John Petrucci interview (excerpt)

Ola Englund: Before [learning about Dream Theater], I did play guitar, but I never actually practiced guitar until I got the Rock Discipline VHS and all the tab books. I just hadn’t had the practice [regimen] built in me. It was the first time I was sitting doing the 1-2-3-4... You know, up and down, and up and down, just doing that for hours.

John Petrucci: I can relate. There was a point where I started playing guitar. As you know, it’s really hard at the beginning. You can’t play anything. It’s not like you sit down at a piano and... a chord sounds nice if the piano is in tune. Guitar is just huge learning curve. I can remember just not being able to play a barre chord with buzzing and... And then getting to a point where “Alright, I think I got the hang of this.” Then as I started to get better at it, then I started to get turned on to some music that just blew my mind, like the first time I heard Steve Morse and The Dregs, or Al Di Meola, and all that stuff.

OE: That’s pretty heavy and extreme.

JP: Yeah, I was like, “How do you play guitar like that?” I was really just kinda blown away by what they were doing on the instrument, and I just wanted to be able to do that.

OE: So did you sit and try and transcribe and learn that stuff?

JP: Yeah.

OE: How was that process of you learning?

JP: I did go to Berklee when I graduated high school. I did go for a year and that’s of course where Dream Theater formed. But before then I was just all self-taught by ear. So I would literally take records, put them on, and then change the speed of the record player so it was half-speed. And I remember trying to learn Iron Maiden solos and Jimmy Page solos, and Boston solos, and having no idea what these guys were doing. Because it’s not like now where if you wanna learn something, you can see how it’s done. You can go to YouTube and see a million guys doing it, and they’ll break it down, and you can see the effects. I remember hearing ‘Eruption’ for the first time and I didn’t know what the hammer-on thing was – I couldn’t visualize what he was doing. Or what a phaser was, or delay. It just sounded like, “How is that a guitar?” I had no idea. Or I’d listen to Boston and Tom Scholz is doing all these harmonies. And like, “How do you do that? How is that guitar? I’m playing, it sounds nothing like it.” Even the first time I discovered how to bend the string or vibrato, it was this huge discovery. I’m like, “That’s why it doesn’t sound like it, I’ve gotta do this.” So that developed my ear.

OE: When you slowed down the albums, did you also have to change the tuning of your guitar?

JP: The interesting thing is it slowed down to an octave lower, which was very convenient.

OE: Just the thing about learning something and then you’re just completely blown away, like pinch harmonics. The day I learned that one, you’re like “Oh my God, I’m a guitar player now!” [laughs]

JP: I know. I have these really funny moments of discovery like that. Like the simplest things you’d never think about. I’ve told this before, but, I remember trying to play ‘Paranoid.’ There was a neighborhood garage band and I watched the guy do it. He was hitting the chord but then hammering on the... and I was like, “That’s why it doesn’t sound like it when I do!” Like, just little tiny discoveries, you know? I had a band, we were doing Mötley Crüe ‘Looks That Kill’ and I didn’t know the guitar was tuned differently. So I’m doing these ridiculous jumps, just these dumb things and then you figure it out. “Oh, that’s how they’re doing it.”

OE: [On] Rock Discipline, there’s all these segments of songs in there that we sometimes never heard. And then when you released your latest solo album, Terminal Velocity, there was this song called ‘Gemini’ on it. It’s funny because I’ve played that lick for years and years, and it was never on an album. And then when I heard that song on your album now, it completely made me feel like I was 15 years old again. Do you have a lot of those song ideas that come back?

JP: I do. There was a period of time where I was doing a lot of guitar clinics. They would set them up for me and I would a little tour of like ten of them. Sometimes I would play along to Dream Theater stuff, but it just felt very karaoke to me, I didn’t really like it. So I wrote some pieces just to demo songs. And I wrote a bunch of ‘em, and I programmed them. You’ll laugh – it was on a little Yamaha sequencer – and I was just typing in the notes and the chords, and ‘Gemini’ was one of them. It was just a demo song that I did. In fact, if you listen to it, it’s not the best song, really. It’s moving between different techniques – I was trying to demo things – so it doesn’t have a lot of cohesiveness as a tune. You’re right, bits of it were in Rock Discipline and I never actually recorded the song. For years I got requests to bring that song back. I guess, just people... “What is that? I like it.” So it’s like, “OK, I’m doing this solo album finally. I wanna do that song.” And I had no way of learning it, I never recorded it. I’m like you, I had the clips from Rock Discipline. I don’t know where that sequencer is. So what me and our engineer Jimmy T did is we went on YouTube and we looked up old clinics like I described. So literally [there would] be a guy with a camcorder in the back, s***ty audio. Basically I was able to get the arrangement, which I kinda changed a bit and little by little things were coming back. You know, “Oh right, that’s what I did.” But some of the audio wasn’t great, so I had to make up stuff, and that’s the version that’s on Terminal Velocity.

OE: That’s funny. You also made a bunch of songs for some videogames. Like Necronomicon. I remember it because when I started listening to Dream Theater, it was the beginning of the Internet age, and you had a forum. I was part of that forum. Anyways, [these songs] were floating around. I’m not gonna say I downloaded it, but [for] the Necronomicon song, that was the only way to listen to this song. I remember it was bits and pieces of songs like that were floating around. Did you do anything with that, or that’s set for that game?

JP: That’s just for that game. That was a fun little story, because I had never done anything like that, and I got a request to do that. It was a very specific request that the game developer wanted. You know, some intro song that was like a minute and a half and an outro song in the style that you do. I remember it was not a lot of money to today’s standard,

OE: So you were given a lump sum?

JP: Yeah and it was kinda the first time that happened for me. So it was neat in a couple of different regards. But I embrace having to do projects like that where there’s a specific goal, and it’s like, “OK, we want to get this out of it.” A lot of times Dream Theater operates that too. We have conversations about the kind of record we want to do, the kind of song or [where] it’s going, and I kinda put that hat on and I love doing that. You roll up your sleeves, you’re like “Alright, what can we do here?” And hopefully it turns out the way you intended. And so yes, that’s for the Sega Genesis videogame system.

OE: Funny you said that about Dream Theater and about the whole process when you’re making the albums, because I can always trust Dream Theater to come back every 2 years. Obviously now there’s been a pandemic, but there’s always like seasons of Dream Theater, where it’s like, “OK, they’ve done these tours. I know they’re gonna record an album and come back, and do the tour again. I can trust the band.

JP: We’ve been very consistent, since I would say Images and Words. We really didn’t tour on the first record, but since we did Images and then toured on an international level, which was really smart at the time to do that, because not every band was doing that. We weren’t really able to rely on commercial success. We had a bit of it with ‘Pull Me Under,’ but the way we survived was playing live shows. And so we started touring in Europe and in South America and in Asia, and that really established our fan base throughout the world. Once we did that, then went into do Awake. “OK, that record’s coming out, we’re gonna go out and tour and support that and grow the live thing. OK, that’s over and let’s do the next one.” And you’re right, it’s been consistent since then.

OE: Do you feel that as a band that plays progressive metal, that you had to work harder?

JP: Yeah.

OE: Because metal is very gatekept, I would probably say. Like, in terms of what’s cool or what’s not cool. And I imagine Dream Theater would have to work more to get established because it’s not really about image, it’s just about the music. So it seems that Dream Theater is probably one of the only bands that kinda became so big, because you were just grinding and grinding.

JP: Totally. It’s the persistence. Because you’re right, we were not cool. We’re still not cool. [laughs] You can look at it this way: there was a point in time where stuff like sci-fi and Star Wars, only nerdy kids like it. And now everybody likes that, right? Dream Theater was like only nerdy [laughs] musician types like it. And fortunately we’ve had a chance to grow. But it did mean that we had to be very persistent and consistent. And keep on making sure that the stuff that we did was the best we could possibly do. That live touring... we toured a lot.

OE: This might be a little personal, but how is it to play festivals like this? Because all the types of metal audience is there, and they go watch different bands, and Dream Theater is very niche, complicated, I would say. How was the reception there? I mean, I’ve actually seen you guys in a couple of festivals. And it’s fine. But for you, how does it feel?

JP: It’s fun. You kinda have this feeling of pride when you go into it, unless you’re doing some sort of prog-centric festival, where there’s players all over the place. Imagine the first time we first started doing festivals, on the bill was Elton John, Sheryl Crow, Joe Cocker, and us. And so you kinda get this feeling like, “Alright, the game’s about to change!” Everyone’s listening to all this sort of pop stuff. Even in some of the metal festivals, it’s a certain thing. But when we come out and we play a song like ‘Metropolis’, you have this feeling “OK, I wanna show you what we’re all about.” There’s this real sense of pride and power being up there to do that.

OE: Obviously, during the ‘90s there were other prog bands, but I think you influenced so many bands. Beginning with the 2000s, there were so many bands that were starting to get prog influences and, you kinda merged the metal world with the progressive metal world. Now progressive metal is almost bigger of a genre, with all the new djent bands, Periphery, and those guys. I think kids these days – and I’m speaking like I’m a kid – but we want the technicality, we want to be impressed. I mean, people with TikTok just scroll until they find something that’s interesting. So I think you’re the reason why prog metal is as big as it is today.

JP: Wow!

OE: I think so. I mean, you are the godfathers, in a way. You can talk about Rush, and Queensrÿche and stuff, but you made it into the metal world. You made it more acceptable than ever.

JP: We somehow merged it. I remember when we first started, me and John Myung growing up on Long Island, Kevin Moore, our original keyboard player. We were all big fans of Yes and our favorite band was Rush. We loved Pink Floyd and stuff, but we were also metalheads. Any time Maiden came to town, we were there, Metallica... So when we went to Berklee and met Portnoy there and found somebody who was in the same headspace, we just started writing music together, it just came out in this style. And we also had this side, I mentioned before The Dregs and the fusion stuff, Return to Forever. So we’d get together and write this kind of complex music but it would be in the metal style. But then in our heads we’d be like “What would Yes do?” They’d have some 10-minute intro to the song in different sections and parts, so... We made this thing very organically, I guess – it just kinda happened that way. And the term ‘prog metal’ wasn’t really used then, it wasn’t really a thing. We had friends, the guys in Fates Warning, a band called Watchtower – they were doing stuff that was more progressive in a metal sound, but it wasn’t like it is today with all, like, the offshoots in genres and things. People didn’t even use that term, really. They didn’t really know how to categorize us.

OE: Going back to the actual guitar playing, obviously when you were young you practiced a lot. How much did you practice?

JP: I practiced a minimum of six hours a day. In fact – and I’ve said this before – this was a pact that John Myung and I had that we had to practice six hours a day in school. So let’s say it was a Friday night, and you heard about a party that night, if you went to it and the other guy wasn’t there, you would assume he was practicing – he didn’t get his practicing in. But if you saw him there, there was the unspoken, “I put my hours in.” So it was really like we had to practice six hours a day minimum.

OE: Compared to later on, how much do you practice a day? Do you still have two hours in you or...

JP: Yeah.

OE: You still practice two hours a day?

JP: Absolutely, yeah. I could sit there for hours and do it. And I do kind of similar thing of what I used to do when I was younger, where it wouldn’t just be six hours straight. I’d practice for an hour and a half, and then take a break, and then practice an hour and a half, and that would be three hours – halfway there.

OE: So, what are you practicing on right now for instance?

JP: So right now, I’m practicing the music that I’m playing live. Because I think of it this way: guitar is fun as you know, and you can go online or on YouTube or Instagram or something and see somebody do something crazy, and you’re like, “What are they doing there?” and you want to try to do that. And you can sit there while you’re on tour, practicing that backstage. But then you flash forward to yourself on stage, playing the song and everybody there who bought tickets expecting you to do it. And you’re like, “Well really, the only thing I’m responsible for right now is to be able to play my own music!” [laughs] So a lot of times, I will drill the difficult sections of the show. And still not play it right, and then walk offstage and be like, “Alright I have another day to practice and try it again.”

OE: How was the point of view for you? Is there a lot of this? [crosses arms]

JP: I suppose there’s some of that.

OE: I mean, that place themselves on your side of the stage?

JP: Although it’s more like this. [makes a heart shape with his hands]

OE: Of course. How does that make you feel? Here comes the ‘Metropolis part 1’ solo.

JP: Yeah, you have to kind of block it out, because if you’re too conscious of that, you’re going to become self-conscious. It’s definitely unnerving. Sometimes I set my eye line kind of above people to do that. Because that could freak you out if somebody’s that close, and you’re playing something that is challenging.

OE: How many notes do you have in you? You have so many albums, you have so many solos. Where does it all come from?

JP: That’s a good question. A good example is Terminal Velocity, my solo record. And then a couple of months later, did Liquid Tension Experiment 3. And then, that fall went in and started the new Dream Theater record. And there’s tons of solos all over that stuff, differing. I never had that feeling like, “What am I gonna do?” or panic, or, “How am I gonna...?” I put myself in the environment, in the studio, and I have the backing track going and the solo section going, turn lights like this off, so you get all vibey, have some coffee, and I just sit there and I play. I go back to improvising and trying to extract what I’m hearing in here. [gestures to head] Sometimes that process is really quick, sometimes it’s longer. But I find that you get into this mode where the creative doors open. And then, all of a sudden, you’re like, “Oh wait, that was really cool!” You start to kinda stumble upon stuff.

OE: Do you record yourself throughout this?

JP: Yeah.

OE: So it’s just constantly recording until you find something that...

JP: Yeah. I mean, sometimes yes, or when I feel I’m like in the zone, we’ll start recording. Sometimes I’m just kinda going for it. And what I’m trying to do is I’m just trying to internalize... I’ll say this, there’s something about recording a record, having all your solos, whatever, and then putting it out. It all happens within a very short period of time, even if it’s several months. It’s not like you’ve had the opportunity to improvise all of these solo sections live for a year with your band. You know, I did a solo tour, and I was doing so much playing on the solo tour that the solos started to develop and change. But you don’t have that opportunity when you’re recording a record. So I try to emulate that as much as I can by just sitting there playing over it, playing over it, playing over it, and then things start to come out.

OE: I mean, I guess it’s like with anything, since you have this steady workflow with Dream Theater, it’s just a process that you’ve done so many times. Basically you’re an expert of just sitting and pushing out solos because you’re doing it so often. It’s like you get a musician to come in and play that’s been in the studio forever, he’s gonna deliver.

JP: Yeah, it’s not like it’s overwhelming, like, “Oh my God, I have to do a solo.” It’s like, “This is what I do.” And the fun thing about it, like you said, the thing about the catalog and all the different projects and stuff. You’re right, like how many solos could you do? If you think about other players and stuff like that, but the thing that always surprises me is something new will come out of it. And you have this kinda weird thing where you’re like, “Wow, how did I never think of that before?” Or just something magically works out on the guitar that’s like, “Oh my God, this chord progression allows me to play every open string on the guitar somehow that magically worked out. So I’m gonna come up with something that uses all of those strings.” Then your brain starts working, and then you end up with something that you’ve never done before that’s really cool.

OE: The problem I have when I write a solo, is that I listen back and be like, “Holy s*** – is this a John Petrucci solo?” [laughs] Do you still have a feeling of impostor syndrome to this day?

JP: Yeah, sometimes. I think at this point I don’t have that with other players. I don’t want this to come off sounding weird, but I almost have it with myself, like, “Did I do that? Is this from another song? What am I doing?”

OE: That’s what I mean – there’s so many solos. Have you done this before? How do you remember that?

JP: Right. Well, I don’t know if you’ve heard the story, but I’ll tell it just in case. When I was writing my latest solo album, I have all these ideas and seeds and things that I collect constantly on my phone. I organize them on my laptop when I go to work on an album. Licks, chord progressions, solo excerpts, melodies, me humming, whatever. I’ll label them and I’ll know which ones... like, “This is more of a solo album-ish vibe. This is a cool riff – could be Dream Theater, could be Liquid Tension.”

OE: So you categorize.

JP: I do. So, in this one instance, I forgot to categorize, and I was working on a song for the new solo album. I spent the whole day working on it. The way we were doing it was I was writing the guitar parts, tracking the guitar, programming the drums, playing bass. Jimmy T and I would share playing bass, he would program the drums. And so, we have like a real piece of music – all we needed was the drummer to play on it and a bass player. So we spent the whole day doing that, and by the end of the day, I’m like, “Why can I picture this keyboard part over this?” And all of a sudden, I was like, “Oh my God. I just rewrote a Dream Theater song!” because I forgot to categorize that I had used that idea already, and I wasted a whole day in the studio. Luckily, it was flagged [laughs] because it wasn’t exactly a Dream Theater song, but it was close enough where I’m like, “Why does this sound familiar?” And it was really heartbreaking because it was so cool. It was like, “This is so cool! Crap! I did this already!” So I’ve gotta be careful. And the band will go through this too. Not just as a soloist, but as a band, like, “Did we do that already?” Usually, the guys are pretty good. John Myung will flag it, like “No, that’s just like...” whatever. So, it happens. There’s a little bit of that, and sometimes it’ll keep me up. Like, “Did we repeat ourselves?”