Mustering an army of guitars, amps, and stompboxes, this dirt-pedal fiend explores the frontiers of blues on his new album, Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven.
Like all great blues records, Peter Parcek’s powerful new album Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven cuts close to the bone. Yet, from the opening track—a gut-punch rendition of Peter Green’s “World Keep on Turning”—Parcek takes us on a two-way journey. One direction is back to the deep emotion that defines the truest blues of every era; the other is forward into a modern sonic approach with which he breaks blues conventions without dishonoring them.
“I wanted to try something that seems impossible when you say it out loud,” Parcek admitted when PG spoke to him on the phone. “I wanted the rawness of the blues—the rootedness, if you will—but I also wanted it to be contemporary.”
In this case, “contemporary” didn’t just mean using modern effects or production and arranging techniques. It also means “of the moment” emotionally. Parcek wrote and recorded Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven in the aftermath of his mother’s death, simultaneously mourning his loss and celebrating her life. These feelings were close to the surface throughout the making of the record, which was recorded in Nashville and near Parcek’s Boston-area home, and remained raw when we spoke months later.
The connection between Parcek, the blues, and his mother goes back to his musical awakening as a kid growing up in the 1960s. He first heard Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Albert Collins, and other heroes through the crackle of AM radio—listening at night when Southern stations could reach his New England bedroom.
Eventually, it inspired him to express himself through music. “When I was in high school, my mom saved up Green Stamps to get me a nylon-string guitar,” he recalls. “I also began playing harmonica, and early on made more progress on the harp.”
In his late teens, Parcek moved to London in the mid ’60s and discovered a whole community of musicians who shared his obsession with the blues. “I’d go see players like Clapton and Peter Green all the time,” he says. That’s when he began to get serious about performing. “Back then, there were so many great British blues guitarists that I focused on vocals and harp,” he says. “I didn’t really get serious about the guitar until I came back to the States.”
He found work as a sideman (most notably with blues piano legend Pinetop Perkins), bandleader, and, eventually, as a solo artist who always seemed willing to infuse his blues with a little something off the menu. Fast forward more than four decades, and Parcek has tapped into something that Peter Green did so eloquently in his days as Fleetwood Mac’s talisman: bringing forward the blues without being imprisoned by purism. On the sequel to his national debut album, 2010’s Blues Music Award-nominated The Mathematics of Love, Parcek is aided by producer/percussionist Marco Giovino—of Robert Plant’s Band of Joy—as he paints his blues with tonal colors ranging from earthy to ethereal, and puts his signature on the style using dazzling chromatic runs, elegant bent notes, grizzled and soaring tones, and a variety of influences from Wes Montgomery to Django Reinhardt. But even when he’s constructing distant ambient soundscapes on songs like Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” and his own “Every Drop of Rain,” the emotional truth remains close. And, of course, the pounding pulse of “Ashes to Ashes,” the raw drive of “Things Fall Apart,” and the playful instrumental romps “Mississippi Suitcase” and “Shiver” show plenty blues bona fides. As a contemporary once said of Green, it’s the “blues feeling” that’s important. And on Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven, that feeling is abundant, deep, and visceral.
If I had to pick two words to describe Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven, they’d be “lush” and “raw.” That’s a pretty unusual combination. Was that your intention?
Some of this is very personal. I hadn’t made a record for a while. I didn’t have the budget. And in the midst of that, my mom passed away. One way that artists react to deep loss is to create from it, in honor of it. Songs like “Every Drop of Rain” and “Ashes to Ashes” started to come through, and they were really in honor of her. So thematically, we’re talking about mortality, aging, impermanence, and loss.
TIDBIT: Guitarist Luther Dickinson and bassist Dennis Crouch were drafted to play on the album's Nashville sessions.
That comes across in a lot of places, but you break away from those themes, too.
Well, early versions of the record were just unrelievedly about loss. It struck me that I needed to give listeners a breath—something fun, but still, hopefully, deep and rooted. So that’s where some of the instrumentals came from. If you only do the themes we were just discussing, you’ve only got one palette. But if you include playful moments in the correct way, then it works.
And it’s more true to the person when you include the fuller spectrum, emotionally. Particularly because, all along, my mother was incredibly supportive of my music—from buying me my first guitar to helping me get to London to everything after that. The album feels truer as a tribute because it has emotional range. I’m really proud of that.
The instrumentals give you a chance to stretch out on the guitar a bit.
I also used them to pay tribute to some great guitar players I adore. “Shiver” is basically an homage to Albert Collins. “Pat Hare”—even though it’s not a mimic of one of his records—is a tribute to him.
“Mississippi Suitcase” was inspired by a cab ride in Memphis. The cabbie talked the whole ride. He started telling me about his son and his ex-wife. And when he got onto his ex-wife, he said, “We broke up. She got everything, and I threw all my clothes in a Mississippi suitcase and got out of there.” I said, “What's a Mississippi suitcase?” and he just laughed: “Oh, you’re from the north! A Mississippi suitcase is a green Hefty bag!” [Laughs.] So I tried to put some John Lee Hooker in there, and there’s almost a “Tom Waits falling down the stairs” sort of vibe. But with the instrumentals, I started to feel like we had a complete album, with the depth of the blues, but with the playful thing, too.
How did the band come together?
I was very lucky to have Marco as the producer and percussionist on the record. All the basics were done at Marco’s house, which, at the time, was in Nashville. He assembled the band, mainly Dennis Crouch and Dominic John Davis [both on bass] and Luther Dickinson [guitar], who were brilliant. Luther throws it down as great as anybody, but he’ll mix it up with you and have fun. He’s on “Shiver,” “Ashes to Ashes,” the title track, and “Pat Hare,” as is Mickey Raphael [harmonica]. On “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean,” and “Mississippi Suitcase” we did the overdubs up here in Massachusetts, with a local lap steel player named Andy Santospago.
Parcek, playing his 2004 Fender 50th Anniversary Strat, leans into his amps for feedback at the Spire Center for the Performing Arts in Plymouth, Massachusetts, while supported by Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven producer Marco Giovino behind the drums. Photo by Denise Maccaferri
Earlier, I used “lush” to describe the album’s sound, but that’s only one way the tones stray from blues norms. What pushed you in different directions?
I didn’t want to just mimic a record from the 1950s. To me, those records are already there and are as good as it’s ever gonna get. I wanted that depth, but hopefully from my own perspective and with elements more of this era. So we used a number of drum loops and modern tones.
Some of the song ideas also came from mental challenges. For example, I was reading about Michelangelo, so I started thinking, “What would Michelangelo sing if he had the blues?” I was reading quotes of his, and I have to admit that I stole a couple of them. It struck me that you can stretch your abilities and your consciousness in a very natural way just by imagining something you haven’t tried before.
How did that thinking influence your approach to tones and textures?
Two examples occur to me right away: “Every Drop of Rain” and “Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven.” On “Every Drop of Rain,” the foundation guitar, which was played live, was pretty heavily effected—almost ambient. That sound was achieved by using a little Swart Atomic Space Tone amp and a Strymon Flint pedal. I had the reverb and decay up pretty high on the Flint, along with some tremolo. I dubbed a second guitar on top of it, but having the ambient guitar as the basic track created this gauzy, filmic thing. That song is dedicated to my mother—which informed the guitar approach and the vocal.
On “Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven,” Luther was playing slide, and my foundational guitar had this pretty extreme tremolo. Both Marco and I believe that if you’re going to have an effect, then really push it—take chances with it. So there’s a lot of intensity in terms of the tremolo setting. That was a brownface Fender Deluxe. It makes you play differently. You don’t need as many notes, but the notes do more because of the effect.
Conversely, your guitar on “World Keep on Turning” is raw and guttural. How did you get that sound?
Well, I have a problem. I have an addiction to pedals, especially filth or dirt pedals. I just can’t get enough of them [laughs]. It’s kinda sad! That tone is a pedal by BMF called The Great Wide Open—because it is great when you just turn it up wide open. It’s dimed through either a Headstrong Lil’ King or the Atomic Space Tone amp. We laid down a second guitar related to it, but hopefully with a different signature sound.
I was lucky in that I had some great amps in Nashville. Buddy Miller lent us the Atomic Space Tone and Lil’ King. He’s an amazing guy. Up here [in Massachusetts], I used a Carr Skylark and way too many pedals—from the Strymon and the BMF to various Lovepedal and J. Rockett pedals. I have not met many drive pedals I don’t like, but there are a lot of ambient pedals I’m very fond of, too. Mr. Black makes some cool stuff, too. I like that guy.
The backing track from “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” feels very non-traditional. How was that recorded?
We actually used two of Marco’s percussion loops and one guitar. I played an Ibanez George Benson through the brownface Deluxe with tremolo, which, by itself, creates the atmosphere. We built everything around that. Brownface Fenders are somewhat overlooked amps. People usually talk about tweeds and blackfaces, but the browns … oh my god—they’re incredible! This Deluxe sounds really good at lower volume, but if you push it, it almost starts to sound like it’s going to early Marshall-ville.
Listeners don’t usually associate drum loops with tremolo-driven blues guitar.
These were all signature Marco Giovino loops. Our engineer, Ducky Carlisle, who’s done a lot of the latter-day Buddy Guy records, is also a drummer. He heard two of Marco’s loops and suggested we put them together. It creates this huge and, I think, interesting sound. That was a different way of working, but it was fun to play along to the loops. The lead guitar is through a tweed Princeton. So we had an embarrassment of riches in the amp department.
Guitars
1960s Gibson ES-330
1950s Harmony Stratotone
2004 Fender 50th Anniversary Stratocaster
2014 Fender 60th Anniversary Stratocaster
Xotic California XSC-2
Fender Custom Shop Telecaster Jr.
Fender Telebration Cabronita
Tom Anderson Hollow-T
Ibanez George Benson GB-10
Epiphone ES-335
Dean Thin Body Electric Brass Resonator
Amps
Carr Skylark 1x12 combo with Celestion A-Type speaker
Swart Atomic Space Tone with 12" Eminence Red White and Blues speaker
Headstrong Lil' King with 12" Eminence GA10-SC64
Brownface Fender Deluxe with stock 12" speaker
Brownface Fender Princeton with stock 10" speaker
1950s tweed Princeton with stock 10" speaker
Top Hat Club Royale with Celestion G12H30 12" speaker
Vintage Supro Thunderbolt with stock 15" speaker
Marshall 50-watt plexi with basketweave 4x12 cab, stock speakers
Effects
Vintage Ibanez TS9 Tube Screamer
BMF Effects The Great Wide Open
Keeley D&M Drive
Keeley Red Dirt
Lovepedal Tchula boost
Lovepedal Eternity Burst overdrive
Greer Ghetto Stomp overdrive
Fulltone Plimsoul overdrive/distortion
Fulltone OCD overdrive
Jetter GS 124 overdrive
Catlinbread Dirty Little Secret overdrive
Xotic Soul Driven
Ramble FX Marvel Drive
Strymon Flint reverb
Strings, Picks, and Slides
Dunlop light gauge (.009-.042) on S- and T-style guitars
D'Addario light gauge (.010-.046) on Gibson-scale guitars
D'Addario medium gauge (.011-.049) for slide and down-tuned guitars
Wegen Big City 1.8 mm
Rocky Mountain Slides
What are your main guitars?
I’m definitely a Fender-style player. I love Strats and Teles. I have a Harmony Stratotone solidbody that I play slide on, which I love. The slide guitar on “Ashes to Ashes” is an Epiphone 335; it sounds great. I have a Tom Anderson Hollow-T, which I love. I have an Xotic California XSC-2, which is a great guitar. As you can tell, I have a problem not only with pedals, but with guitars and amps, too! [Laughs.] But it lets you do some sonic exploration, which I think is all to the good.
Speaking of exploring, your soloing style doesn’t always stay with the usual blues scales and licks. Is that something you try to avoid?
Yes, it is. For a while, I would put structures on myself, like: Do not use this phrase. Or if you do, do it backwards or sideways. It’s really out of respect. It’s been done by the greats at the highest level. So even if you do it well, and it feels good, there would be very little original in it.
You don’t worry about breaking blues conventions?
To me, the emotion is there, for better or for worse—you like it or you don’t. I think that even with the highest-level players, everybody falls back on stuff that you love. I went “bad” a long time ago, listening to George Benson and Pat Martino [laughs]. And lately, I’ve gone further off by listening to a lot of Gypsy music, which is incredibly demanding and virtuosic.
So Gypsy guitar influences your approach to the blues?
That’s in there, for sure. I’ve taken a couple of lessons from Sammy Daussat, and he’s like, “the secret to gypsy rhythm is … beer!” I like to practice to Gypsy backing tracks. I play the melody and improvise solos against them. If I practice something really difficult but I make it through, it really helps me when I go to play other things.
Do you record your solos live?
Usually, yes. “World Keep on Turning” was live. “Things Fall Apart” was mostly live except a bit at the end. “Pat Hare” was, too, though there were multiple guitar dubs as well. “Shiver” is another one. But I’m really self-critical. I always think I can do it better or make it more emotive. So even if I’ve laid down something good, you’ve got to convince me of it. Sometimes I convince myself by trying to beat the live solo and discovering that I can’t [laughs]. One of the many funny things about working with Marco Giovino is that he had a bullhorn. If I was doing an overdub, he’d get on the bullhorn and yell, “Try not to suck this time!” It’s kind of a combination of love and abuse.
Did you improvise your solos?
Oh yeah, everything. Sometimes during a gig, I might play the solo that’s on the album, but that’s after the fact. That’s one of the joys to me—just winging it. On this album, the only exception was “Every Drop of Rain.” Marco said, “Look, I know you don’t like to repeat things, but please do me a favor and repeat some phrases in those sections.” He wanted the repetition to drive home the emotion.
What’s your mindset when you improvise in the studio?
I feel like the best I play is when I’m relaxed, not trying too hard, and barely thinking at all but reacting to, and emotionally in tune with, the track. When I overthink it, or when I go, “I’ve to get these intervals in here, gotta try this scale there,” it usually feels artificial to me. The solo that resonates emotionally is the one to keep.
Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven seems like the culmination of so many things … from your early blues influences to your London period to everything that came afterwards. As a songwriter, singer, and guitarist, where do you go from here?
I’m still learning. If you listen to blues greats like Albert Collins, Freddie King, B.B. King, Albert King, Fred McDowell, Robert Johnson, Son House, and mash them up with people like Django Reinhardt, Biréli Lagrène, and Stochelo Rosenberg, and practice any or all of that when you go to improvise, it’s going to inform what you’re doing—if you can relax enough to let it come through.
So listening to the greats opens creative doors?
Listening is just as important when you’re playing with your band. On this album, Marco and the band that he assembled were all such great musicians. When you play with great musicians, if you just listen to what they’re doing, then it can’t help but inspire you to play something fresh.
This nuanced performance of the title track from Peter Parcek's new album was captured live at Boston's Red Star Union in 2013. With his 2004 Fender 50th Anniversary Stratocaster running in stereo through a pair of vintage Fender Princetons—a brownface and a tweed—Parcek fully explores the song's emotional landscape, playing lush single-note melodies, graceful bends, octave chords, dirty blues licks, and ending in a cloudburst of feedback.
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The high priest of prog-metal guitar, John Petrucci, is still finding new territory on his instrument.
The legendary progressive-metal guitarist details the darkness—and the renewed camaraderie—that led to his band Dream Theater’s 16th full-length record, Parasomnia.
Some very important events happened in John Petrucci’s life in 2024. He celebrated an enormous milestone with his bandmates in prog-metal behemoth Dream Theater: They’ve been a band for 40 years. Many bands aren’t destined to last a single decade, let alone four. It’s a titanic personal and artistic achievement. And yet, that anniversary paled in significance next to another major development: The band wrote and created a new full-length record with founding drummer Mike Portnoy, who had been absent from Dream Theater since 2010.
The news of Portnoy’s reunion with Dream Theater rocked the metal world. Over the years, whiffs of acrimony and hurt feelings suggested Portnoy’s return to the band might be a pipe dream. But in October 2023, the band revealed that they had all independently reconciled with Portnoy, a process that culminated backstage at New York’s Beacon Theater in 2022. Portnoy attended Dream Theater’s show at the venue and met up with the band afterward. It was the first time he’d seen vocalist James Labrie in 10 years. Within seconds, 13 years melted away in the warmth of camaraderie.
“The gear was all set up and we sat there and started playing. It was magic. It was like we never missed a beat.”
A few months after the announcement of Portnoy’s return, he and bandmates Labrie, Petrucci, bassist John Myung, and keyboardist Jordan Rudess convened at the recently renovated Dream Theater HQ, their longtime creative hideout and recording studio in Long Island, to begin to create new music. Petrucci, speaking over the phone from Brazil during Dream Theater’s December 2024 tour, remembers that period fondly. “From the moment that we all stepped in the studio in February, the gear was all set up and we sat there and started playing,” he says. “It was magic. It was like we never missed a beat.”
After shaking off the cobwebs, the first song they wrote together was “Night Terror”—“if that gives you any indication of the energy and vibe and mood that we were in,” quips Petrucci. It’s heavy, riffy, aggressive, and progressive, a capsule of 13 years in just shy of 10 minutes. “We let that all out in the first couple of weeks of just being together,” Petrucci continues. “It was wonderful and the creative juices just flowed the way they always did. There was great brotherly chemistry between all of us.”
Last year, Dream Theater celebrated their ruby anniversary as a band. Four decades on, they’re still exploring the dark corners of what happens when we sleep.
The band continued to create together as they’d always done. They had some concrete ideas: They wanted to make a concept album, and it had to be heavy and riff-centric. Petrucci, who produced the record, was intrigued by parasomnia, a medical concept which refers broadly to any unusual sleep pattern, like sleepwalking, nightmares, insomnia, sleep paralysis, and more. He hadn’t experienced those nocturnal issues (the worst he deals with is snoring), but he began deep research into them. A path had opened up. “That creative part of me just wakes up, and then that turns into it also being musically creative, lyrically creative, visually creative,” says Petrucci.
This is how Parasomnia, Dream Theater’s 16th studio record, came to exist. Engineered and mixed by Andy Sneap, the concept album comprises a collection of suites and vignettes that center on various sleep disturbances, opening with “In the Arms of Morpheus,” a slowly building soundscape that sets the scene for all that follows. It soundtracks someone getting ready for bed and falling asleep, and just as they’re drifting into a dreamstate, a musical theme starts to creep in. It heightens and gets weird before exploding into the full chaos that gives way to “Night Terror,” the nine-minute-plus epic. Petrucci’s playing on this song alone is staggering: There’s the classic, open-string beginner riff, then vintage, hyper, ’80s-metal single-note melody work, then a truly brain-melting, lightning-fast solo that leaves your jaw open.
True to Dream Theater lineage, there are pieces of the record that feel ready to soundtrack alien drag races on Mars next to swanky sections of jazzy, hard-rocking funk-blues, like on “A Broken Man.” Petrucci slips in and out of modes and scales like a chameleon changing its colors, each sounding as lived-in and natural as the last. His fingers just seem to know where to go. His only reprieve is the funereal interlude “Are We Dreaming?” which prepares us for the power ballad “Bend the Clock” and the devastating, scorched earth closer: “The Shadow Man Incident.”
Parasomnia is Dream Theater’s 16th studio record, and their first since reuniting with founding drummer Mike Portnoy.
“It’s wacky,” says Petrucci about the phenomena behind that song’s title. If you’re not familiar, “the shadow man” is a colloquial name given to a figure that appears during some episodes of sleep paralysis. People around the world have reported a similar apparition visiting them while they’re experiencing sleep paralysis—but there’s no scientific consensus for what causes the similar visions.
“There’s something in the human brain that is unaccounted for or whatever that must be producing that, that repeated experience,” continues Petrucci. “You start doing all this research and going down rabbit holes online. You’re like, ‘Wow, for centuries, in every culture and civilization, the same thing has been happening. What is this?’ It definitely explores the depths of the human mind, but it reminds me of any sort of topic that holds your interest in a weird way, like UFOs. A song like ‘The Shadow Man Incident’ is a long, epic piece of music that gives you the backdrop and license to go into storytelling more.”
The goal was to take that storytelling beyond the normal confines of an LP—or, at least, what we think of as an LP in the streaming age. “What we decided to do was to make the album kind of like a Dark Side of the Moon listening experience,” explains Petrucci. “Our hope is that people will get this record, turn down the lights, get together with some friends for a drink or whatever you do, and just listen to the whole thing like you’re watching a movie. It’s supposed to be an experience.”Petrucci even studied the music of composers like John Williams to get a bead on how to create epic, cinematic feelings in music. He displayed his research to his bandmates in the form of creative direction for certain songs, likening the process to scoring a film. “The album or song topic presents certain imagery, and you want the music to match that imagery, so you have those tools in your toolbox, like, ‘Okay, I know what kind of chord movement or chordal sounds or modal things I can do that are going to make that,’ and it’s going to create that flavor as opposed to just going in and writing in the typical way that you would if you didn’t have that knowledge ahead of time.”
“With Mike rejoining the band, I wanted to lean into the nostalgic aspect in some of the recording process.”
A part of that soundscaping is what Petrucci describes as “ear candy”: spoken-word passages, or sound effects like clocks ticking and alarms ringing. These elements help build a more profound, immersive listen, but they only work if the songs are good, says Petrucci. “You can have all these sound connections and overdubs and voices, but if the songs suck, it’s not going to mean anything. No one’s going to want to listen to it.”
Knowing that the record would deal with all things eerie and creepy, Petrucci wanted to explore what types of tonalities could unsettle the listening experience. “For ‘Night Terror,’ I use the super Phrygian mode, which is like a mode of the Hungarian minor which has a very unresolved sound that creates a lot of tension,” he says. He also experimented with constructs like the Prometheus and Tristan chords. “That gives you that dreamy weird thing you hear in ‘In the Arms of Morpheus.’ That first 8-string chord is this crazy chord of all tritones that just makes it sound like you’re in a nightmare right away.”
Petrucci, pictured here shredding in November 1994, broke out plenty of classic gear for the recording of Parasomnia to mark the reunion with Portnoy.
Photo by Frank White
Petrucci called on a range of tools old and new to bring Parasomnia to life. “With Mike rejoining the band, I wanted to lean into the nostalgic aspect in some of the recording process,” he explains. He used his 6-, 7-, and 8-string Ernie Ball Music Man Majesty guitars, in a spread of different tunings. He used his Mesa/Boogie JP-2C on everything except the record’s solos. For those, he busted out his old Mesas—a Mark III, IV, and IIC+ among them—for a shootout and wound up choosing the IIC+ that he used on old Dream Theater records (plus his own solo release, Suspended Animation). A Roland Jazz Chorus even clocked in for some cleans—a page Petrucci took from James Hetfield’s book.
The nostalgia didn’t end there. The band reached out to recording engineer Doug Oberkircher, who engineered all of the band’s records from 1992’s Images and Words through 2003’s Train of Thought, to purchase the Neve preamp used on those albums. All the guitars on Parasomnia were recorded through that preamp.
In many ways, a production this grand and intricate is familiar territory for the band. Petrucci and Dream Theater obviously have a penchant for art that is narrative, theatrical, and grand. But Parasomnia is specially weighted with circumstance and time.John Petrucci's Gear
Petrucci and Dream Theater have managed an incredible feat: They’re just as excited about their music now as they were when they were teenagers.
Photo by Ekaterina Gorbacheva
Guitars
- Various Ernie Ball Music Man The Majesty 6-, 7-, and 8-string guitars with DiMarzio Dreamcatcher and Rainmaker pickups
Amps
- Mesa/Boogie JP-2C (rhythm parts)
- Vintage Mesa/Boogie Mark II C+ Simul-Class (lead parts)
- Roland JC-120 (clean parts)
- Mesa/Boogie 4x12 Rectifier Traditional Straight cabinet
Effects
- MXR Bass Compressor
- Boss CE-2W
- Boss DC-2W
- TC Electronic Dreamscape
- TC Electronic TC 2290
- TC Electronic Corona Chorus+
- MXR Stereo Chorus
- Keeley Blues Disorder
- Dunlop JP95 John Petrucci Signature Cry Baby Wah
- MXR Custom Audio Electronics MC403 Power System
Recording
- Neve 1093 Pre/EQ
- API 3124MV
- Solid State Logic PURE DRIVE OCTO
- sE Electronics VR2 + Mojave Audio MA-D (rhythm parts)
- sE Electronics SE4400a + Royer Labs R-121 (lead parts)
- Royer Labs R-121 in stereo (clean parts)
- sE Electronics RNR1 (mid room)
- sE Electronics RNT in OMNI (far room)
- Waves H-Delay Analog Delay Plugin
- Soundtoys EchoBoy
- Soundtoys MicroShift
- Soundtoys Crystallizer
- D16 Group Audio Software Repeater
- Valhalla DSP VintageVerb Plugin
- Valhalla DSP ValhallaRoom Reverb Plugin
- Radial ProRMP
- Radial J48
- EBow
Strings & Picks
- John Petrucci signature Dunlops
- Ernie Ball .10 gauge electric sets
“John Myung and I met when we were in middle school, so we were like 12, and I remember everything about us playing together, going over to each other’s houses after school and playing every Iron Maiden song there ever was, going to Berklee and meeting Mike when we were 18, forming the band,” says Petrucci. “Here we are, it’s 40 years later. How the hell does that happen? But the great thing is to still be playing with my brothers and my buddies, and still making music together that we’re just as excited about as we were when we were 18. It’s all we ever wanted to do.”
All of this history isn’t just window dressing. It comes out in Petrucci’s playing, too: It’s all one, long story. “By the time I was 16 or 17, I had a handle on the kind of style of player I wanted to be, and those original elements are still there and will always be there,” says Petrucci. “But now, 40 years later, there’s still new things coming in. Even on the new album, there’s things I never did before. We’re playing these shows and I’m trying to master this stuff live in front of an audience and see if I can pull it off under pressure. The challenge of it is just as much as it was when I was a teenager. I love it.
“It’s a continuing experiment,” Petrucci continues. “As you develop new techniques and go down new roads of playing, all of a sudden you realize you abandoned some older techniques, then you go back and rediscover those things, and through the process of rediscovering the old things you used to do, all of a sudden you could do some stuff that you never were able to do before. It’s like something that’s living. It’s a living experiment of guitar playing. It’s just forever inspiring.”
YouTube It
Last year marked Dream Theater’s 40th anniversary as a band, and the official Dream Theater fan club caught up with the group before their gig in Oslo to see how they brought the milestone tour to life.
Fifteen watts that sits in a unique tone space and offers modern signal routing options.
A distinct alternative to the most popular 1x10 combos. Muscular and thick for a 1x10 at many settings. Pairs easily with single-coils and humbuckers. Cool looks.
Tone stack could be more rangeful.
$999
Supro Montauk
supro.com
When you imagine an ideal creative space, what do you see? A loft? A barn? A cabin far from distraction? Reveling in such visions is inspiration and a beautiful escape. Reality for most of us, though, is different. We’re lucky to have a corner in the kitchen or a converted closet to make music in. Still, there’s a romance and sense of possibility in these modest spaces, and the 15-watt, 1x10, all-tubeSupro Montauk is an amplifier well suited to this kind of place. It enlivens cramped corners with its classy, colorful appearance. It’s compact. It’s also potent enough to sound and respond like a bigger amp in a small room.
The Montauk works in tight quarters for reasons other than size, though—with three pre-power-section outputs that can route dry signal, all-wet signal from the amp’s spring reverb, or a mixture of both to a DAW or power amplifier.
Different Stripes and Spacious Places
Vintage Supro amps are modestly lovely things. The China-made Montauk doesn’t adhere toold Supro style motifs in the strictest sense. Its white skunk stripe is more commonly seen on black Supro combos from the late 1950s, while the blue “rhino hide” vinyl evokes Supros from the following decade. But the Montauk’s handsome looks make a cramped corner look a lot less dour. It looks pretty cool on a stage, too, but the Montauk attribute most likely to please performing guitarists is the small size (17.75" x 16.5" x 7.5") and light weight (29 pounds), which, if you tote your guitar in a gig bag and keep your other stuff to a minimum, facilitates magical one-trip load ins.
Keen-eyed Supro-spotters noting the Montauk’s weight and dimensions might spy the similarities to another 1x10 Supro combo,the Amulet. A casual comparison of the two amps might suggest that the Montauk is, more-or-less, an Amulet without tremolo and power scaling. They share the same tube complement, including a relatively uncommon 1x6L6 power section. But while the Montauk lacks the Amulet’s tremolo, the Montauk’s spring reverb features level and dwell controls rather than the Amulet’s single reverb-level knob.
“High reverb levels and low dwell settings evoke a small, reflective room with metallic overtones from the spring sprinkled on top—leaving ghostly ambience in the wake of strong, defined transient tones.”
If you use reverb a lot and in varying levels of intensity, you’ll appreciate the extra flexibility. High reverb levels and low dwell settings evoke a small, reflective room with metallic overtones from the spring sprinkled on top—leaving ghostly ambience in the wake of strong, defined transient tones. There are many shades of this subtle texture to explore, and it’s a great sound and solution for those who find the spring reverbs in Fender amps (which feature no dwell control) an all-or-nothing proposition. For those who like to get deep in the pipeline, though, the dwell offers room to roam. Mixing high level and dwell settings blunts the amp’s touch sensitivity a bit, and at 15 watts you trade headroom for natural compression, compounding the fogginess of these aggressive settings. A Twin Reverb it ain’t. But there is texture aplenty to play with.
A Long, Wide Strand
Admirably, the Montauk speaks in many voices when paired with a guitar alone. The EQ sits most naturally and alive with treble and bass in the noon-to-2-o’clock region, and a slight midrange lean adds welcome punch. Even the amp’s trebliest realms afford you a lot of expressive headroom if you have enough range and sensitivity in your guitar volume and tone pots. Interactions between the gain and master output controls yield scads of different tone color, too. Generally, I preferred high gain settings, which add a firecracker edge to maximum guitar volume settings and preserve touch and pick response at attenuated guitar volume and tone levels.
If working with the Montauk in this fashion feels natural, you’ll need very few pedals. But it’s a good fit for many effects. A Fuzz Face sounded nasty without collapsing into spitty junk, and the Klon-ish Electro-Harmonix Soul Food added muscle and character in its clean-boost guise and at grittier gain levels. There’s plenty of headroom for exploring nuance and complexity in delays and modulations. It also pairs happily with a wide range of guitars and pickups: Every time I thought a Telecaster was a perfect fit, I’d plug in an SG with PAFs and drift away in Mick Taylor/Stones bliss.
The Verdict
Because the gain, master, tone, and reverb controls are fairly interactive, it took me a minute to suss out the Montauk’s best and sweetest tones. But by the time I was through with this review, I found many sweet spots that fill the spaces between Vox and Fender templates. There’s also raunch in abundance when you turn it up. It’s tempting to view the Montauk as a competitor to the Fender Princeton and Vox AC15. At a thousand bucks, it’s $400 dollars less than the Mexico-made Princeton ’68 Custom and $170 more than the AC15, also made in China. In purely tone terms, though, it represents a real alternative to those stalwarts. I’d be more than happy to see one in a backline, provided I wasn’t trying to rise above a Geezer Butler/Bill Ward rhythm section. And with its capacity for routing to other amps and recording consoles in many intriguing configurations, it succeeds in being a genuinely interesting combination of vintage style and sound and home-studio utility—all without adding a single digital or solid-state component to the mix.
Watch the official video documenting the sold-out event at House of Blues in Anaheim. Join Paul Reed Smith and special guests as they toast to quality and excellence in guitar craftsmanship.
PRS Guitars today released the official video documenting the full night of performances at their 40th Anniversary celebration, held January 24th in conjunction with the 2025 NAMM (The National Association of Music Merchants) Show. The sold-out, private event took place at House of Blues in Anaheim, California and featured performances by PRS artists Randy Bowland, Curt Chambers, David Grissom, Jon Jourdan, Howard Leese, Mark Lettieri Group, Herman Li, John Mayer, Orianthi, Tim Pierce, Noah Robertson, Shantaia, Philip Sayce, and Dany Villarreal, along with Paul Reed Smith and his Eightlock band.
“What a night! Big thanks to everyone who came out to support us: retailers, distributors, vendors, content creators, industry friends, and especially the artists. I loved every second. We are so pleased to share the whole night now on this video,” said Paul Reed Smith, Founder & Managing General Partner of PRS Guitars. “I couldn’t be more proud to still be here 40 years later.”
With nearly 1,400 of the who’s who in the musical instrument industry in attendance, the night ended with a thoughtful toast from PRS Signature Artist John Mayer, who reflected on 40 years of PRS Guitars and the quality that sets the brand apart. “The guitars are great. You can’t last 40 years if the guitars aren’t great,” said Mayer. “Many of you started hearing about PRS the same way I did, which is you would talk about PRS and someone would say ‘They’re too nice.’ What’s too nice for a guitar? What, you want that special vibe that only tuning every song can give you on stage? You want that grit just like your heroes … bad intonation? The product is incredible.”