With doing covers live, why does Dream Theater pretty much do straight-ahead covers and not inject more of their own style?
MP: I think it’s mainly time restraints for rehearsal purposes. It’s hard enough for us to rehearse these albums ‘straight.’ With Master of Puppets, we had to rehearse every night at soundcheck, and every day or every couple of days we would tackle a new song. We’d have to turn off the PA so that nobody outside could hear what we were doing. We’d have to practice just through our inner-ear monitors. It’s hard enough for every one to learn the songs as they are, so it’s hard when you’re on the road and have limited soundcheck time to really mess with the stuff too much. But in the case of Master of Puppets, we had to reinterpret the orchestration. We had to figure out who was going to play what guitar part and Jordan had to completely re-approach his instrument. I think no matter what we do, it’s going to sound a bit more like Dream Theater, there’s going to be keyboards, and James is going to sing differently. We did however rework our version of Maiden’s Gangland, so it’s never out of
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