The Iconic Drumming Behind "The Dance Of Eternity" | Dream Theater Song Breakdown

hey everybody it's Mike porno here and it's time to put on your dancing shoes because I'm about to play Dream theaters the dance of [Music] Eternity so the dance of Eternity is pretty universally agreed upon to be one of the most technically challenging things I've ever written if you don't know the backstory uh on the images and words album we had a song called Metropolis part one for years and years and years everyone was like wow when are you going to do a metropolis part two long story short we ended up writing a song called Metropolis part two it turned out to be about a 20 minute epic when time came to begin the the falling into Infinity album the label wouldn't let us put it on there and uh a few years later Jordan rudus joins the band and we decided okay what is the first album we're going to make with him and we decided let's do a concept album and let's take that original original Metropolis part two demo and expand it into a full length album so we ended up writing an entire an entire album called Metropolis part two scenes for a memory once we got to the center of the album we decided we wanted to write the craziest instrumental we could possibly write and this is what we came up [Music] I think I remember there's this one video of you with uh like all the time signature changes do you know how many time signature changes are in this song oh God no 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 I mean this this song has so many twists and turns and it's constantly going through all these different things and some of them are are uh call backs or recalls to the middle of metropolis uh there's a section towards the end of the dance dance of fraternity where it's going which are all um group uh groupings of fives and sevens a five is and then a seven is [Music] the entire scen for memory album has all kinds of little nuggets like that and call backs to the original Metropolis part one but dance of fraternity as an instrumental we were able to really dig into it and get pretty [Music] clever there's all kinds of clever things throughout the song uh a lot of it stems from my fascination with numbers for instance uh once we kick in we kick in with this [Music] pattern all that was was me coming up with something okay we're going to do two and then now let's do three now let's do four and then we come back to the the number thing but let's reverse it so instead of going 2 3 4 then when we come back to it we go 4 3 2 so we go so it's it's a similar thing that I've done throughout my career especially with Dream Theater music of trying to play with numbers and and different patterns and get creative in that way so before I play the entire dance of Eternity for you uh you could check out the drum transcription as as well as the drumless version in the link [Music] below [Music] [Applause] [Music] yeah [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] n [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh [Music] this song was always a a real challenge to play live and um it's funny here here at Dro I don't know if it will have been released before after this but I did a version of instr medley uh I played along to that which was a live medley of instrumental sections and there's bits and pieces of the dance of Fraternity in that uh but that was a live version where the tempos were [Music] flying when I came here to dromeo to play this version the studio version of dance Fraternity in its entirety it was shocking how pulled back the tempos were and it was way more relaxed so I guess live you know inevitably uh the adrenaline is always going and I I think it's always good to have that push and pull and you know if you're excited go with it and it I I've always been a fan of the human element but yeah this one was always a challenge and it was always hard to pull back and let these parts breathe because it's so exciting the adrenaline is just going when you get to the song in the set well we survived barely Holding On by a thread but yeah there it is uh definitely one of the most challenging uh pieces of music I've ever uh composed and performed and uh I'd like to thank Dro for giving me the chance to uh resurrect it and play it once once again for you guys uh after all these years it was a lot of fun and uh hopefully I made it through uh without too many clams hey everybody it's Mike pnoy here come along with me for a dance no way uh it's time to take a trip down the no what would be a clever thing put on your tap shoes and prepare to take a trip with me no I can't dude it's so close and uh put on your dancing shoes because we're about to take a trip down the dance oh my God why why am I like that would have worked all right it's got to commit all right

Channel: Drumeo

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Id: 49h2BivkQ0s

Length: 12min 25sec (745 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 25 2024