has all those elements which [are] the five pillars of Dream Theater, if you wanna call it that.

JL: The whole thing is that everyone is feeling it and there's such an incredible synergy going on here. This environment that we're in, this particular studio – and no we're not revealing to you what studio – but it's just it's so conducive to what we're trying to attain.

JP: Yeah. And the cool thing is everybody is contributing. We're fired up with all our gear as a band, so it's a real big live sound. We kind of get an idea when we're writing [of] what things really feel like to play and whether the grooves are powerful or whatever; whether it really is hitting us and making the hairs on our arms stand up. Just to give you a little insight on how we're doing this and what we'll be doing for the next couple of months, we have all the gear set up – all of our live gear – and we're basically going through this kind of neat little board here that have set up. It's a very simple thing, but all the instruments are pretty much direct. Actually the cab clones on the Boogie sound unbelievable. We only have four mics on the drums and as we complete a section or a song, we get it to where we can all play – it as hard as it is however many takes we have to get – and we get like a really solid, live demo out of it. We're also multitracking, so we'll take that multitrack and we mix that down, so we have a pretty good quality demo. Then our engineer will then take that and prep it for tracking. So he'll prep it for ProTools, so when it's time to track and overdub, we’ll be all set to do that.

JL: That's the beauty, though. You're laying it down, you're recording it, and then we got a reference mix. So we know right away – is it hitting us the same way that it felt when it was going down? Then you're able to either adjust, go back, rethink it, or it's great and we can just move on. So it's a very positive situation and very productive.

JP: Exactly. We're having a lot of fun. These demos sound really good actually. We’re eating a lot of food, we're hanging out, we're laughing.

JL: I think I'll go to the gym every day!