John Petrucci, Jimmy T interview

Roie Avin: We're talking with John Petrucci and Dream Theater engineer Jimmy T. We're talking about the sound of the guitars and how you approach recording the new album. But first, why don't you tell everybody a little bit about Jimmy and what his role is.

John Petrucci: Sure. Well, I love the fact that he’s just Jimmy T. You don’t have a last name.

Jimmy T: No, it’s strictly Jimmy T.

JP: It’s to the point that Mrs. T is calling you Jimmy T.

JT: And we call her Mrs. T.

JP: So Jimmy T is an invaluable member of the Dream Theater team, I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but he started off as being our assistant in the studio on last two Dream Theater albums. Since then, he actually came onboard as a live crew member and he was running our record rig, our Pro Tools rig, and everything that had to do with that. That was especially important on The Astonishing tour – that was the first time you joined us on the road because we had a lot at stake running that show. Everything was tied in via time code, as far as the video and the sound and the orchestra going – it was insane. So he ran that impeccably. Then when we decided to do this album in the way we’re doing it, where we would just shack up in this remote place and just really wanted to focus on writing and not so much recording. We were like, “You know what, Jimmy T would be the perfect guy to set us up.” And he’s come up through the ranks. And he actually did a whole bunch of things in between that, different projects. We cut ‘Xanadu’ for the Rush, A Farewell To Kings 40th anniversary thing – you recorded that. So we knew that he was talented. He did a bunch of personal projects for me. I’ve heard his mixes, and was like, “You know what, it’s time.” And so we decided to make him the sole engineer for the new record.

RA: So talk briefly about your approach to setting up in here, recording, what are you using, without getting too technical for people watching, but what's the setup back here?

JT: Well, I would say that the most important part of this setup was we started with a writing rig. What was different about this than past records was we wanted a very basic writing rig.

We didn't want real studio equipment. So we got consumer/prosumer type devices to just get two track mixes out to me so that I can review and prep for a real studio.

This room [referring to the room with the mixing equipment they’re in for the interview] was a bedroom to Mike Mangini, and it wasn’t until I got the phone call from John once they finished writing the record, which was a month early – so this was early July – and he said, “Can we do the record here?” This room wasn’t set up for that at all at the time, and I just said, “Yeah, sure!” Then right after that everything changed. So, this room now being the control room is set up with Pro Tools HD rig, a good amount of outboard for tracking this band because they're large, mainly Rupert Neve, and a bunch of speaker sets so we can review our work.

RA: So there was no desk in here?

JP: No, this is his desk.

JT: Yeah, this is my personal desk, this is the band’s computer, these are our monitors, speakers, headphones...

JP: We made a few purchases. We purchased this couch; there was no studio couch. I mean, this is an absolutely gorgeous studio. It’s all pre-wired with all the connections and everything, but there was just no gear in here. The original reason why we wanted to come to a place like that is because when we’re writing and simultaneously recording, we tend to get bogged down with the recording process – the sound, the takes and everything – it takes forever. All I wanted to do was just write, get a quick demo down, and move on to the next song, and not get bogged down by that process. And that worked out perfectly.

RA: Yeah, it helped speed up the writing.

JP: Yeah, and that's why we were able to do that in the time that we did, not in any rush or compromising anything.

RA: So for you, in terms of generally your guitar sound and what you're looking for, you play down there, your setup is underneath us with all the main gear. When you come up here, are you looking to say, “OK, that sounds good to me, let's move with this sound?”

JP: Right. Well, the concept is that it has to sound good at the source. That's my philosophy. I know that if I stand in front of the rig and dial in my sound and play, it sounds awesome. Then it's a matter of capturing that. So when we listen to it on whatever speaker set we're on or headphones, it sounds like my guitar sound, it sounds like my rig. It's not being colored in any sort of way. So that's done by a combination of microphones and EQs and summing them together to get all of the different sonic elements of the sound blended and to be able to get it to sound good.

RA: How many guitars do you layer per track, like on rhythm, let's say?

JP: Rhythm, I do two. So I record one pass, and then I double it, so there's a hard left and a right. So all of the heavy rhythm sounds are done that way. Some other sounds, like cleans and things like that, I might layer several times to get a more dense and washy sound. Solos are just a single track.

RA: Does the music so far to you sound [different] in any particular way because of recording here in terms of sound, acoustics, and everything?

JP: Yeah, there’s a few things. First of all, after writing here and creating what we feel is some really special music that has a really good balance of who we are stylistically and have some fun moments and really get the spirit of the band. We wanted to make sure that we didn’t lose that. That’s why we didn’t move out of here. We were like, “This is an amazing setting, it’s so private, there are no distractions. If we move out of here into an hourly or daily studio or whatever in the city or somewhere, it’s gonna lose the vibe.” So I think first and foremost, the album sounds like this room, it sounds like the spirit of this location. Even the guitar sound, for the first time we blended in a room mic just a little bit to get the flavor of the room in the barn here. Another production thing that I wanted to focus on, is that when we were writing the songs and recording them live, we sounded like Dream Theater playing live as a band, so I didn’t want the recordings to lose that quality, and all of the sudden sound all sleek and polished and everything. So one of the things I did purposefully is that when I’m playing a guitar solo, I didn’t record any rhythm tracks, so it's just the same as if Dream Theater was playing live. Normally on a record, I would record rhythm tracks, but now I did it so [the] keyboards and bass would fill out the background just the same way they would live. And so I think between capturing the room sound on the guitar, especially on the drums, keeping the arrangements more live as far as orchestration, not over-recording parts, not over-orchestrating things like keyboards and stuff like that, I think it really has that solid, live, organic, powerful magic that we started out with.

RA: Is that something that a band starting out might play like that, and then as they continue to make new albums and go to bigger studios, you get this thing where you start adding stuff, and all of a sudden you realize, “Hey, wait a minute, we can scale back to what we used to do and get back to basics”?

JT: It depends on who you’re working with – if you have a vision of bare bones or not. I will say not a lot of bands can make their music sound as big with a single line of lead guitar, but we spent I think, 15 hours capturing tone just to make sure it was as massive as what was happening on the floor. So when you take this big keyboard arrangement, drums, bass, the whole deal, and you're not putting rhythm guitars, that’s also a challenge to still make the section have impact, so that’s why we took a ton of time to make sure the tone was as big as the section but can be less production involved. In this case, you guys had a vision, and a lot of my job was staying out of the way, making it sound good at the source. My job on this end was to be transparent, not turning the knobs too much. If I was, it was a problem, and we would go back and we would review.

JP: But the end result, the guitar tone was ridiculous. The lead sound was so spot on; the drums sounded amazing, bass, keyboards... Jimmy T has a lot of experience, because you record a lot of young bands and different projects. He’s actually in a band himself, he’s a bass player, his band is really badass; they’re called Time King, they’re really good. So he gets it, and I like the way you record your band; two guitar players, it’s a whole different thing. I think it’s about creating space – I think that’s really important. You can make things overly dense. The last record, The Astonishing, it was all about density – we recorded a full orchestra, choir, so many different tracks, 700-and-something tracks to mix.

JT: Yeah, it needed multiple rigs to get the session going. By the time it ended up at mix, it was just out of control.

JP: Yeah, but that was a certain thing; we were going for something larger than life. This was like, we wanted to capture the band in an environment. It’s not a live recording per se, but we wanted to try to keep that energy – we don’t want to lose that – so he did a great job.

JT: There’s not a lot of tricks going in. It’s pretty basic when you break it down, it’s just good songs and arrangements, making decisions like, “Maybe I should sit out” and you’re not competing. When you do a ton of layering, a lot of times things need to be compromised because you’re making space in the mix. The arrangements with this and the production choices, it’s like everyone’s at full tilt at all times because there’s space to do it. And when someone needed attention to their instrument, we chose the right sounds around it to give that player his space.

JP: Right. One of the things that I'm really happy about on this record is that as far as the keyboards are concerned, we really took a more aggressive and, again, I hate to overuse this word, but organic approach. Jordan is an awesome piano player, an awesome organ player, an awesome lead player. And when he just is jamming and improvising, it's amazing. On top of that, obviously, he's a great programmer and he can make these incredible sounds and soundscapes and things. But I wanted to just focus on him as a player. So on a lot of the tracks, there's just a single track of him playing organ against the heavy guitar. Or him playing piano only against a section. Or when it's meant to be orchestrated, there'll just be strings and a little piano. The space that that creates and the rawness and the energy that it retains, it doesn't mask or muffle or mute any of the heaviness that the guitars and drums are bringing. So that's way more of an impact.