We have a lot of fun. There are no holds barred when it comes to writing music for us.
The thing about me is that I'm very fortunate to have had the opportunities with Avenged Sevenfold in songwriting. I really think it's helped to bolster my guitar playing as well.
We don't ever spread ourselves too thin. And sometimes it's a little bit to the chagrin of our fans; they don't get albums... I mean, The Beatles were doing two albums a year at one point.
I use Bogner amps and custom-designed Schecter guitars with Seymour Duncan Invader pickups. I beef up my tone with a Boss CS- 3 Compression Sustainer. It's kinda like my secret weapon.
I can't imagine doing anything cooler or better than what we did on 'The Stage' and felt like we're firing on all cylinders.
When practicing, it's great to break a part down into its different elements, start slowly, and then try to build up the speed until you're playing as fast as you possibly can.
My little brother played drums, so we had a drum set over at my house.
I was living out of my truck for a short while. My dad wanted to emancipate me at 16 and send me to music college.
My father was a studio musician, played for a lot of people like Frank Zappa and a lot of R&B bands, and was always gone doing that. Then when he was home, he was practicing. And so I always saw it, and I always wanted to do what he did.
My fans, they know my dad as Guitar Guy or whatever, and he's kind of just this shredder that plays on my records sometimes. But they don't know his ear and how rich his harmonic scope is.
Our singer, Matt, was reading Stephen Hawking and other physics-related books, and I was reading entrepreneurial books, and we all started discussing the new technologies that were taking over the world, from 3-D printing to space travel. These conversations starting leading us to think of how we could portray these things in a musical way.
Breaking Benjamin, talk about songwriting, I mean, some of the greatest songwriters of the modern era. And, obviously, it's a little heavier.
We're more about other things over odd timings: orchestration, composition, horn/vocal arrangements - that's where we get super weird.
We're very much perfectionists, so when we're putting on a huge show and want to play to the best of ability, we rehearse intensely. And I have a guitar pretty much in my hand for at least five hours before doing a show. I'm just noodling and mucking around and working on some of the songs here and there.
Lyrically, 'Planets' is the precursor to 'Acid Rain'; it's about a meteoric, intergalactic war that results in an apocalypse and the human species aligning together to go fight something much better than us, our individual trials and tribulations.
Sometimes, with more progressive songs, you lose that feel somewhere along the line, but 'This Means War' never quits - the energy is always there.
There's nothing like having some healthy competition. We really strive to think outside the box by taking the standard approach the then twisting it a little, all the while trying something new.
We're trying to leave no stone unturned, to push forward in every aspect of what it means to be a band. Because this really matters to us. Metal matters to us. And we know exactly how much it means to kids out there, too.
We make sure we have total artistic control with our albums. We were working with Interscope Records, and they had a hard time with us having all the control. So when we signed with Warner Bros., we told them we would be working hands-on with our producer, and they were cool with it.
We're fans of stuff like Maiden, but I think we generally get it from weirder places. For me, the Eagles' 'Hotel California' represents one of the most brilliant harmony approaches to music. Boston did it very well, too.
