If you can’t play as good or as fast as me, just give up, sell your guitar on eBay and kill yourself.
Dark master of sin, now my soul is yours.
I wanna go in the studio and just go back to the same amps and stuff I’m so comfortable with the sound of. Which I think is important to stay original.
We’re not the kind of band who writes an order abundance of songs and picks from them, we usually write for the album.
I know we play a part in the story of progressive music, but for us those influences are the real fathers, the ones that we were interested in.
We have a storage close by where I live, that’s very organised. My guitar tech, Matty organised it all, labeled everything.
When we make those guitars we make tons of prototypes, I have all those. And once a guitar has come out there’s all different versions and colours and woods and I have all those. There’s hundreds of them.
Almost 15 with music, we have so many guitars that we developed over the years. The latest one is ‘The Majesty’ guitar, which I’m really proud of.
I have a lot of guitars. Yeah, I’m not like a guitar collector, I don’t have all vintage instruments. I don’t even own a Strat or Les Paul. I don’t have one.
Out of Berklee Dream Theater was born and we’ve been together ever since. I didn’t have to taste that feeling of defeat.
I somehow always found the right people on my own to jam with as well as playing with all my buddies. I didn’t get to a point where I was auditioning for any bands.
I didn’t try out for bands when I was younger. I got into guitars intensely a couple of years into playing so much by the time I was graduating high school I was accepted into Berklee College of Music.
There were some initial instruments I had when I was young and made some trade-offs. Maybe a guitar I bought in a flea market. They weren’t the greatest guitar but they would be cool to still have them. Other than that, not as a professional.
I’m from the school of putting a lot of hours of practice into playing. But at the same time you have to write original music – that’s really important, because that’s the things that’s going to separate you from everybody else, that’s going to give you your unique voice as a music that you create.
The good thing about playing this style that we play, you know, the progressive element of it, is that we can add in different elements of different styles. And that creates a more interesting overall sound.
I have to say that our fans have been absolutely wonderful all across the world.
Even with Dream Theater, we track in a big studio and everything. But when it comes to doing leads, I don’t really require a lot of studio to do that. I need a good sounding room and a Pro Tools rig, and some Neve mic-pres, and I’m good.