Mike Portnoy God of War: Blood & Metal guest blog, Part I

Posted February 25 by Chris D.

By Mike Portnoy (Dream Theater)

It’s pretty amazing that in our 25-year career, this was the first time we were asked to contribute a song to a soundtrack! Film directors and TV producers take note!

In any case, when we were asked to contribute a song to Roadrunner's God of War 3 soundtrack, the initial reactions of “But we don't have any leftovers from the last album” or “But we are in the middle of a tour” quickly turned to “Hey, this could be cool” and “Hmmm. Why the hell not?”

Dream Theater has been in the traditional 'write, record, tour, write, record, tour' pattern for almost 20 years straight now and there's no question that the days of 'traditional' approaches in this industry are disappearing quickly. Bands can now record and release individual songs—especially via downloads—much like it was it was in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s.

Not that I necessarily would want to work that way full-time with DT, as I am very much an 'album-oriented' artist...however, in the case of this soundtrack offer, it seemed to be very doable.

We were in the middle of a world tour when this offer came in, but we decided there would be a nice hole in our schedule right after the Christmas holidays and New Years so we decided to schedule a few days then to knock it out.

Much to the disappointment of our singer James LaBrie, I decided it would be easiest if we simply wrote an instrumental for the soundtrack. My reasons were two-fold:

1) It would make the process much easier and quicker. We are very used to writing the music first with just the four of us (myself, John Petrucci, Jordan Rudess and John Myung—and then later on in the process, writing the melodies and lyrics for (or occasionally with) James. To simply write and record an instrumental is something we could very easily bang out in a matter of days. But then to add writing melodies and lyrics, flying James down from Canada to New York and begin recording vocals would add many more days to the project, which was time, and budget, we didn't have.

2) I have been wanting to do a new DT instrumental for years anyway. The DT instrumental is a musical tradition throughout our whole career (1989's "Ytsejam," 1994's "Erotomanina", 1997's "Hell's Kitchen", 1999's "Overture 1928" and "The Dance of Eternity", etc.) and we hadn't written one since 2003's Stream of Consciousness, so the time and situation seemed right to do a new one!

So the goal was set and the window of opportunity was found. We had five days to setup, write, record and mix a new instrumental!

To some people, this may seem impossible, but myself, JP and Jordan were very used to (and are actually quite comfortable) writing in such a whirlwind manner. The three of us wrote and recorded the two Liquid Tension Experiment albums in under 10 days each and even though Dream Theater usually has the liberty, freedom and comfort of moving into a studio for four to six months at a time while doing a new album, the fact of the matter is that me, JP and Jordan usually bang out 12-minute DT epics in the course of a few days each. It’s just the way we naturally work together.

On Monday Jan. 4, we moved into Cove City studios on Long Island, where we recorded the basic tracks for our Train of Thought album in 2003, with our engineer of the last two DT albums Mr. Paul Northfield, as well as two trusty DT crew guys: Jose 'Ho' Baraquio and Matt 'Maddi' Schieferstein. We spent the whole day on Monday getting set up, mic-ed and up and running and then on Tuesday we began writing.

I brought in CDs of some unused riffs we wrote during the “Black Clouds & Silver Linings” sessions at the end of 2008 to give us some direction and a bit of a starting point. We ended up using a total of four leftover riffs, which became the setup to the solo section and then the three riffs underneath the solos, but that was enough to inspire us and get the creative juices flowing for a slew of new ideas.

The next thing we knew, by halfway through Wednesday, the song was written and we had this insane instrumental finished that reminded me of Meshuggah meets LTE!

I tracked my drums Wednesday afternoon, JP tracked his guitar Wednesday night and John Myung and Jordan tracked their Bass and Keyboards on Thursday. Basically, the whole song was essentially written and recorded in only three days. On Friday myself, JP and Paul Northfield banged out the mix and VIOLA! Another Dream Theater instrumental is born.

The following week the song was sent to out to Ted Jensen to master, before which we were informed of a slight change that needed to be made. Originally, me and John had filled the entire last couple minutes of the song with samples from the God of War game. It was VERY INTENSE and really added to the orchestration of the song's climax. Unfortunately, one of the soundtrack's 'powers that be' insisted we take them out because of fear of copyright issues with the actor's voices.

Now if this were a DT album, we never would've rolled over and we would've fought to keep ‘em on there. However as this wasn't 'our' album, we didn't want to be difficult and we simply removed the samples.

So there ya have it: the conception, pregnancy and birth of “Raw Dog,” which BTW, was a title I came up with the same way I came up with the name “Ytsejam.” Hint, hint.

** Check out Mike Portnoy's "Raw Dog" guest blog here. Dream Theater instrumental action!

** Check out Mikael Åkerfeldt's "Throat of Winter" guest blog here. Opeth thinking they're Comus!

** Check out Chris Babbitt's "This is Madness" guest blog here. Taking Dawn fucking with Metallica and Iron Maiden!

** Check out Matt Heafy's "Shattering the Skies Above" guest blog here. Trivium gets back to basics and learns from it!

** The God of War 3: Blood & Metal soundtrack on Roadrunner Records is available now as a digital download from iTunes (click here), Amazon (click here) and other digital music e-tailers.

** SCEA's God of War III is available March 16, 2010 (North America) at fine retailers and e-tailers everywhere. Order here. 

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