During a conversation with Metal Hammer Dream Theater guitarist John Petrucci talked about the band's predominantly male fanbase, getting his first eight-string guitar and using it on the new album, and much more.
Dream Theater is promoting a new album called A View From the Top of the World .
One point mentioned in the interview was that the ratio of women to men at a Dream Theater concert is estimated at 4.96.
“That’s funny! I don’t know why it’s like that. I just finished my third guitar camp, called John Petrucci’s Guitar Universe , and I have a lot of guest instructors coming,” he said.
“This was the first time my wife Rena came as a guest instructor. She’s a guitarist for Meanstreak , which was an all-female thrash band, and plays in Judas Priestess [an all-female Judas Priest tribute band]. All the campers there, except two, were male. We discussed why more women don’t come to camps and shows of this kind,” he stated.
She also questioned: "There are tons of women who play instruments out there, why don't they come to the shows?"
“We’ve seen an increase in DT’s audience lately, but the ratio is still quite good and I always wonder why. I would love to see more women at our shows!”, she added.
John Petrucci was also asked about the new album and whether he used new and experimental techniques.
According to him, there was a bit of both. "There's definitely something new for me on this album that I wasn't familiar with: I got my first eight-string guitar," he said.
“The Ernie Ball Music Man store has an eight-string version of my guitar, the first eight-string they ever made and the first one I ever played and used, so we wrote a song on the album with it and that was different,” he stated. The guitarist also highlighted that it didn't take him long to get the hang of it, since the guitar is based on one of the models he owns, called Majesty. In this case, Majesty already has between six and seven strings, so “what's one more string?”.
“Certain things are different compared to eight-string guitars: they have fan frets and angled pickups, things like that, but since it was a Majesty that I'm so used to, it felt like a natural extension of that. The guitar is absolutely beautiful,” he concluded.