John Petrucci interview (excerpts)

Do you still practice guitar, and for how many hours a day? What kind of routine do you do?

I still practice; I love playing guitar, it’s a lot of fun, and I love trying to get better. My practice routines usually try to span many different techniques, so I make sure that I stay well-balanced. I do one-note, two-note, three-note, four-note-per-string ideas, arpeggios, legato techniques, things like that. I’ve been doing a lot of guitar playing this year because there’s been a lot of creativity, so I spent many hours in the studio, up to eight-to-ten hours in the studio. I still play a lot, and it’s really important if you want to get better at the instrument. And consistency is the most important thing. That would be my best advice – if you could practice a little each day, it’s better than just saving it up for like one day or the weekend, even if it’s 20 minutes. If it’s six hours – great; but if it’s 20 minutes or a half-hour, or 45 minutes, it’s better to try to be consistent every day with that.

How do you keep memorizing such complex music of Dream Theater? For those who have a low attention span, what should they do?

The Dream Theater music and my solo album music, and even Liquid Tension, I mean, this is complex music, there’s a lot of parts, the songs are long, but I have developed my ability to memorize music over the years. And this is one of those things where I’m not sure if you are sort of born with the ability to do this or you develop it from doing it a lot. In my case, I do it a lot, so my ability to memorize music has greatly grown over the years. Some of the key things that I do is – I listen to the melody of the song because that will kind of guide me to where the song is going next or even pick up on a rhythmical motif. So what I’m trying to say is that it’s more about the connections between the sections of the songs that will help you to memorize what’s coming next. As long as you put in the practice and you can play all the parts, getting those connection points is key. It’s kind of like directions, you know – you don’t necessarily have to pay so much attention while you’re driving on a long road, but you need to know when the next turn is going to come up and if there are landmarks or prompt or something. So it’s very similar – you have to kind of follow those direction points in your mind that will help you to memorize longer songs for sure.

Your solo phrases always make me moving, and I feel that even more so at the concerts. When you have a free area on your solo part, do you prepare phrases beforehand or just improvise?

For me, I really like solo sections in music to be interesting; I like those to be moments where you can hear the instrumentalists do their thing, but not in a way where it gets kind of old or boring. So for me, having those solo sections stemming from improvisation is really important. I guess in general when I’m recording solos on records, I’ll improvise most of it. But if there’s a section that I want to get really technical or very specifically weave throughout a certain chord change or develop a certain technique, then I will work on that, work it out, practice it and put that into the song as well. But the solos are mostly stemmed from improvisation, and I do love those moments, especially live, to have long extended solo moments and just kind of go for it. I think the art of building a solo is something that players develop over time, and I love doing it – I love having the opportunity to stretch and build something from something that’s really intimate and sensitive into something that could be an incredible frenzy.

Asked if the rumors of “an eight-string Majesty” is being made are true, Petrucci replied

My signature models with Ernie Ball Music Man – and it’s been 20 years with Ernie Ball Music Man, so that’s unbelievable, it’s been an incredible relationship – but they all come in a six-string and a seven-string version. One of the things I’ve talked about for a while now – there have been rumors, the rumors are correct – is the developing of an eight-string model. Why not add one more string? So, specifically, we are going to come out with an eight-string Majesty model, and that is something that’s being developed, it’s been a project that we’ve been working on – myself and the engineers that are in Ernie Ball Music Man. And it should be ready in some form, even if it’s a prototype, for me to be able to use on the next Dream Theater album. I’m looking forward to that. It’s going to be – as all the Ernie Ball music man instruments are – it’s gonna be amazing. It will be the best, it’ll be an incredible eight-string. For me, I don’t play eight-string guitar – I never really played one, so I’m looking it as an opportunity to experiment with a brand-new instrument, very much the way when I got my first seven-string was when Dream Theater was in the studio writing for the ‘Awake’ album. And I got a seven-string, and we wrote ‘The Mirror’ right off the bat. I’m looking for that same kind of inspiration from the eight, so I’ll treat it, the development of the guitar, from my own perspective, as a player, and I’m looking forward to that. Ernie Ball Music Man JP signature eight-string, coming sometime soon.

You have been constantly releasing different types of guitar picks. Do you use all of them depending on your needs?

For the longest time I have been using a Dunlop Jazz III pick – I discovered this a long time ago. The Jazz III shape, it’s a stiff pick, it has a point to it, and it’s a smaller pick. Now more recently, I forgot when we did the first signature one, I started doing a signature pick with that same company, Dunlop, based off of the Jazz III shape, and we came out with the first JP signature pick. And you know, it had a polished tip, it continues with the tradition of having a point and being a stiff material. I’m always experimenting with different guitar picks, probably to the point where it drives everybody crazy around me. Most guitar players do this, I know I’m not alone. If you ask your buddy to check out their pick collections, probably like in a bucket or a drawer, there’s hundreds of picks – guitar players are just into this kind of nerdy aspect. But the cool thing is I’ll stumble upon something that I really enjoy and then have a conversation with Jimmy Dunlop and the people there, and the great engineers, and talk about the possibility of developing a new version of the pick, just to have another tool in the picking toolshed. And sometimes it comes from them too, where they’ll present something new. It kind of happened with the NYC pick, which is the Primetone version, it has a bevel on it. They were coming out with this, and we made one for myself that has a custom bevel that I developed. The Flow pick as well, I started getting into gypsy guitar playing and looking into thicker picks, and that Flow pick is a 2mm, does something different. The whole ‘Distance Over Time’ record was recorded using that pick.