John Petrucci, Tosin Abasi, and Devin Townsend Talk Their Favorite Players

well I've always worried about or wondered how you and Jordan cuz I feel like especially some of his lead sounds is kind of in the same yeah so how do do you guys consciously sort of carve out like sounds he can use to not compete with your guitar frequencies or is it not even that a deal the way that we've approached this and and in producing Dream Theater this this is something that I had to learn um and and once once we figured this out it made all the difference so a guitar line single line is just mono right and it's just coming at you there or wherever you put it a synth lead sound is usually stereo it's usually some kind of thing that's chusy and it's doing all this stuff and so when we were doing like Unison lines the keyboard would sound like hugely in Stereo yeah and and in a lot of ways softer it didn't have the uh the cut of a guitar note you know and the guitar would be there and it's like even if you took the keyboard and like oh we'll pan him to the right and we'll pan well then the stereo sound is just like stacked and it sounds funny so I was like well what if we just took the keyboard signal and treated it as if it was a guitar coming out of like a guitar player right and we'll put that through in fact my plugin wasn't done yet so on the latest Dream Theater record we used the Plenty plugin we took Jordan's sound without any processing and we put it into the plugin so now we had a guitar and a keyboard that were in the same space and so now we could pan them and it works now we can put them on top of each other and it sounds just like two different players like Adrien Smith and Dave Murray play like it doesn't sound like a keyboard guy who's like over here and then a guitar player is there Adrien Smith or Dave Murray I loved Adrien Smith in fact I love both those guys it's it's really hard to pick cuz cuz Dave just has some amazing leads but the reason I I have to say Adrian is because in the conversations about slowing down the records Adrien Smith is the reason why I know what vibr is today I was learning one it was solos and it was slowed down and I'm playing the notes and all of a sudden I hear right slow down half speed vibr half speed vibr with a guy who does a very wide vibr and I was like that's how you do that anytime Maiden hit New York we go see them at the Coliseum or Garden every single tour me and John mang wanted to be like maiden or rush like that was our whole thing what was yours toen my what but this the equivalent band um dream the is one of them uh but you didn't learn vibr from me no I kind of missed the the importance of focusing on it and I think it was interesting when you describing learning guitar and I'm I'm thinking like who he didn't know what a Bend was I'm like there's no other guy the usually there's a local teacher someone in your high school plays and I didn't think you would be coming from a vacuum of information like that that's mindblowing but I think part of the value of being in a community of players especially guys who have been playing longer than you is they can like kind of align you with like some of the foundationally important things totally um vibr is a huge one and I think I was always like enamored with like the techniques that were well beyond that just like who's doing the wildest and I almost like went straight to that and so it's been this journey of like just trying to yeah find my own in a weird way it sounds weird to say at this point but it's like I think I kind of neglected it to a degree you you went on a path that made sense to you who cares if you go back and then do it yeah in some ways it's cool because now I'm you know Finding value in something that for some people theyve maybe stop thinking about a while but yeah I mean there's a few formative bands I mean I remember so liquid tension experiment it was kind of like I had heard instrumental records but it was usually like a guitarist and then a backup band but this was like everyone in the band insane and then the compositions were so I was like oh I that's that's the kind of band I want to do so cuz look there's you know you're exposed to all this music but every once in a while you hear something that you're like okay like this is really specific but like I resonate with this to a degree that's beyond you know a lot of the other stuff that you know everyone else is totally and you you almost try you almost like sort of like start to like mold yourself in a certain direction so yeah liquid tension and dream and then muga for like a lot of the more like the heavier and the the rhythmic the rhythmic vocabulary and then yeah I don't know um just like a lot of Harmony from outside of metal like actually yeah it's amazing what about you Devon I think his guitar players it was KK Downing cuz he was Out Of Tune and had tons of echo on him and I was like I loved it it just sounded possessed but then it was always you know was all the musical theater stuff from the 70s was huge for me like Westside store and Jesus Christ Superstar was huge for me right but I was a kid and it was Metallica and Ana and de leopard and King X and you know all these things come together and it was a huge thing for me I love the album Watermark it was just so vast and beautiful and I I I I I fell in love with that because I thought well if you could get that sense of grandure in something that was had that sort of Metallica vibe to it uh yeah that was a big thing but for guitars yeah it was kicky Downing man that's amazing I just loved him yeah I hope I never meet him either yeah and priest I mean talk about like one of the original metal bands too when they start like late 60s yeah that's the era yeah crazy were you a glen Tipton fan then or yeah yeah dude yeah yeah it's funny there's every now and then they have guitar players that when they play you think yeah that's how it should sound and then when you go to do the same thing you're like I think I'm playing it exactly but it doesn't I always found out about Van Halen too too oh yeah there's always the one guy in town that was the guy who could play all the Van Halen Rifts and when he's playing it's like how did you how yeah I know it's like the connection with the pink totally and the boss the blue and white delay and like you know and I played it always just sounded like ham fisted like you're wearing oven mitts or well sometimes there's like a little tiny technique that you're not aware that they're doing you know I told this so many times I'm repeating myself but I remember trying to play uh paranoid and it not sounding like it yeah and it was um only until I saw somebody do it where they hammer on right like like I was like that's why I'm that's like that little tiny detail so the Van Halen guys like they figured out this little Motorhead too I Remember Loving that it was just because it just seemed like at any time it could just self-destruct yeah and uh the first guitar we had was a Sears we got it from the catalog like the little acoustic one but within a week the neck separated from but if you had the strings you could as a 10-year-old you could make a a v or a whammy bar with it by just pulling the headstock in the body oh that's funny it breaks in somebody sent me a h YouTube video of the drum room mics of Van Halen of Eddie playing eruption and the fact that there was nothing really like that before that it it it becomes even more mindboggling when you hear him talk about why he did things and how came up with stuffs it kind of makes a little more sense cuz he was kind of I guess thinking very mechanically or practically how could I do this how can I make this happen how can I go into this amp and make this but you I you often think like well yeah but how did you end up like playing that way like why is it so different why is it so vastly different than all the guys doing that at that time some questions don't have answers yeah I think it's just he liked party there you go yeah the answer to everything well you know you mentioning the mic the drum mic in the other room or whatever it's like I feel like eruption had to be played through a loud amp yeah and you know going back to the Moder Thing versus there's an experience of a loud amp that's going to you're going to play in a certain way because it's like this loud amp that's almost it's almost like a violent thing and it there's an energy that will Express itself because of that that is very different than like studio monitors at like a reasonable Vault and there's just it's quintessential to the electric guitar

Channel: Rick Beato 2

Views: 84,033

Keywords: john petrucci, tosin abasi, animals as leaders, dream theater, devin townsend, progressive metal, favorite riffs, dreamsonic 2023, rick beato, metal riffs, john petrucci interview, tosin abasi rick beato, tosin abasi thump, Iron Maiden, Enya, liquid tension experiment, Biggest influence

Id: n9FRdn0wB9A

Length: 8min 37sec (517 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 30 2023