John Petrucci Quotes

Songs like "Spirit Carries On" really gets the audience moved and on the same page. It's challenging and all so much fun to play.

If you bring somebody into the band you are going to be with them a lot whether it's in the studio, on the tour bus, or at dinner every night; you want somebody you enjoy being around. You don't want an annoying guy .

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.

I'm a member of the Recording Academy and I see the way it works and even with the whole voting process it's broken down into specific categories. There are Pop categories and Dance and Rock and Metal and Film and Score and everything else. Basically when you are voting you are urged not to vote in the category that you don't know anything about.

As far as bands doing that in a way where they think they're going to fight the government, the only people they're really hurting is the fans.

I've always said that there's a huge progressive rock, progressive metal audience out there, in the world.

It's hard to answer that from my own perspective because when I'm playing I know where it is coming from and the sources.

I went straight out of high school, and when I was 17, all I wanted to do was play guitar.

When I first started, it was the real basic stuff that was being played on the radio, so I was into Zeppelin, and Sabbath, and AC/DC, and all stuff like that. I grew up in New York, on Long Island, so the local radio stations played all that kind of thing.

When we came out, the kind of music that was popular was Nirvana, Soundgarden and Alice In Chains, all that stuff. That was when we released our second album, 'Images And Words', and it was something people werent used to hearing maybe, and it sort of rose above all that somehow, being progressive, or whatever.

I almost rely on other people to say, "Hey, you ever hear of this band?" And I'll say, "Oh, I've never heard of that!" And I listened to them and thought, "What the hell?"

Personality wise, we are all kindred spirits. I've said this before; if we [with Mike Mangini ] ever went to high school together we would have been friends. He is just one of us! We felt that immediate connect.

It's probably no coincidence with the internet and social media and the word being able to spread beyond the radio, where fans can go and talk and congregate and trade stories and a band could communicate news very quickly and in a worldwide basis. I'm sure that's helped in bringing in this case us to more of the forefront of peoples attention.

I experimented a bunch with Ernie Ball in getting the strings to not flop around too much, but at the same time not to be too thick to where you're playing telephone cables.

We're not the kind of band who writes an order abundance of songs and picks from them, we usually write for the album.

Real thick strings - your hands start to get fatigued. As much as you practice, and as much experience as you have, and as long as you've been playing, there is a fatigue point during the show, as with anything that's physical. So I wanted to basically pace myself better.

We're always in that head space about the audience and less about us at that moment.

You might be able to get a certain sound, and in the studio you certainly look at things under a microscope a lot more. You might hear more warmth out of a thicker string gauge. But in the practical world, like with us, we're playing An Evening With ... so it's three hours of music, and our music is pretty challenging as far as the technical aspect. And I found after awhile that I was killing myself.

Instead of buying a guitar for $2,000 or $2,500 - I'm not sure how much these are going for - but it's maybe $300 or something like that. It's more for beginners and stuff like that. Obviously it's not hitting the pros. And you can't get the Piezo pickup and the color-changing paint and the inlays and all the fancy things that my signature guitars offer, but you can get the general feel of the guitar - and the body style. It's cool.

To be in Boston, which is a great city and which is full of many colleges and young kids, and to be around that many people that were at the same point in their lives, who played guitar or whatever instrument - it was just perfect. It was a great environment.

Obviously [Black] Sabbath is definitely a huge name and of course deserving with Ozzy coming back.

If you can't play as good or as fast as me, just give up, sell your guitar on eBay and kill yourself.

I'm realizing this more and more that it's one thing to get involved with your own political beliefs and stand behind you believe in personally.

It's a balance between getting the right string gauge that's thick enough where it sound good, and not rubber bands - but not too thick where your hands start to get real tired.

Songs come alive every night and can be a new experience for someone. You might have someone in the audience who has never seen us before and hearing it for the first time. We are aware of that.

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.

I think I'm a father, but a father of three kids!

Since I'm in a band, and I'm not usually in situations where I need to read, it doesn't come up as often, and I don't rely on it as much.

Music is a communication. It's a two-way street. You need people to play to in order to make that connection complete. That's the way we look at it.

Many times we talk about the people that have come to enjoy the show. They went through a lot to get here, whatever they needed to work out in their lives; they got babysitters, they traveled, and purchased the tickets. So it's up to us to deliver the goods!

When I think of a lot of the players I admire, they could always play their parts without hiding behind distortion and sustain. Put the time in. Hear your mistakes. Yeah, it sucks, it's humbling, it makes you want to throw the guitar out the window. But if you work on your mistakes, they'll eventually go away, and you'll become a strong player.

Out of Berklee Dream Theater was born and we've been together ever since. I didn't have to taste that feeling of defeat.

With the Road King amp, you're able to switch power tubes and speakers and do all these different things. And I didn't want to have five different heads in my rack. And there's something about, when you do the type of setup that I have, unless you have a dedicated amp to a dedicated speaker and you're actually switching, you have to use the same power section of the main head that you're using.

The style of music that we're playing, this progressive metal style, has always been an upstream battle for us. We don't usually get a lot of commercial exposure.

First and foremost, with everybody we wanted to see if they can pull off the songs, play them correctly, and that they it felt right musically. That's something Mike [Mangini] did, it felt like the band. He really gets the style and delivers in a powerful metal way.

I do a lot of the stuff that I started out doing that I think any guitar player that's concerned about the craft needs to do. It's basic practicing of the basic elements. I try to practice like a well rounded regiment of things where I can kind of do whatever I wanna do and I also have to practice the actual songs to keep that under my fingers as well.

Stay focused when you're playing alive, so you're not distracted by something going on.

Guitar players get inward and analytical about their playing but when you start to get positive feedback from other players it makes you think that it is coming together.