john petrucci is the guitarist and lyricist for progressive metal band dream theater. petrucci, along with john myung and mike portnoy (dream theater bassist and drummer) are graduates of berklee college of music and this definitely shows in their music.dream theater are famous/well known for intricate, complex and self indulgent music. many of their songs span for over 15 minutes and contain some of the most terrifying guitar, drum and bass work around.
petrucci has, by far, the best overall technique of any famous shred guitarist. his legato, sweeping, string skipping, picking an anything else you can imagine are in the highest echelon. in other words, he's pretty much as good at all these techniques as you can want to be.
the most coma-inducing of his techniques is his picking. he is capable of doing fast alternate picking runs at 16th notes at over 200 beats per minute. that's around 14-15 notes per second, all of them picked separately and many of his solos and riffs use this technique. as opposed to players like paul gilbert, i think petrucci focuses more on pure speed and "shred" factor in his picking. his picking lines are very dense, short and sharp. he incorporates complex sweeping, blindingly fast legato and millions of other crazy small tricks and licks.
as i said before, dream theater are known for their complex and intricate songs. their music is kind of like pink floyd on crack meets metal. they use complex time signatures and heavy riffs a lot. over their 20 odd-year career they've dipped into pretty much every genre of music. however, as complex as they may be, they are still pretty accessible and well known due to the fact they have a vocalist (their music is not all instrumental, but contains lengthy instrumental breaks) and more straightforward metal songs.
petrucci used to be endorsed by ibanez guitars and played them for many years, having his own ibanez JPM signature guitar before switching to ernie ball/musicman guitars. he now has multiple signature guitars from EBMM. petrucci, along with steve vai, is one of the main users and pioneers of the seven string guitar. many of dream theater's songs are in drop tunings or utilise seven string guitars.
due to his monster technique, the guitar-playing community often joke about and make references to him. in many parodies on the internet, he has become known as "the overlord", "your God" and "satan". he made a "rock discipline" guitar instructional video in the 90's which has been ridiculed to no end due to petrucci's insane level of skill, technique and dedication and also the exercises themselves. here's an example.
this video is a decent example of his overall playing:
You mention that Dream Theatre is famous for 'self-indugent' music. Do the think that this will preclude them from also becoming popular musicians? Do they now and will they always have a very limited following?
ReplyDeleteMichele
they're pretty famous actually, lots of their albums have reached the billboard 200 charts and they appeal to more people than just guitarists since their music isn't instrumental and appeals to a wider audience, but they do have some very, very intricate pieces of music which will never get played on the radio.
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