DREAM THEATER Keyboardist Discusses The Making Of His New Solo Album

Classic Rock Revisited recently conducted an interview with DREAM THEATER keyboardist Jordan Rudess. An excerpt from the chat follows:

Classic Rock Revisited: What exactly does the title of [your new solo] record "The Road Home" mean to you?

Jordan: "It's a straight-ahead title in the sense that I feel like I'm kind of returning to my roots. One can say that classical music is my roots but in this case I'm going back to the music that I really, really love which is the progressive and art rock of the '70s."

Classic Rock Revisited: How was the actual recording process done? For example you've got quite a few high-profile guests appearing on this disc and I'm assuming that you weren't in a position to be all in the same room together. Does recording this way in this day and age pose any challenges for you?

Jordan: "The way that I worked was a little different. The way that I do it most people when they listen to the album might think I did it a different way than what it is. What I mean by that is, when you listen to my rock albums, primarily the core of it is keyboards and drums. I'm playing the bass, there's no rhythm guitar or anything like that. Any guitars that you hear on the albums are these wonderful solos at certain points that I allotted for those solo sections. I did the arrangements on the keyboards while Rod Morgenstein is playing the drums, which is like the RUDESS MORGENSTEIN PROJECT. What's different of course about this project for me, besides it being a cover album, is that it's also an album with vocals. I really haven't had a lot of my rock albums feature that many vocals so this to a certain extent is an album of songs. What happened was I recorded all the parts at home, I flushed out all the arrangements and I got it all cooking. In some cases we'd put down some MIDI drums just to have something down so I could understand what it was going to do and also to give Rod an idea what I wanted to have happen. There are not too many MIDI drums on this album as far as pre-production whereas with my other albums, it was original music and he'd have no idea. On this he could go back and hear the song and make up some part. After we got all that together we started FedExing it out to people and sending out the music online. At that point everyone has their own system, one guy has ProTools, and another has Logic or Cubase. So what my engineer John Guth, who's very technically capable, did was he ended up making an FTP site where he'd put up a ProTools file, a MIDI file and all these different types of files. Instructions went out through John and my assistant Dani Koesterich to all the guys on how to get onto the FTP site, how to access the files and what kind of files were there. Then we figured out what they had and what they needed and how to get it back to us. A lot of times I work with a lot of people who are really technically savvy, like Steven Wilson, who is not only an amazing musician but also a producer as well. He knows how to record and how to prepare this kind of stuff because he's so into technology. Kip Winger is a master engineer and singer so with him it was the same thing. One interesting thing that happened on this album is that for 'Sound Chaser', the intro vocal section was sung by Kip and Nick D'Virgilio together. First the tracks went to Nick and then they went to Kip. He just massaged the vocals, recorded his and then sent it back. He totally produced the vocals because we didn't have to do anything to it. It was spot on."

Read the entire interview at this location.