I almost rely on other people to say, "Hey, you ever hear of this band?" And I'll say, "Oh, I've never heard of that!" And I listened to them and thought, "What the hell?"

I have to say that our fans have been absolutely wonderful all across the world.

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.

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!

I went straight out of high school, and when I was 17, all I wanted to do was play guitar.

Almost 15 with music, we have so many guitars that we developed over the years. The latest one is 'The Majesty' guitar, which I'm really proud of.

Instead of buying a guitar for $2,000 or $2,500 - I'm not sure how much these are going for - but it's maybe $300 or something like that. It's more for beginners and stuff like that. Obviously it's not hitting the pros. And you can't get the Piezo pickup and the color-changing paint and the inlays and all the fancy things that my signature guitars offer, but you can get the general feel of the guitar - and the body style. It's cool.