Speaking with Guitar Player, Dream Theater's John Petrucci offered 10 tips for aspiring guitarists to improve their playing. Following is an excerpt from the rundown.
Unplug It
Petrucci: "If you want to find out where you rate in terms of technical ability, it’s really effective to practice electric guitar acoustically. Don’t play through an amp. Instead, go into a tiled room, like a bathroom, where you have a little bit of natural reverb. Then you can really dissect your playing and figure out what’s going on with your technique, because you don’t have the sustain of distortion, or any effects or delays hiding anything. All you have is what’s actually physically happening when your hands are touching the instrument. That can be very revealing."
Come Together
Petrucci: "Another thing that’s important, and I guess it’s sort of twofold, is to play with other musicians and to take some time to improvise. In this world today, where all of us have home studios and it’s so easy to stay in and create stuff and share it publicly, you can do everything without seeing a single person. But there’s something to be said for getting out there and jamming and working on your improvisational skills, which is really just creativity on the spot. It’ll help you become a more well-rounded artist, and it can actually help you develop your voice as a player."
Don’t Ignore It. Record It.
Petrucci: "Record your ideas. It doesn’t have to be done in any sort of fancy way, but as you’re playing, if something comes to you creatively, don’t ignore it; record it. When I was younger I would do it with cassettes, but it’s so much easier now because everybody has a phone. So just get it down. You might listen back to it later and it could turn into a whole song. It happens to me all the time. 'Fall Into The Light' on Distance Over Time(opens in new tab) was like that. There were riffs that I recorded on my phone and saved them for later, and it turned into a fully-fledged song."
Read the complete list of tips here.
The Haunted guitarist / Solar Guitars founder Ola Englund recently invited Petrucci for another chat on Coffee With Ola, but unlike their 2020 meeting which was done via Skype, this time they met in person. Check out the chat below.
They discuss re-using old song ideas, videogame scores, practice routines, how to not repeat yourself, Guitar Universe, live gear and more.
