John Petrucci Reaches Terminal Velocity

Dream Theater’s resident lord of the strings uses the lockdown as an opportunity to record some sick instrumentals – with a little help from former bandmate Mike Portnoy

By Jon Widererhorn

In early 2020, when Dream Theater were touring Europe to celebrate both their latest album, Distance Over Time, and the 20th anniversary of 2000’s Scenes From a Memory, John Petrucci had no immediate plans to finish writing his second solo album, which he has worked on sporadically between Dream Theater activity over the past few years. At the time, there was hardly time to think, let alone put together a schedule for anything that didn’t involve his main gig. The band was scheduled to remain on the road through at least the end of April and then begin discussing the follow-up to Distance Over Time. But then, like every other touring group, Dream Theater were forced to ground operations in late February due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Not only were the musicians unable to play shows, they couldn’t practice together or work on new material since Petrucci is in Long Island, New York, which, in March, was near ground zero for the Corona virus and all the band members were adhering to CDC guidelines, wearing masks and socially distancing. It didn’t help that vocalist James LaBrie was at home in Toronto. And the band didn’t want to work together digitally.

Effectively isolated and practically quarantined, Petrucci took the hiatus as an opportunity to return to his home studio and finish Terminal Velocity, his first solo album since 2005’s Suspended Animation. Like the former, the new release is a melodic and deftly played showcase of virtuosic instrumental songwriting and technical guitar excursions. The album easily could have reflected Petrucci’s frustration with the infectiousness and danger of the Coronavirus, yet Petrucci treated his time in the studio as an escape from the outside world, a panacea for the disorientation he felt when he stepped back upstairs and turned on the news, and an opportunity to write spirited, exciting songs that offer listeners a diversion from the daily chaos.

“I think the turmoil that was going on is buried in the energy of the music, but when I was in the headspace of creating, I just flipped a switch and entered this zone where everything was all about the music,” Petrucci says. “So I think the songs are exciting instead of aggressive and it’s really positive for the most part. The last thing I wanted to do was to have my first solo album in 15 years be this negative, doom-and-gloom bummer of a record.”

Ensconced in his studio with all of his gear, Petrucci nonetheless kept his setup simple. He played the entire album using his signature Ernie Ball Music Man guitars, including the 2019 Emerald Green Enchanted Forest and the Majesty Purple Nebula equipped with his DiMarzio Rainmaker Neck and Dream catcher Bridge pickups. As much as Petrucci likes seven-strings, he wrote and played just one song, ‘Temple of Circadia,’ on a signature seven-string. Regardless of which guitar he used, he plugged into a JP Mesa/Boogie and a 4x12 Boogie cabinet and Neve preamps.

When it came to songwriting, Petrucci wanted the guitar parts to feature memorable melodic motifs and atmospheric experimentation between the abundant leads. While he was intent on writing songs that would wow crowds at clinics and G3 tours, melody was always at the forefront of his mind. “I love songs, and songs usually have vocals,” Petrucci says. “So, when I write an instrumental, the guitar melody takes the place of the vocals. They become the cohesive structures that separate the verses, choruses and bridges and soloing. If the songs didn’t have that melodic focus and structure, and it was just all soloing and all noodling, it would get really boring.”

While Petrucci is proud of Terminal Velocity, which ranges from the blues swagger of ‘Out of the Blue’ to the frantic guitar sprint of the title track, he’s aware that Dream Theater fans – even those who enjoy the music – will likely view it as a placeholder until the next Dream Theater album. And that’s fine with him. With no hesitation he explains that he’d rather have remained on the road with Dream Theater and kept Terminal Velocity on hold until he had small windows between band tours and writing sessions to get to work on the project.

“People ask me why it took 15 years for me to make another solo album,” he says. “The answer is because I never had the time to devote to fully getting it done. To be honest, it wasn’t necessarily a pressing thing for me, so I worked on it gradually over time. But I’m really happy with it and I’m glad I did it.”

Petrucci’s 2005 solo album also stemmed more from pragmatism than divine inspiration. In 2001, the guitarist was invited to join Joe Satriani’s G3 tour. Petrucci was thrilled with the offer, but he lacked original instrumental material to play onstage. So he quickly wrote a batch of songs and debuted them on the tour. “I played the songs I wrote and did a Dream Theater instrumental, and that gave me enough for a 45-minute set,” he says. “It was only after I did that when I decided to complete an album’s worth of solo material and get that out – but that was really an afterthought.”

He took a similar approach for Terminal Velocity. Four out of the nine songs – ‘Gemini,’ ‘Happy Song,’ ‘Glassy-Eyed Zombies’ and ‘The Way Things Fall’ were originally written for 2007 G3 with Satriani and Paul Gilbert. Petrucci also played the material at guitar clinics over the years and at the John Petrucci Guitar Universe Camp, which he launched in 2018. The oldest track on the new solo album, ‘Gemini,’ is from a nearly forgotten demo of a song he first played at clinics in the early Nineties. “I also used a little bit of ‘Gemini’ on my [2002] instructional video Rock Discipline,” he says. “And I played it live for a while so people might recognize it from a YouTube homemade video.”

‘Glassy-Eyed Zombies’ and ‘Happy Song’ also can be tracked down on social media in rough form. ‘The Way Things Fall,’ however, was composed for G3 but didn’t make the cut and has never been played live. “I forgot about that song for a while,” Petrucci says. “Then when I was gathering my thoughts for this record, I found a fully demoed version of it and I thought it was really cool. I don’t know why I never played it before now.”

To record the older songs, Petrucci replayed them along with a newly programmed drum track. Then he added bass. Instead of retracking guitars for the final tracks, Petrucci pasted his guide parts directly into the songs without any overdubs. For the remaining five songs on Terminal Velocity, Petrucci took a deep dive into his invaluable riff bank, which contains rhythms, arpeggios and lead fragments he has recorded over the decades on audio and digital home recorders, answering machines and cell phone voice boxes. In the past, he has raided the bank for Dream Theater, yet he found it especially useful for Terminal Velocity. Using what he calls “song seeds” to start the songs, Petrucci worked with his engineer, James “Jimmy T” Meslin, who programmed beats that further inspired the guitarist’s creativity.

“We did a passage at a time and then moved onto the next one,” Petrucci says. “Doing it that way is a lot of fun because you’re working with all these parts, but you don’t really know where the song is going. So everything just develops along the way.”

The icing on the cake came when ex-Dream Theater drummer Mike Portnoy – who hadn’t been on a record with Petrucci since 2010 – came in and recorded directly over Petrucci’s final complex guitar parts. That flipped the script on standard band operating procedure, in which the drummer records either to a click or over scratch tracks before the guitarist lays down his final rhythms. Portnoy was certainly more than up for the task.

“It was an interesting way to work,” Petrucci says. “I had never done anything like that before, but with the pandemic going on, we had to be resourceful. Mike banged out all his parts in six days, which is amazing since there are a lot of weird tempo changes and crazy arpeggios on there as well as a lot of different musical styles. And his playing is so lively and spirited and he played with so much energy. The whole experience was great.”

Dream Theater fans hopeful that Petrucci and Portnoy’s collaboration could lay the groundwork for the drummer’s return to the band will likely be disappointed. As much as Petrucci enjoyed working with Portnoy on Terminal Velocity, the drummer will not return to Dream Theater; Mike Mangini remains the man behind the kit. “I know people tend to speculate, but it’s something we never even discussed,” Petrucci says. “I wanted to have Mike [Portnoy] on there just to have a great drummer on my solo album, so why not?” he says, emphasizing that he and Portnoy have maintained a good relationship over the years. “Even though Mike left the band, we’ve always kept in touch and our families have been friends forever. Our wives played in a band together and our kids grew up together so we’ll always be family – just not bandmates.”

Ironically, while the COVID-19 pandemic enabled Petrucci to create the long-awaited followup to Suspended Animation, the virus has virtually ensured he won’t be able to promote the album on the road even after musicians start touring again.

“I’m really glad these songs are out there,” he says. “For now, that’s gotta be enough because the way things are right now, Dream Theater are pushing up our plans to enter the studio. We’ll start on a new record later in the fall. And then, the first opportunity we get, we’ll be back on tour again.”

Inset

Terminal Velocity Track by Track

From the galactic-sounding guitar effects and insistent, propulsive riffing and ear-nagging hooks of the title track to the majestic journey of the album-closer ‘Temple of Circadia’ – which weaves spindly six-string passages between arhyhthmically chugging riffs and incorporates a clean midsection colored with harmony-laden licks – Terminal Velocity is a masterful presentation. It’s a diverse, invigorating illustration of how guitar pyrotechnics can be arranged to create what Frank Zappa called “impossible guitar parts” that neither come across as self-indulgent excursions or detract from the enjoyability of the songs. The rest of the album demonstrates Petrucci’s acumen and agility, whether playing music rooted in blues, Latin music, Eighties metal or thrash. And through it all, Petrucci offers the listener melodic threads to cling to throughout the wild ride.

“With most guitar instrumental music, you can only listen to soloing for so long before you need something else,” Petrucci says. “I felt that these songs had to go somewhere. They have to speak and have a purpose. They have to have a message. And the best way to do that is through melody.”

The guitarist also sought to maintain interest by presenting a wide variety of sonic techniques and compositions filled with unexpected twists and turns. “On most of the songs on this record there will be a part that will sound like a certain type of song, but it’ll go into a section that you’re sort of not expecting stylistically. That always keeps listeners guessing and keeps things interesting.”

Rather than delve into the minutiae of every track, we let Petrucci describe what he was striving for with each individual part of Terminal Velocity – and what happened along the way...

‘Terminal Velocity’

Out of the five new songs, that was the first one I wrote. It was one of those seeds that I had in my files that jumped out at me as soon I went back and heard it. I started playing the main lick and it developed right away into something cool. It’s done backwards with filtering so it gives you this really textured sound. A lot of the guitar on the record is manipulated to create these memorable soundscapes. That riff just sounded like an album opener to me, and it remained the album opener because there was something about it that caught my attention right away.

‘The Oddfather’

It starts with these intervallic chords that come from early Queensrÿche or even Judas Priest. They’re really just two-note chords, and I love them because you can very easily make them diminished chords or inverted chords or minor chords. In this case, when you do that kind of thing over a pedal tone it creates a lot of drama. I do that with Dream Theater a lot as well. As the title ‘The Oddfather’ suggests, I wanted to keep an Italian or Sicilian theme going on that the song hints at, so there’s a lot of super-fast tremolo picking as if the electric guitar were a mandolin – but done with high facility and with lines that run throughout the song.

‘Happy Song’

That’s one I wrote a few years ago and played on G3, and it came from this idea I had at home. The opening pattern prompted the whole song and it almost sounds like a theme for a TV show – or a little bit like a Nineties pop-punk band. But the thing about it is that I wanted it to sound positive. The original title was ‘Cloud 10,’ and I just thought ‘Happy Song’ was more direct. It’s one I hope people will smile at.

‘Gemini’

I wrote that song for clinics around 1993. It’s the oldest song on there, and it was interesting because I had no version to base it off of. I used to bring along a little Yamaha sequencer and play these clinics so I never had an official demo. I scoured the Internet to find the best-sounding quality of a video recording where a guy’s holding a camera in a clinic where people are talking. It was interesting to try to remember what I intended to play and build it into a complete song. There’s a moment in ‘Gemini,’ too where I was playing some acoustic rhythm for the solo section breakdown, and I just started soloing on the acoustic while I was playing the rhythm. I thought, “You know what? This sounds pretty cool!” It was a long solo, so I started improvising and soloing on acoustic and I decided to make half the solo acoustic and then follow it with electric and have it build, almost like an Al Di Meola type of piece with a Latin-y groove to it. And that was very different than the original clinic version, so that was fun. I recorded the acoustic solo on a gypsy jazz guitar that I bought in Germany from Joscho Stephan, who is this German gypsy jazz player and builder.

‘Out of the Blue’

On a record like this, that’s spirited and energetic and technical and is filled with metal parts, it’s always cool to try a melodic idea that stands out and provides a break from the other stuff. This is essentially a blues piece, but there’s a stylistic part in there that breaks it up. It’s a bridge that I played twice and it takes the song out of the blues world and into a more melodic part that’s like my take on Steve Morse’s playing in Dixie Dregs. It’s very thematic and dramatic and then it shifts right back into the blues. So you’re going from a relaxed swing feel to a straighter part, and that demonstrates how you can get so many tones out of the JP Mesa/Boogie amp, not just prog metal. The opening guitar is channel one with a Tube Screamer to break things up, and then I switched to channel two on the amp for the whole blues sound without a lot of gain. You can really hear the sweetness of the notes. That was fun for me because you don’t hear that side of me a lot in Dream Theater, but I like playing in that style because it’s expressive and relaxed in a different way.

‘Glassy-Eyed Zombies’

That’s one of the heavier songs on the album. I tuned the guitars down to D, and it has more shredding in it than a lot of the other songs, so it really shows the metal side of my style. I like that the main melody is sort of quirky in that song and we wanted it to stand out so we took up a bunch of time to get the right sound for that. When I played it, Jimmy T and I would settle on certain delay effects on the guitar and share that information with Andy Sneap [who mixed and mastered], so it was a collaborative process all around. By the time Andy was done with it and I heard it back it was literally, exactly the way I was hearing it in my head and the way I wanted it to sound on the album. And we did that all remotely, so I’ve gotta give Andy a lot of credit for getting everything exactly right. That guy is amazing.

‘The Way Things Fall’

I wrote it during the same period I did ‘Happy Song’ and ‘Glassy-Eyed Zombies,’ but I didn’t do anything with it. I remember rehearsing it for the G3 tour, but it wasn’t working out so I put it aside. I forgot about it for years but it was fully demoed. We loaded the multis of that in and I recorded everything. My favorite part of the song is the acoustic strumming during the verses. I originally had distorted electric guitars left and right, but when I recorded I said, “Why don’t we try muting the electric rhythm guitars and play the electric melody against a strumming acoustic?” There was nothing else on the album like that, so it was just something different where the heavy guitars drop out and the acoustic rhythms and acoustic lead comes in. It’s like a really long and cool jamming session. I always like to get these cool Robin Trower-ish sections in because they’re so much fun. You can rip over them or do something bluesy and more raw or you can make it melodic. You have a lot of flexibility.

‘Snake In My Boot’

I had an idea to do something like this for a long time and I’m so glad I did it. The original idea was to have a single guitar and a kick drum going the whole time so it would almost be like an audience-participation part of the show. I pictured it playing live and like having the audience stomp along or clap, and just having that single guitar drive the whole song. On the album, I developed it a little further from there, but for the most part, there’s just the one guitar.

‘Temple of Circadia’

I wrote the song on a six-string but then I played it on a seven because I thought it would sound heavier, especially when I developed the middle breakdown section, which goes into clean and acoustic guitars and sounds almost like a Metallica-ish, melodic solo section. That just made the song more powerful for me and it screamed “album closer” in the same way that ‘Terminal Velocity’ shouted out “album opener.” Listeners might think there are strings or keyboards during the verses because that’s what it sounds like, but it’s actually a clean guitar part with a crystals [harmony] effect. It’s the same idea as the way I started the record with effects. It came out cool but it’s not like I wanted to avoid having any keyboards on the record. Keyboards are awesome and I would be thrilled if I could play them. But in the couple of instances I was hearing organ or strings in a song it was a fun challenge to figure out how to get those sounds with just guitar. As far as playing it on a seven-string, I’m kind of surprised that it’s the only seven-string song because I love the extended range of a seven-string guitar. Even when you’re playing things that are in a key that fits naturally on a six-string, just the idea that you can go below where you normally would to create riffs and licks and lines is something I really like. I love anything that gives me the ability to paint outside the lines. With an instrumental album, the guitar melody has to guide the melody almost the way a vocalist would do it. So I always try to shape the way it goes so it doesn’t sound like a monotone, boring melody. I’m really conscious of making sure it’s not boring.