Biography
John Petrucci was born on July 12, 1967 in Kings Park, New York to an Italian American family. He picked up the guitar at the early age of 8 because his older sister was allowed to go to bed later in order to practice the piano. However he decided to quit the guitar when his attempts to stay up late were unsuccessful. He would later pick up the guitar again at the age of 12 when his childhood friend and future Dream Theater keyboardist Kevin Moore invited John to join his cover band.
John attended Berklee College of Music in Boston with childhood friend John Myung (bass), where they met future bandmate Mike Portnoy (drums). These three in addition to Kevin Moore, formed the band Majesty, which would later become Dream Theater.
While Dream Theater is what Petrucci is most commonly associated with, he is also a part of the project band Liquid Tension Experiment and has appeared as a guest on several records by other artists such as the Age of Impact album by the Explorer's Club.
Petrucci has released a guitar instructional video, "Rock Discipline", which covers warm up exercises, exercises to avoid injury while playing, alternate picking, sweep picking, chords and other techniques for developing one's guitar playing. Petrucci also has a book named "Guitar World presents John Petrucci's Wild Stringdom", which was compiled from columns he wrote for Guitar World magazine, bearing that same title.
In 2001 John Petrucci 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. The album, Suspended Animation, was released on March 1, 2005, and was made available for order from his web site. Petrucci also appeared on the 2005 and 2006 G3 tours, and in 2007, went on G3 tour again, this time with Paul Gilbert and Joe Satriani. In a recent video with Larry DiMarzio, Petrucci revealed that he's been working on a follow up to his 2004 album, "Suspended Animation" along with the new Dream Theater album.
Petrucci also wrote and recorded two instrumental soundtrack songs for a Sega Saturn game titled Digital Pinball: Necronomicon. Each track is roughly two minutes long and they are simply titled "Prologue" and "Epilogue".
According to the spoof rock band, Nightmare Cinema (the Dream Theater members changing instruments playing a gig), he got the "alternate stage name" Johnny James.
Dream Theater bandmate Jordan Rudess revealed in an interview that Petrucci is a practicing Catholic. He currently lives in St. James, New York with his wife Rena Sands, a guitarist in the all-female heavy metal band Meanstreak, and they have 3 children, Samantha and Renato (who are twins), and Kiara. He is also an avid fan of bodybuilding and dedicates much of his off time to weight training.
He is a voting member of NARAS.
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