Originally published in Guitar Techniques magazine 147 · January 2008
Petrucci Prog!
Article2 min read
If any band has taken progressive music to the max it's Dream Theater. Martin Goulding looks at the style of this formidable US outfit's guitarist, John Petrucci...
Dream Theater was formed in 1985 by guitarist John Petrucci, bassist John Myung and drummer Mike Portnoy while studying at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Initially under the name Majesty, the band was joined by Kevin Moore on keyboards and Chris Collins on vocals.
After a couple of months of writing and gigging around New York to local acclaim, the band dropped out of college in order to pursue their music, recording the Majesty demos.
Chris Collins left the band shortly after, and after a year of searching, Charlie Dominici successfully auditioned as the new singer. With this line-up, the band attracted attention and the quintet was quickly signed. They set about recording their debut album When Day And Dream Unite (1989) under the new band name of Dream Theater.
After a short tour. Dominici parted company with the rest of the band due to musical differences, and after another long search, Canadian singer James LaBrie took the position and the band went on to record and release their classic second album, Images And Words (1992). This release brought them worldwide critical acclaim, and the success of the single ‘Pull Me Under’, which received healthy MTV airplay, combined with relentless touring, saw the album go gold in the States and platinum in Japan.
Dream Theater released their excellent third album Awake in 1994, again to global acclaim, but were to suffer another disruption with Kevin Moore leaving the band - again due to musical differences. Derek Sherinian was success fully auditioned and joined the line-up for the epic EP Change Of Seasons (1995), which featured a 23-minute long composition that was originally written in 1989 as part of the Images And Words album. After the fourth release. Falling Into Infinity, Derek Sherinian was replaced on keyboards by Jordan Rudess and Dream Theater had found the line-up that has remained to this day, recording another five highly successful albums. Their latest, Systematic Chaos, was released in June 2007 by Roadrunner Records.
Dream Theater, with its unusually high standards in technical versatility and musical knowledge, has led the way for heavy progressive music for more than two decades. The band continues to push the boundaries and influence both the metal and prog music scenes.
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The early albums Images And Words and Awake are compulsory. They established John Petrucci as a truly awesome guitar player with one of the most well developed alternate picking techniques the world had seen. From then on he seems to have pushed himself to almost inhuman capability. For recent evidence of this and great musicianship on all levels, check out Train Of Thought and the latest Systematic Chaos.