Mike Portnoy is former drummer of Dream Theater and he’s an absolutely “living legend” for many drummers. The effects of his entire metal world have been at enormous levels. Even Avenged Sevenfold…
Avenged Sevenfold bassist Johnny Christ tells how Mike Portnoy changed his band A7X. In an interview with Metal Insight, he explained this:
“Just having those moments where we can actually show our ability as players on our respective instruments – we’ve always kind of done it, and sometimes you go a little too long and everything like that.
And that’s great for the progressive fan, and I love that stuff – I grew up on it – but for this band, we like to make sure that every note really counts and every part is really there. So I think what he brought is a little bit more of having those ideas back.
I mean, looking back on what we did on ‘Nightmare’ with Jimmy’s parts, there’s some things that Mike was able to add in on ‘Nightmare’ with his hands and cymbal work that Jimmy hadn’t really written out yet before he passed. So there was a lot of cool stuff. And it definitely inspired some ideas like that.“
Avenged Sevenfold’s latest album, The Stage, was released last year. I could say that it was a quality album, though it was behind expectations as sales success.
