John Petrucci's had a busy 2020.
In addition to releasing Terminal Velocity – his first new solo album in 15 years – we also learned yesterday that Petrucci had re-teamed with former Dream Theater drummer Mike Portnoy (who also played on Terminal Velocity), Dream Theater bandmate Jordan Rudess, and King Crimson/session legend Tony Levin to reform the prog-rock supergroup Liquid Tension Experiment.
With all of these endeavors to chat about, Petrucci recently sat down for an interview with Guitar.com, where he was asked about improvisation, and if he ever has a tendency to “go back and re-record” something that he initially improvised.
To this, he had an amusing, and quite insightful, answer.
“Yes I do, I do but a lot of times I’ll end up using the initial recording because for whatever reason it happened organically and it’s better," Petrucci said. "There’s something to overthinking where you could actually take away from the feeling of it, so you’ve got to be careful with that. You have to kind of know when to stop.
“It’s like trimming the beard – if you try to get it exactly symmetrical you might just go in a little too much and next thing you know you’ve got to shave the whole thing off!”
Food for thought! In the meantime, Terminal Velocity is out now, while Liquid Tension Experiment's first new album in over 20 years is slated to arrive in Spring 2021.
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