
One of the industry’s most esteemed builders shows us 5 easy (and practically free) mods to hot-rod your electric.
Some guitarists consider the notion of modifying an electric guitar from its stock configuration distasteful, while others consider it mandatory. As a custom builder with a decidedly vintage background, I fall somewhere in between. Generally, I’m most in favor of maximizing an instrument’s usability without jeopardizing the ability to return it to original condition.
However, when I’m building a guitar, there’s a myriad of small adjustments I can make to steer the instrument on a desired trajectory. These micro mods are interactive with each other and, depending upon the combination, offer a wide variety of sonic outcomes. But these little mods can also be applied to existing guitars—your guitars—in any number of permutations and to great affect. Let’s take a look at five mods that are easy enough for most players to try.
1. Foaming Pickup Cavities
The first and easiest adjustment that most electric guitars can benefit from is stuffing soft foam into the cavity behind the pickups in order to stop microphonic squealing. The first time I used this was when I was repairing a Gibson Firebird for Johnny Winter—the foam stopped the pickup’s back plate from vibrating like a microphone diaphragm. I have since learned that reducing the space (the cubic volume) behind a pickup modifies its sound at higher sound levels. Discovering this resonating-chamber effect has altered my approach to routing a body for pickups on new guitars, too.
It’s easy to remove your pickup or pickguard and slide some foam rubber behind the unit. Start with soft foam first, and then increase the density to find the difference you like. Conveniently, the gray foam used in aftermarket pickup packaging makes great damping material: It’s soft enough that you can double it up (see Fig. 1 and Fig. 2) to create more pressure on the pickup’s back plate, too. This is a relatively no-frills mod that requires minimal materials and tools.
2. Pickup Magnet Tricks
As we all know, sometimes a pickup isn’t a perfect match for a guitar. I always approach pickup selection like a vocalist would choose a microphone—finding the one that best brings out the guitar’s character rather than attempting to change that innate character with a new pickup.
With this in mind, try swapping your existing pickups’ magnets instead of replacing the whole thing. Magnet type and strength are big contributors to a pickup’s tonality, so it stands to reason that tweaking them will affect your sound.
Swapping magnets is easiest to do with humbuckers. In fact, it can actually be done without completely disassembling the pickup—and sometimes without even unsoldering it.
The first step is to determine what’s in your pickup already. The most common magnets for humbuckers are (roughly in order of strength): alnico 2, alnico 4, alnico 5, and then various types of ceramic magnets. In simple terms, the stronger the magnet, the greater the potential output. But you can’t just look at magnetic strength alone, because stronger magnets also affect the string’s ability to sustain.
By moving up or down one level, in terms of magnetic strength, you can usually add or subtract a little edge from a pickup. If your guitar is too tangy, moving down one pickup level (e.g., from alnico 4 to alnico 2) may smooth it out. If you want to add bite, go with a slightly stronger magnet—like, alnico 5 to a ceramic magnet. The good part is that magnets are both easy to find and inexpensive in comparison to buying a whole new pickup.
Here’s how to swap magnets in a humbucker:
1. Before you begin, determine the magnet’s polarity orientation (north/south). You can use a simple magnetic compass to do this (Fig. 3).
2. Desolder the main leads and remove the pickup from your guitar.
3. Remove the protective outer tape (Fig. 4). This gives you a clear view of the internal parts. (Note: Be careful not to pull out the hookup wires underneath.) You should be able to see the magnet in the center, underneath the two coils.
4. Loosen the four small coil-mount screws on the underside of the pickup (Fig. 5).
5. Raise each of the adjustable pole pieces about four turns to release the coil from the back plate (Fig. 6).
6. Gently pry the coils from the plate to provide a little gap (Fig. 7).
7. Place a screwdriver in the gap at one end of the pickup and slowly tap the magnet out (Fig. 8). Once enough of the magnet is exposed outside the housing, you’ll be able to pull the magnet out with your fingers. (Note: If your pickup is wax-potted, you may encounter some initial resistance as the wax breaks free.)
8. Slide in your new magnet, being careful to match the same magnetic orientation you observed in step 1 (Fig. 9).
9. Return the adjustable pole pieces to their prior position, replace the coil-mount screws and tape, and re-install the pickup in your guitar.
3. Modern vs. Vintage Wiring
Another relatively drastic but easy and cheap way to hot-rod your guitar’s sound with its current components is to alter how and where its volume and tone pots are connected to each other. The difference can be subtle—and it’s more a matter of preference than what’s “correct”—but it can make the difference between a guitar that is just OK and one that really is a joy to play.
With this mod, what you’re essentially doing is changing the way the tone and volume control interact, based upon how they “load” each other. I’ve mocked up a control setup here showing one volume and the corresponding tone control.
Fig. 10 Vintage wiring—which has pickups wired to the volume pot alone, and the tone control’s capacitor being attached to the output—yields minimal high-end roll-off when you turn the volume down. Fig. 11 Modern pickup circuits often have the tone control affecting the pickup’s tone before it gets to the volume knob, yielding a decrease in treble response as volume is reduced.
In the vintage setup, the pickup is wired to the pot lug alone, with the tone control capacitor being attached to the output side. This tends to allow the volume to be rolled off without losing too much high end. This is great for those who play clean rhythm by just lowering their guitar volume as opposed to switching amp channels or turning off a boost pedal. It’s old-school, and it works. The downside is that the tone control sometimes has to be rotated a bit more before its effects are heard.
In our so-called modern configuration, the tone cap is attached to the pickup before the volume pot. This presents the volume control with a totally different signal, resulting in a more colored sound as you reduce the volume. This can be useful if you like to turn up the guitar to cut through more. For me, the downside is the way it makes the tone control a bit of a hair-trigger affair. If you’re the type who avoids the tone control, this won’t be a factor for you.
If you have two sets of volume and tone controls (e.g., on a standard Les Paul), you may or may not decide to wire them differently, which can potentially open the door to even more tonal variations.
4. Add Steely Twang to Your Strat
There are times when a single-coil just doesn’t have enough twang. I’ve encountered Strat neck pickups that are just too wooly to provide me with that saucy, SRV/Hendrix-style rhythm juice. Or, sometimes an anemic bridge pickup just needs an extra dose of snap to push it into Tele-like territory. If so, this simple mod could be just what you’re looking for.
When Leo and the boys at the big “F” ranch developed the Tele, they put a big slab of steel under the bridge-pickup coil. This reflected the magnetic field up and toward the strings. In the words of Seymour Duncan’s Evan Skopp, this gives it more “crack”—which, if you’re addicted to twang, is a good thing. The better news is that you can attach a plate (sometimes called an elevator plate, because of how it elevates the magnetic field toward the strings) to any single coil whose pole-piece magnets are exposed at the back.
To do so, purchase a small piece of .047"(18-gauge) sheet steel from your local hardware store. Then:
1. Trim it to a manageable size and shape—about the same dimension as the pickup bobbin (Fig. 12). Then trim it so that it fits within the perimeter of the base plate without touching the lead wire contacts (Fig. 13). 2. Using a small piece of thin, double-sided tape, fit the plate over the bottom of the pickup, and then secure it with dabs of adhesive (Fig. 14). I prefer hot glue, because it’s easy to remove, but you can use epoxy or super glue, too.
This mod works great for Strat-type pickups or aftermarket Tele-style reproduction pickups that don’t already have a plate. Some pickup companies make P-90s that don’t have a metal base plate, and these can be twang-ified in this way, too. The best part is that, if you don’t like the sound, you can just peel the plate off and be right back where you started.
5. Fine-Tuning Your Tuners
This mod is a little different—and definitely not as affordable as the ones we’ve been talking about up to this point. When players think about modifications that involve tuning machines, the subject revolves around tuning stability. That’s all well and good, but I’ve rarely encountered a quality machine that slips—because the mechanical torque required to turn the tuner’s capstan is pretty stout. Problems of pitch are usually more related to capstan wobble or a bad nut-slotting job.
However, there’s another aspect of machine-head selection that I contemplate when building a custom guitar: weight. But this is more about sustain and tone than a question of neck-heaviness.
I’ve written in previous issues of Premier Guitar about how the size and shape of a guitar’s headstock affect its sustain and tone. Clearly, the mass of the tuning machines is a factor in this, as well. Having overseen the building of tens of thousands of custom guitars over the course of my career has given me cause to consider machine-head weight as a fine-tuning tool in and of itself. This kind of mod is more complex than the others I’ve presented here because it is harder to predict, and obviously more costly to dabble in because it involves replacing the existing tuners. Nevertheless, I put it out there for those of you who are willing to go to the limit of sanity in the search for a responsive instrument.
This mod revolves around the concept that adding mass to the headstock lowers its resonant frequency, while reducing mass will raise that frequency. The theory at work here is that vibration is absorbed or reflected back into the strings and body based upon this frequency. Depending upon the harmonic makeup of your particular instrument, changing this can enhance or degrade sustain and accentuate or attenuate certain harmonics. All of this is dependent not only on your guitar’s construction, but also on how large your headstock is to begin with. If all of this seems a bit hazy, that’s because it is. I don’t have a handy-dandy answer like “more mass equals more sustain” because it isn’t always true. Suffice it to say that you can make a difference in a guitar’s character by following this path. I usually go through this exercise with my builds because I have the luxury of time and the resources at hand. It’s like fine tuning a race car’s suspension settings to your liking.
Most of the better machine heads on the market these days use a standard .375" headstock hole, so swapping tuners isn’t that hard to do. The problem comes with the mounting at the rear of the peghead. Luckily, if you use the type that screw down from the front side with a nut and washer, you can swap and test before you drill additional mounting-screw holes.
To illustrate the potential variances in weight that one can expect with different tuners, I rounded up three of the most common choices and threw them on my shop scale. You can weigh your current machines to compare. Be sure to weigh all the hardware— screws, nuts, and washers—because it all comes into play. (All weights are in grams.)
The lightest of the bunch are minimalist Sperzel tuners, which look pretty sci-fi. They clocked in at 138 grams (Fig. 15). Well-made and beautifully finished, the Sperzels use a pin-mount on the back instead of wood screws—further reducing weight. This can be a game-changer if you have a substantial headstock.
Next up are the wonderful vintage Kluson reproductions by TonePros (Fig. 16). These are some of my favorites, and they weigh in at a moderate 186 grams with all hardware included. For many of my builds, the characteristics of these tuners are ideal. I enjoy the modern engineering these tuners hide within their vintage-styled exteriors, and the weight is almost perfect.
Unabashedly brute class, with typical German overbuilding, the Schallers shown here are the Incredible Hulk of the bunch (Fig. 17). At a hefty 272 grams, they have the might to get noticed when you fasten them to your axe. If you have a guitar with a tiny headstock, you’ll hear and feel a difference with the Schallers. Whether or not you like the change is subjective, and it depends on the makeup of the rest of your guitar.
Sweat the Small Stuff
As we’ve shown here, a lot of relatively small—and inexpensive (many are practically free)—tweaks can hot-rod your tone and maneuver it to an array of differing ports of call. In some ways, it’s like tossing a handful of dice instead of just two—because the way small tweaks interact can lead to exponential changes in sound. For that reason, my advice is to take it slow and only make a single change at a time to understand what it delivers. Besides, it’s more fun (and less stressful) that way, anyway!
[Updated 12/30/21]
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The ultimate hand-wired Tube Screamer from Ibanez is up for grabs! Enter the I Love Pedals giveaway today, and come back daily for extra entries!
Ibanez TS808HWv2 Tube Screamer Overdrive Pro Pedal
Ibanez has taken the iconic Tube Screamer and pushed it further by re-envisioning their flagship, hand-wired model. The company evaluated every component while aiming to stay true to the pedal’s transparent and mid-range-focused tone. After numerous prototypes, it was concluded the JRC NJM4558 op-amp was essential to achieve the Tube Screamer’s legendary sound. At the same time, this new design is capable of a wider range of sounds thanks to the addition of high-end components such as MOGAMI OFC cables, which further enhance the benefits of a hand-wired pedal. Additionally, a boost has been added to the final stage of the circuit, increasing the maximum output level by +6dB. Its look has also been revamped, giving it a high-end appearance while retaining the traditional shape.
Building upon the foundation of the beloved Core Collection H-535, this versatile instrument is designed to serve as a masterpiece in tone.
The new model features striking aesthetic updates and refined tonal enhancements. Crafted at the iconic 225 Parsons Street factory, home to other world-famous models like the H-150, H-157, and H-575 - the H-555 continues to exemplify the very best of American craftsmanship.
The Core Collection H-555 features a set of Custom Shop 225 Hot Classic Humbuckers, meticulously wound in-house with carefully selected components, and voiced to deliver added punch and richness while preserving exceptional dynamics and touch sensitivity. Seamlessly complementing the H-555’s semi-hollow construction, they blend warmth and woodiness with refined, articulate clarity.
The Core Collection H-555’s aesthetic has been elevated with multi-ply binding on the body, headstock, and pickguard. Its neck, sculpted in a classic ’50s profile, delivers effortless comfort and is adorned with elegant block inlays, seamlessly blending style with playability. Gold hardware complements the aesthetic, exuding elegance while presenting the H-555 as a truly premium and versatile instrument for the discerning player.
Available in Ebony and Trans Cherry, each Core Collection H-555 is beautifully finished with a nitrocellulose vintage gloss that features a subtle shine and gracefully ages over time. An Artisan Aged option is also available for those seeking an authentically well-loved look and feel, achieved through a meticulous, entirely hand-finished aging process. The new Core Collection continues Heritage’s tradition of world-class craftsmanship, offering a true masterpiece in tone and design for discerning players. Each guitar is shipped in a premium Heritage Custom Shop hard case.
Key Features
- Finest Tonewoods: Laminated highly figured Curly Maple (Top & Back) with solid Curly Maple sides
- Heritage Custom Shop 225 Hot Classic Humbuckers: Designed and wound in-house
- Headstock: Multi-ply bound headstock, featuring a Kite inlay, 3×3 tuners laser-etched with Heritage graphics
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- Bridge: Tune-O-Matic with aluminum stopbar tailpiece for enhanced sustain
- Made in the USA: Crafted at 225 Parsons Street
For more information, please visit heritageguitars.com.
Ariel Posen and the Heritage Custom Shop Core Collection H-555 - YouTube
Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.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.
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.”