John Petrucci Quotes

When we were recording, sometimes I wondered if what we were doing would even be possible to play live.

Although he loved performing live, and was great at it - Jeff was as solid on stage, as he was in the studio - performing for two hours at a stretch really took a physical toll. It was very hard on him.

Your sound is in your hands as much as anything. It's the way you pick, and the way you hold the guitar, more than it is the amp or the guitar you use.

When I need to nail that riff to the cross, Marshall will always provide the hammer!

Nobody seems to play Yamaha electrics, but it's the best guitar I own.

Live music is better.

When you're in a club or a theater or even an arena, yeah, you want visuals, you want a good light show. But Slayer has always been about the sound. We have to sound good. It has to be tight.

There's a clip where he had someone miming me running around from keyboard to keyboard. Oh dear, I am sure a lot of people didn't know what he was going on about.

To get my sound in the studio, I double guitar tracks, and when it gets to the lead parts, the rhythm drops out, just like it's live. I'm very conscious of that.

I don't think that Simon and Garfunkel as a live act compares to Simon and Garfunkel as a studio act.

Playing a three-hour Rush show is like running a marathon while solving equations.

The first record I bought was a Carl Perkins record, because I saw him at The Festival at Sandpoint, Idaho. I loved Elvis and I found out that he wrote 'Blue Suede Shoes'... so connecting that experience of going to see him play was pretty awesome. That's when I realised I wanted to play guitar.

The more guitars we have onstage the better, as I'm concerned.

'The Last Five Years,' we sang almost everything live. When we're in a convertible on the West Side Highway, there was no point - it's not going to be usable sound. But any time we were indoors, we were singing live.

I used to break three or four strings a night, and the show would be over because I didn't know how to change the strings.

After that initial success, every chance we got we'd hire that remote recording truck and just record stuff at the Whisky because it was so inexpensive.

At the Isle of Wight, the sound went out and kind of kept on going. And I wasn't... when I came off stage I was kind of unhappy about how we had played. But now, I listen back to those recordings and it's not bad.

I play enough guitar to get by. I don't like to play guitar live.

Well, you know it was so different from when you rehearsed. You're out there with your guitar and trying to get a sound, but it doesn't sound anything like what you expect!

A concert is a concert is a concert is a concert. An album is an album is an album is an album. Musically, both have nothing in common.

I mean, I can sit down with a guitar, and in fact, we do two, three songs with just guitar and percussion.

What gets people into trouble with records now is that they want to build something up without substantial musical ideas. Without that as a foundation, you can add all the layers of sound you want - it's still going to sound like a mess.

I can't play guitar if I blow my arm out.

Drumming's pretty physical. We sit at the back of the stage getting beat up like a workhorse.

Very few guitarists play nylon-string. They don't know how to get the sound out of them. That's something I've spent a lot of time on.