John Petrucci interview (excerpts)

Where does the tone come from?

There’s been a lot of discussions about this because so many guitar players are infatuated with the pursuit of tone and gear, and I tend to agree that it starts with your hands. It starts with your individuality, your approach to the instrument. Nothing illustrates that more than if you’ve never played through somebody else’s gear, with the same exact equipment, and the tone sounds different. One of the G3 tours, I said, ‘Hey, Joe [Satriani], I want to try your rig.’ And I started playing through his rig and I didn’t sound like Joe. I even tried to play some Satriani songs, and it didn’t sound like Joe. It’s not only technique, it’s your actual human nature.

At one of your G3 tours, you had shorter hair and less beard. Does beard have anything to do with tone?

Beard has a lot to do with tone. The more luscious and epic your beard.

I’ve heard you say that Five Guys is the best burger... What is the Five Guys burger of guitar riffs?

Of guitar riffs? ‘Dark Eternal Night.’ Yeah, that opening riff. That screams Five Guys burgers.

You have a soccer background – which position would each member of Dream Theater play?

Well, it’s funny, you could almost picture the band setup. You got to put [drummer Mike] Mangini in the goal, he’s a keeper; you got to move [singer James] LaBrie at the center; John [Myung, bass] and I are the wings, and Jordan [Rudess, keyboards] would be one of the full backs.

What does it mean to have a voice on guitar?

Well, it’s like an identity. It’s something that when people hear you play guitar, it’s just as identifiable as when somebody hears you speak. I guess that’s a good way of looking at it. We recognize people’s voices, their tone, their inflections, so if you can develop your playing to where people recognize that it’s you by the music that you play, that’s an amazing connection to make. Everybody has that ability because everybody is an individual. It’s just a matter of recognizing that and making a connection like, ‘Oh, that’s Slash.’ It’s really wild when you think about it because you’re not saying anything, you’re not speaking – it’s all through the instrument.

Some of the tone comes out from this machine (points at guitar), a lot of it is in the fingers, but what would you say if you had to sum up this guitar in 30 seconds?

This guitar is a tone machine and when you plug this into an amp, it jumps out at you. It has a huge voice, it has a ton of character, it’s very bold – just like Five Guys – it’s very rich, definitely not cheesy, and it has a lot of layers. Because you have a mahogany neck-through – look at the neck-through, it’s beautiful, this Tiger Eye version is with an alder body and with a big maple top, so that’s a huge burger.