Greece-based Rock Overdose recently caught up with Dream Theater drummer Mike Mangini. An excerpt from the interview is available below:

Rock Overdose: What do you enjoy most: Teaching or playing a gig?

Mike Mangini: "Well, teaching has a higher level of gratification, because I’m really able to speak and affect somebody while hearing their responses. I can’t do that with just a performance. There, I can see the people like it, I can hear the people like it, I can read it, but, when teaching, there’s something else about giving someone an opportunity to improve that has a different kind of gratification to it. I can tell you that playing a drum clinic, I can play a lot more freely, I can play a lot faster, and I’m a lot looser as well. So, there are a lot of benefits that I gain. What is awesome is that I’ve learnt to take my experiences with the band onto the clinic stage and I’ve learnt to take my clinic experience to the band’s stage. They both help each other out. In different ways, they’re better or worse, but the clinic environment is a little more easy on me."

Rock Overdose: Numerous awards, faculty member at Berklee College of Music and drummer for Dream Theater. What left for Mike Mangini to achieve?

Mike Mangini: "Well, what is left for me to achieve are many things. First of all, with Dream Theater, I knew, going into it that the recording of one album and meeting people is not enough time to really settle in. I’ve made a career out of replacing people, practically. I’ve done it many times. To the point of making a living out of stepping in after a drummer has established himself. I’m very confident about bringing that to a certain level. Now that I’ve had the chance to make a second record with the band, it has allowed me to experience more comfort. Since we are approaching my third album with the band, I have a different kind of comfort. As time passes, things gel more. So, what I have left to achieve is another level of gelling. As far as things to achieve on the drums go, well, I am currently working a lot on my feet, because I really have let them go. For a period of 10 years, I haven’t really practiced that much and I lost a lot of my strength and speed, while teaching at Berklee. I also had an operation on my left knee and I still have a torn left meniscus. But, I am making a lot of progress. I just would like to get some more beats per minute. So, it’s a physical thing that I’m interested in. As far as the career is concerned, I have so many songs that I’ve written, so many songs that are lists of things like guitar riffs, keyboard riffs, vocal ideas, melodies I have come up with. Literally, I’ve got a database of all of this stuff. So, there’s plenty for me to achieve."

 Go to this location for the complete interview.

Mesa Engineering recently checked in with the following Dream Theater-related update:

"John Petrucci visited the Mesa Factory in April 2014 before his San Francisco show to hang out. It was also a great day to have John play through an early prototype of the Mark Five 25 for the first time.

We took the fly-on-the-wall approach to capture the experience and got some epic playing from John, some great tones and a bunch of good times with Mesa founder Randall Smith, Tone Boy Doug West, and the rest of the Mesa team.

John played through all the various modes and many different settings through a Mini Rectifier 1x12, a Rectifier 1x12 and at the end, a 4x12 Rectifier Standard Slant with Celestion Vintage 30s. He also played with a few different delays (T.C. Electronics G-Major and Jim Dunlop Carbon Copy) in the loop for singing solo tones.

Recorded with the Mark Five: 25, various cabinets (listed above) and a Shure SM57 and a Sennheiser 421."

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