John Petrucci interview (excerpts)

David Slavkovic: One of the things that I really wanted to ask you about is you finally used an 8-string guitar on a Dream Theater song on your latest album. And you recently talked about this seamless transition – how you didn’t want to play an 8-string until you got your prototype from Ernie Ball – but as far as getting your tone, you’re talking about an instrument that was pretty much a bass because you’re so low down there. Was it a challenge to get things going with your amps and gear while dealing with these lower frequencies?

John Petrucci: It actually wasn’t a challenge it. What happened was, I had recorded some stuff with the 8-string just through my normal amp settings that I was using on the rest of the record, and it sounded great. But one day I came in and my engineer had said, “Hey, I got out another head and I just tweaked it a little bit.” I think he had re-amped it to see what I thought. And he did make some small adjustments, anything you’d have to do, like just carve out a little bit of low end or add some more gain or take some middle out. Whatever he did just slightly adjusted it, and I was like, “Well, that sounds awesome!” [laughs] So it wasn’t at all a challenge for me, because I didn’t really have to do it. [laughs] I walked in, and he had made those adjustments, and it sounded killer. So that’s what’s great about having great people surrounding you doing great work so that, part was easy. [laughs]

DS: Before the album came out, there was a lot of talk how there’s been an 8-string guitar on there. Knowing how a lot of modern progressive metal musicians are using 8-string guitars, extended-range guitars, did you feel any pressure to start using this, or was it just the thing where it was something that you liked and you wanted to try it?

JP: I didn’t feel any pressure. I was interested in what it would be like in the same way that I was interested at the time and playing a 7-string. It sounds really cool when you extend the range of a guitar or even if you tune your guitar differently. I played baritone guitars in the past where the low note’s an A or B-flat. There’s something that’s cool about that sound. But if you noticed, even in the times I’ve used 7-string, baritone, drop C – all these different things, and even with the 8-string – I don’t really change my style to go with what you would expect out of that guitar. In other words, I didn’t get an 8-string and be like, “OK, now all of a sudden, I have to write music that sounds like all of this other music.” I just got an 8-string and I wanted to write the way I write. So that was what I did. I didn’t get one to chase a style or want to be part of a scene or anything because that’s not authentic. That’s not the way I am; it’s not the way I work. I think of it this way, if you look at a piano, there’s so many lower notes you can go to so it’s kind of fun to be able to have that range on a guitar. But not to chase anything or try to mimic anything or imitate anything that I wasn’t feeling was gonna come out of me genuinely. Because you’d see right through that if, all of a sudden, I started writing 8-string stuff that sounded like all these different bands. It’d be like, “OK, this doesn’t sound like Dream Theater, this doesn’t sound like John.”

DS: Absolutely. Now after all these years, your playing seems to be getting better and better. And I really wouldn’t need to ask you – how much do you practice at this point in your career?

JP: Thank you for saying that. It’d be horrible if my playing was getting worse and worse! [laughs] It’s good to take in the positive direction. I’m always practicing. We’re on tour right now, on the DreamSonic tour with Devin Townsend and Animals as Leaders. We play a two-hour show and I’m still practicing during the day a few hours. And sometimes you gotta watch it – sometimes I over-practice and then you’d go walk on stage and then you’re tired for this gig. I love playing guitar so that always draws me to the instrument. But I am always physically drawn to wanting to be able to do this stuff that I write and that Dream Theater writes. In order to be able to do that, you have to be conditioned all the time. You can’t just get lazy and not practice and then expect, “Oh yeah, I’m gonna play a concert of my solo material.” It’s like, “No, you’re not!” [laughs] That stuff needs to be worked on daily. It’s a challenge.

DS: While we’re on the topic, there’s this still ever-present discussion between shredders and those who play with feel. A lot of people would tend to say that faster, technical playing and prog music lack emotion. But do you think there’s sort of a middle ground where both this virtuosic shredding and feel can work hand-in-hand and do something together?

JP: Absolutely. There’s so many players that do, there’s so much music that exemplifies that. If it was just exercise-type drilled, practicing, turned into a song, yeah, you might say that’s pretty drab and it doesn’t really go anywhere emotionally. But most guitar players that can shred don’t do that. Most of the good ones who could write have the ability to take the music anywhere they want to. And part of that is kind of like being a classical musician. If you listen to classical music and the symphonies and things that were made – all those musicians – they had to be able to have the skills to take the music wherever the composer wanted it to be, and sometimes that was to really sensitive places that took a lot of control and a lot of dynamic playing. And sometimes it was really tactical places where you had to be on top of your game and be able to play these crazy lines. So that’s the way I look at it. It’s being able to do all of that, it increases your ability to be expressive as a musician, because you could take it to all these different places. I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive. I think that’s a really silly argument. I kind of never understood that – that there’s one or the other or if somebody has a technical ability that that means that they’re not an emotional player. I think that’s pretty BS. I really do.

DS: Absolutely. While we’re at this topic, I don’t know if you heard Nuno Bettencourt’s solo in ‘Rise,’ Extreme’s new song. Everybody was blown away. How did you react to hearing that solo and how did you process it?

JP: Well, Nuno is an awesome guitar player, let’s just say that! [laughs] I remember when Extreme came out, it was around the same time that Dream Theater did with our first record or maybe with our second record – in the same sort of era, like early ‘90s, I guess. And I remember hearing Extreme and hearing Nuno’s playing and just being like, “This guy is unbelievable!” [laughs] He’s a nut. He’s an amazing guitar player. And I remember learning some of that stuff and just being so impressed. So I’m not surprised at all that Nuno came up with a solo like that. The guy is just a monster player. And what a great one for the ages. Hats off to him for that killer, killer solo. And I love that everybody’s talking about that and talking about him and talking about guitar and talking about shredding. That’s a much better conversation to have, then, “Oh, guitar solo shouldn’t be in rock music.” I love that we’re having a conversation about how awesome Nuno’s solo is! [laughs] I think it’s killer. I love it.

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DS: If we go back to the late ‘80s and the early ‘90s, Dream Theater emerged just around the time when grunge was also blowing up. This was also the era when the 1980s metal bands – all the faster guitar playing – was kind of impacted by this movement. Did you guys in Dream Theater ever feel threatened or in any way worried, that you’ll need to adapt or that your band is not going to make it because of this sudden change in rock music?

JP: We really didn’t know what to expect from our career. We were just young guys, we put out one record before Images and Words which was the one that you’re talking about that was in ‘92 when Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains and all that stuff was huge on the radio. We were just kind of in our own bubble. We weren’t thinking about how we could change our sound to adapt to the new stuff. We’re just in our own little world, writing these songs. We hadn’t really had any commercial success yet, so we were just doing what we did. To be honest, having commercial success at that time was just a crazy thing to have happened, like you said, given that radio climate. Maybe that was part of the reason why it had some success, because it really was so different from all that other music at that time when the most popular rock music was coming from Pearl Jam or Alice in Chains or Nirvana. Still, a lot of great guitar music coming out of those bands, obviously, great players, but the more technical side of music wasn’t a part of that style. So our music being so different and exhibiting more technical aspects and playing aspects – maybe that made it stand out more. I wonder if it would have been worse if all the bands at that time were all prog metal. [laughs] Maybe we would have got lost. Whatever the timing was, it worked out.

DS: What’s in store for Dream Theater right now and are there any plans for new music in foreseeable future?

JP: Right now we’re on the DreamSonic tour which is our own traveling prog metal festival with Animals As Leaders and Devin Townsend. We have about nine or ten more shows left across Canada and the US, and that’ll be it for Dream Theater as far as touring for 2023. We’ll take some time off and we’ll get into the studio soon, so I’m imagining if not by the end of the year, by the beginning of the next year we’ll start working on new music.