John Petrucci is the lyricist, guitarist and founding member of the progressive metal band Dream Theater. He has been involved in and been one of the producers of all the albums by Dream Theater right from its start in 1999. He has also been involved in the project band Liquid Tension Experiment and has also played as a guest guitarist with several artists.
John Petrucci has also been actively involved in guitar tutorials, guitar instruction videos, guitar magazines and books. One of his familiar guitar tutorial and instructional video is “Rock Discipline” where he explains extensively on guitar warm up exercises, alternate picking, chords, lead progressions, scales, sweep pick playing and guitar exercises to avoid hand injury while playing. He has been featured in Guitar World magazine with a book “Guitar World presents John Petrucci’s Wild Stringdom”, after which followed regular reviews and articles by him on the Guitar World magazine. He has also won the “Guitarist of the Year” award by the Total Guitar Magazine.
Petrucci has also written and recorded two complete instrumental soundtrack songs for the game “Digital Pinball: Necronomicon” by the popular computer gaming company Sega Saturn. Its also interesting that Petrucci is an addict of Sega Saturn games and never tours without the games. The two songs were titled “Prologue” and “Epilogue”. John Petrucci has been on tour two times, one with Joe Satriani and Steve Vai on 2001 and the second time on 2007 with Paul Gilbert and Joe Satriani.
John Petrucci is said to have learnt guitar when he was eight years old after he saw that his sister was allowed to stay late past her usual bed time for practicing the organ. When he was 12, he started playing with his friend Kevin who played the keyboard. Later on, Kevin Moore joined John Petrucci to play the keyboard in Dream Theater. John Petrucci's wife Rena Sands is a guitarist in the all-woman heavy metal band Meanstreak.