The only thing I had in my mind [when I was 17 ] was that I was going to be a professional musician. So it was just the right environment.

I'm a hopeless tone chaser!I love it and get into the whole thing.

In Japan they're definitely more over the top. They had four Boogie stacks and 20 guitars. But otherwise it's pretty much the same thing, except there's a translator. It's really nice.

The style of music that we're playing, this progressive metal style, has always been an upstream battle for us. We don't usually get a lot of commercial exposure.

We have a storage close by where I live, that's very organised. My guitar tech, Matty organised it all, labeled everything.

I experimented a bunch with Ernie Ball in getting the strings to not flop around too much, but at the same time not to be too thick to where you're playing telephone cables.

Jordan Ruddes does [have a home studio], but it's all self-contained. I'll be the only guy with a fully built recording studio. So they'll have to come to me.