John Petrucci

John Petrucci

John Petrucci (born July 12, 1967) is an American guitarist best known as a founding member of the Progressive metal group Dream Theater. He is also the producer (along with his bandmate Mike Portnoy) of all Dream Theater albums since their 1999 release, Scenes From A Memory.
John first played guitar at age 8 when he noticed his sister (who was taking organ lessons at the time) was allowed to stay up past her bed time to practice. He soon dropped it when his plan failed. At age 12, he began playing again when he was invited into the band of his friend Kevin Moore, who would later become the first keyboardist of Dream Theater. John began to practice in earnest whilst exercising physically. He was a largely self-taught guitarist who developed his skills through attempts to match the skill of his idols, who included Steve Morse, Steve Howe, Steve Vai, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Al Di Meola, Alex Lifeson and Allan Holdsworth. He has jokingly referred to his guitar idols as "the Steves and the Als".

In 2001 he was invited by Joe Satriani and Steve Vai to tour with them on the popular G3 guitar tour, which exposed him to a massive number of new fans and inspired him to record a solo album. Suspended Animation was released on March 1, 2005, and made available for order from his web site. He also appeared on the 2005 G3 tour.

John is a devoted user of Mesa Boogie amplifiers. During his career, he has used Mark II's, Mark IV's, Dual Rectifiers, the Formula, Recto, TriAxis and Formula preamps, and 2:90 power amps. He also has a one-off custom preamp called the Nunya. More recently, John has been using the Road King heads for his dirty tones, and the Lonestar for his cleans.

Petrucci is also notable as one of relatively few users of the seven-string guitar. While he uses a conventional six-string guitar in the majority of his compositions, he began to use Ibanez seven-string guitars on three tracks of the 1994 album Awake and on songs like "A Change of Seasons", "The Glass Prison", "The Test That Stumped Them All", "Just Let Me Breathe", "Jaws of Life", "This Dying Soul" and also "The Dance of Eternity" (from the album Metropolis, Pt. 2: Scenes From a Memory). Beginning with the album "Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence", he started to experiment with lower tunings on his guitars. Much of the track "Blind Faith" from that album was tracked with a detuned Ernie Ball Silhouette six-string bass guitar, simulating a baritone guitar. (Baritone guitars feature a longer scale neck, giving far greater tuning stability at lower tunings than a standard guitar.) Lately, it seems that he has favoured these detuned six-string guitars over his seven-strings. He now has proper Ernie Ball JPM baritones but they are not comercially available as of yet.

Petrucci currently endorses Ernie Ball/MusicMan guitars and has two signature guitars on the market, a six- and a seven-string. Petrucci uses a modified DiMarzio Air Norton in the neck position and a DiMarzio D-Sonic in the bridge position. His signature Musicman guitars also have Piezo acoustic bridges (special saddles hold the strings and pick up the true acoustic vibrations of the strings). This allows John to make his electric guitar sound like an acoustic guitar. He uses this in many of Dream Theater's songs, one of the most obvious examples in the song "Hollow Years". In the past he has endorsed Ibanez guitars, and had his own signature model manufactured by the company (also known as the "JPM" model).