Real thick strings - your hands start to get fatigued. As much as you practice, and as much experience as you have, and as long as you've been playing, there is a fatigue point during the show, as with anything that's physical. So I wanted to basically pace myself better.

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.

You might be able to get a certain sound, and in the studio you certainly look at things under a microscope a lot more. You might hear more warmth out of a thicker string gauge. But in the practical world, like with us, we're playing An Evening With... so it's three hours of music, and our music is pretty challenging as far as the technical aspect. And I found after awhile that I was killing myself.

If I'm not in an environment where I can record, it's great to be able to write something down, to be able to know how to do that, to be able to write notation. You grab a piece of paper and there it is. It's the cheapest recording equipment you can buy: a piece of manuscript paper and a pencil!

Stay focused when you're playing alive, so you're not distracted by something going on.

With all tools at my disposal, I'm 100% into chasing tone and checking out new equipment and "geeking" out during sound check by taking too much time.

It's probably no coincidence with the internet and social media and the word being able to spread beyond the radio, where fans can go and talk and congregate and trade stories and a band could communicate news very quickly and in a worldwide basis. I'm sure that's helped in bringing in this case us to more of the forefront of peoples attention.