And he would show me stuff, and some of the guys in the shop would show me stuff. He had his own business and I would spend a lot of time out in the shop and just take pieces of metal and drill holes through them on a drill press, or take a piece of wood and cut it up with a saw and just kind of trial and error learning. My father was very mechanically inclined. And I couldn't get a guitar that I liked, so I would take two guitars apart and I put together to make something that worked for me." And I was always mechanically inclined. Obviously the playing is what kind of grabbed me, but it was the more articles I read in magazines with Eddie, and he would talk about how, "Well, I built this guitar. But I noticed on the article, you were less centered on his playing than the actual taking apart the guitars and the mechanics of it. Evan: And that sort of brought you into the guitar tech fold a little more. Evan: And you do mention actually, to back up a little further, how when Van Halen came out, you were fairly captivated by Van Halen. I can link to that in the show notes, but that gives a little more detail in your backstory. And just for the audience, you wrote a blog post on the Music Man site. I think it was the Black Clouds and Silver Linings Tour, and I've been there ever since. Maddi: So I did that tour and then wanted away for a bit. So I was away for a little while, and then I came back on the Train of Thought Tour and that's when I actually became John's guitar tech. And then as with most road guys, a tour finishes, you go on to do something else, and you go on to do something else, and something else. And that was on the original Scenes From A Memory Tour. Do you want to go work for them?" And I said, "Well, okay, sure." And yeah, I actually started off with Dream Theater 20 years ago as the bass and keyboard tech. And so I got a call one day from the management office saying, "Hey, we've got this band Dream Theater, that's getting ready to go on tour. And then right around that time, I believe the way it happened was they were looking for new management and somehow or another Deep Purple's management got involved with them. Just we'd see each other on gig days or whatever, but that was it. And kind of just struck up a very casual, like a, "Hey, how you doing" kind of friendship. And kind of spy on all the cool guitar nerd gear and stuff like that, that JP was using. And so I was a fan of theirs, of course, and I got to hang around. And it just so happened that Dream Theater was one of the support acts on the tour. And we did a tour in the kind of late 90s, I guess. So I was actually the base tech for them. So years and years ago, I worked for Deep Purple who, as you know, Steve Morris is the guitar player in Deep Purple. Maddi: Let's see, I'll have to go back a number of years. Before we do that, let's do a quick recap on how you came to become John Petrucci's guitar tech. Evan: All right, so we solicited questions from social media, got lots back, only within a short window, so lots out there. Maddi Schieferstein, welcome to the podcast. Ladies and gentlemen, Maddi Schieferstein. We'll talk about string height, string changing, string gauges, also John Petrucci's guitar collection, his pre-show rituals, and much more. We solicited questions from social media, and Maddi's going to answer a handful of those. On the show we have Maddi Schieferstein, guitar tech extraordinaire to John Petrucci. So we're going to try something a little different this episode. Welcome to Striking a Chord, an Ernie Ball podcast.
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