Total Recall

Progressive metal veterans Dream Theater are currently on the road playing songs from their recent album, Distance Over Time, as well as celebrating the 20th anniversary of the 1999 album Metropolis Part 2: Scenes From A Memory. We track down Music Man-toting bassist John Myung for an appropriately memorable scene...

“The tour is going amazingly well,” opines Dream Theater bassist John Myung of his band’s current road trip. As he’s not a man prone to exaggeration, or indeed doing anything without extreme care and attention to detail, we know we can trust what he says. “People are digging what we’re doing, and we’re just happy to be playing the 20th anniversary of Scenes From A Memory, as well as splicing in a bit of the past and current catalog in the first set,” he adds. “It’s a long evening – three hours – but it’s been going really well. Everything is dialed in at this point, so we’re looking forward to continuing it over in Europe.”

Three hours of ‘Mustang Sally’ or something equally undemanding would give us finger-ache, so we can’t quite imagine what a set of that duration, comprising bass parts of unforgiving speed and precision, must do to the Myung digits – especially on a tour lasting several months. “My hands are pretty conditioned at this point, but after three shows in a row, they’re begging for a break, for sure,” he concurs. “But usually after a day off they’re good to go. I warm up well, though – there’s no way I could play if I didn’t. I play really slowly for at least an hour and a half before we go on stage. That’s the only way I can prepare my hands to get through three hours of playing, or at a certain point they’ll be fatigued.”

So what’s Myung’s daily routine as Dream Theater power through city after city, we wonder? “We get to the venue about five hours before show time, and in that period I go through all my basses with my tech;’ he explains, adding that there’s an environmental factor here which most of us fail to consider in depth, if at all. “I make sure that the temperature on stage is relative to how it will be at the start of show time, because of the nature of the woods and how the action moves. The biggest challenge for me is just getting the temperatures stable on stage so that there isn’t too big of a move for the neck plate. There are six basses to go through, so I make sure that they’re all sitting well in the environment that they’re in.”

He continues: “One of the basses is tuned up a half-step, so my low B is actually a C, and that’s relative across the neck. We also have songs that are in standard tuning, and then tracks like ‘Paralyzed’ which is a half-step down, and others that are a whole step down. What I’m finding is that my ear is gravitating towards the lower-pitched sounds. There’s definitely something to be said for tuning down; the new songs we’ve added in the low tuning sound really good.”

For the older, fan-favorite songs from Scenes From A Memory, is Myung replicating the original recorded bass parts, or adding a live spin? “For the most part, I’m trying to play what’s on the record – but there are moments when I’m playing parts that I wish I did on the album the first time round!” he says. “I think it’s a matter of perspective. We play these songs with a certain vitality that isn’t there when you’re recording them in a studio, because you’re not thinking along those lines, so there are certain things that I wish I’d played differently. They’ll differ from the album versions. I’ll play certain sections differently, or there are some transitional things that I wish I’d done on the album, but that’s the evolution of a track.

“The initial phase of a song is to demo it in the studio and then record it, and then it starts to evolve as you spend more time with it – that’s one of the things that happen on first or second albums, when you have so much time to refine the songs. You get to record things a little bit differently. When you write these songs you don’t get to test-drive them in the live setting, because you’re behind a monitor or a set of headphones, which gives you an analytical perspective. That’s what makes live music so great – you don’t have the constraints of the studio setting. You capture the initial freshness in the studio, of course. I guess this is what live albums are for, right?”