If I had to pick a favorite band of all time, it would be Rush.

For me, it's always easier playing with a drummer.

One very important side of my playing lies in rhythm; I have a very percussive style. It's one I've developed with Dream Theater over the years, and requires the guitar to be very locked into the rhythm of the drums... way more than what would normally entail.

Guitarists use downstrokes and upstrokes to play fast patterns, but doubling up on down- or upstrokes might be essential to the sound of a specific melody. So as a player, you've got to sharpen your picking skills as much as you can.

I've always employed a melodic style with my leads, placing strong emphasis on infusing romantic sensibilities into what I'm trying to say. Those big, epic melodies come from influences like Pink Floyd, Journey, Marillion... bands that have these guitar parts that are just soaring!

There's successes you have in your career. For me, for example, as a guitar player, as somebody in a band putting out albums, the success that we have in our field and how we're viewed by our fans; that type of success means more than anything to us.

Growing up on Long Island, I think Billy Joel albums come with your driver's license.

Before you start a practicing regimen, you have to be aware that the study of music is a lifelong process-it's a discipline. And the key to mastering any discipline is consistency.

When I look back and think about how I played when I was 16, and moving on to my 20s, 30s, 40s and now 50s - to me, it seems like you gain more experience, you gain more technique, you get better.

One of the main things I look for in a guitarist is in the sound itself. I go for a certain sound, and I think it's an important thing for making a player more identifiable in the big giant pool of musicians out there. You want a sound that people will recognise just as much as your playing.

Where I lived, on Long Island, you had the radio stations that always played Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath and AC/DC and all that. I grew up on all that stuff.

Music is great, because you can do that pretty much until you drop.

As a guitar player, you never stop learning, never stop honing your skills.

I don't have very eclectic tastes in music.

We are very, very fortunate to have built a career based on playing the kind of music we play. In a lot of ways, it's a very eclectic style. It's not pop; it's not mainstream; so the fact that we have been able to have the career that we have had internationally, with all the success we've had, it's like a miracle. It's amazing.

Definitely an important aspect of my playing is keeping my hands in sync.

I do remember one of the first great experiences of going to Europe was playing in Rome hearing the people sing our music so loud. It was louder than the music we were playing.

Of all the things that can frustrate a guitarist the most, it's the nagging feeling that he's not reaching a certain level of proficiency as quickly as he should.

Dream Theater has never been a band that hit at a particular fashionable point and said, 'OK, that's basically it.'

We record Dream Theater shows and I'll sit on the bus and listen to my playing - what worked, what didn't. A lot of times it's embarrassing and humbling, but that's what you have to do to get better.

For anyone who doesn't know his work, Andreas Vollenweider is a harpist who creates very atmospheric, new agey music that's totally beautiful.

I think if anything, what 'The Astonishing' proved is that we're always going to experiment.

If you practice in a focused, concentrated manner and make efficient use of your time, you will progress a lot faster than if you were to use the same time noodling without any specific goals or direction.

I'm such a huge fan of Steve Howe, I worship him.

I often use triadic arpeggio forms within my riffs and solos as a tool to create rich-sounding, poly-chordal sounds.

2112' basically set the course for my musical career and how I approached Dream Theater.

It's much better to play the guitar a half hour a day, every day, than not practice for a week and then jam for five hours one day.

When I think of a lot of the players I admire, they could always play their parts without hiding behind distortion and sustain.

I see every new album as an opportunity to start over. To either build or improve upon a direction that has been evolving over time or to completely break new ground.

In the neighborhood that I grew up in - in New York on Long Island - there were a lot of musicians. For some reason, that time in history in our town in New York, everybody played. So it was all around me.

I wanted to go to Berklee College of Music because that's where Steve Vai went - I was total tunnel vision.

So many things will happen, for better or worse, in your career, and it's very easy for those things to bog you down or consume you. But when you get a chance to look back, you realize that those were not the things that were really important.

Music doesn't have to sit within the confines of pop structure, you can really make stuff that's more visual.

I've always said that there's a huge progressive rock, progressive metal audience out there, in the world. We see it when we're on tour.

I think it's really hard to describe music without alienating somebody.

Just because something is very technical or heavy doesn't mean that it's not melodic.

We've always had a very strong focus on the instrumentation, and our approach to our individual instruments.

That's kind of the nature of being in a progressive band - always trying new things, moving forward.

I'm a fan of creative writing and telling stories.

Your solos should be as interesting as any other part of the song.

Although music comes from a very personal place, talent is meant to be shared.

As a guitar player, playing instrumental music is a blast.

The cool thing about our fans is that they're not just passive concert goers.

For a band like us, one that you don't necessarily hear on the radio, it's our fans that keep us alive and keep us going, and it's been an ever-growing base, especially with the younger kids that play guitar and want to play complex music.

Pop culture is a reflection of social change, not a cause of social change.

Over the next decade, cities and states across America will be compelled to tighten their belts as the really big bills - the pension bills they cannot afford - come due. They'll have to go after existing contracts with current workers.

The attack on ObamaCare was that Congress does not have the power under the Commerce Clause to force a private citizen into a private contractual relationship. If such a thing is permitted to stand, the anti-ObamaCare forces argue, there will be no limit to Congress's power in the future.

There's no light at the end of the tunnel in the Republican message, no promise of better things to come. There's only the present stagnation, followed by a slow decline.

Christopher Nolan's astounding third Batman feature, 'The Dark Knight Rises,' represents the true maturation of the superhero movie - and provides the key to understanding the bottomless craving moviegoers have for these films, 34 years after the Christopher Reeve Superman gave birth to the genre.

The Middle East Media Research Institute has spent decades detailing the diseased messages emanating from Palestinian TV and textbooks, instructing children in the glories of suicide terrorism against innocent Israelis.