The Astonishing Mike Mangini

Mike Mangini learns to trust his instincts with Dream Theater

“There is one thing about being in this band, of many that are very, very cool, and that is that we really are all on a similar life path as musicians, and you know what? You cannot be on the path we’re on unless you’re willing to go to the edge of the cliff and learn how to climb down it,” says Mike Mangini.

Prog heroes Dream Theater face a cliff of vertigo-inducing steepness on their 13th studio album. The Astonishing, due out on 29 January, contains over two hours of music. “The record is just really Act One and Act Two, they’re meant to be one giant song each, so I didn’t want to learn pieces of it as if they were individual songs,” says Mangini about his preparation for recording the double album. “All I did was jam on a four-piece drumset for weeks. The only time I actually constructed something had to do with coordination things that were so difficult for me that there was no way I could play them unless I actually spent several hours on maybe 10 seconds of it, just to be able to get it.”

Where Mangini usually favours a compositional approach to crafting drum parts, for The Astonishing, he played by instinct. “Playing intuitively means that I’m just winging it and spitting stuff out,” he says. “There are pluses and minuses to that. The pluses are that I will play things that I would not have thought of and they excite me very much, but I also play other things that I would change if I had my way. So it has pluses and minuses, but I’ve learned how to trust it, that’s the difference.”

Mangini had to use everything he’s learned over his long career on The Astonishing. “I can be literal and say that the parts that challenged me were the ones where I had to learn the coordination and that are very difficult unless your pattern recognition is high, meaning that a person needs to recognise odd-tuplets and time signatures and tempos,” he says. However, what was really tough for Mangini was tracking his parts before the vocals were recorded. “The vocal is the one telling the story, so essentially I was shooting in the dark during a lot of this recording, just playing from the hip and asking [guitarist] John Petrucci what the vibe was. I really relied on him. I went in there and I knocked out 20 songs in 12 days including waiting for the sessions to be prepped. In other words, I had to maybe change some of the click-track subdivisions or where I thought I heard where ‘1’ was, and I had to wait for all that to happen.”

Now Mangini is busy preparing to play the album live in its entirety before the band’s London shows in February. “I have to learn them in order as if I’m learning two giant songs,” he says, “and it is a full-time job!”

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Preparing To Astonish

“Now you would think this would be an easier thing for me because I played on the record,” says Mangini about his gig preparations. “What has to happen is I have to have my drum-only tracks, meaning I have to listen to just my drums with no other music so I can hear every little thing that I did.”