In 1995, three albums into Dream Theater’s career, John Petrucci released his Rock Discipline instructional video through REH. It would quickly become one of the most insightful tutorials of its kind - a shredder’s bible highly lauded to this day for its close-up examination of alternate picking, inside picking, arpeggios and beyond. Fast forward a quarter of a century and some of its performance excerpts have made an unlikely comeback on the track Gemini from the guitarist’s second solo album, Terminal Velocity...
“I haven’t seen the DVD in a long time,” he says, talking to TG from his band’s headquarters in Long Island, New York. “Someone else actually reminded me it was on there! I always liked that piece, I don’t know why. It was a guitar demo thing I wrote to do clinics and masterclasses. Something about it felt really cool and I always wanted to record it for real some day. So when I had to relearn it for this album, I had no reference! I had to go on YouTube and find it - all I got was some crappy version recorded in the audience and all distorted. I was like, ‘Alright, I can just about learn it from that and try to remember what the hell I was thinking!’ That was a fun challenge.”