GUITAR

DREAM THEATER’S JOHN PETRUCCI ON HIS NEW EIGHT-STRING GUITAR AND THE CHALLENGE OF PLAYING IT

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Photos Rayon Richards

The last few years have been incredibly prolific for John Petrucci. He’s built his own studio, recorded his second solo album and reunited with Liquid Tension Experiment to release their first new music in two decades. And now he’s back with Dream Theater, whose latest album AViewFromThe TopOfTheWorldfeatures his brand-new eight-string signature...

How did you go about designing this eight-string Majesty?

It’s been several years in the making. I guess the biggest challenge for both myself and Ernie Ball Music Man was that I’d never played an eight-string guitar and they’d never built one! The first thing that I did was ask any eightstring buddies, players like Tosin Abasi and the Periphery guys, about what they’d been looking for in their instruments. Some of the things that came up were multiple scale lengths, having a fixed bridge and fanned frets. I came to realise that these were the staple elements to do this right. Obviously DiMarzio had to develop eight-string pickups as well. Then we started wondering whether this would be a brand new guitar in design or would it be an eight-string version of one of my existing guitars. And we chose the latter, to create a new Majesty. We did experiment a little with a JP-15, a bolt-on version, but the Majesty looked slicker.