how did you discover Dream Theater?

[jcmoorehead]

Back in 2005 I was playing my first ever MMORPG, The Matrix Online and I got to be friends with the leader of a fairly big faction on there. Me and her used to talk on AIM quite a lot and we both shared music as a passion. Back in 2005 I was starting to become more passionate about music, my final year of Secondary School had lead to me discovering a lot of older rock and falling in love with Pink Floyd. She asked me one night if I had heard of a band called Dream Theater and that she was listening to their latest album, she started sending me little snippets of the title track.

I looked up a video of the track and fell in love with it so went out and bought the album, from there I went on to discover Scenes From A Memory and everything else Dream Theater had to offer until they became my favourite band.

The best thing really about being into them isn't just that they're fantastic but through learning about them and their influences and side projects I've also gotten into so much more music.

[JRuless]

speaking oktober 2002. A guy (a close friend now)  I recently met invited me to see DT live..(hmm...why not!)
Before getting into the music madness I listened to Metropolis pt 1 a couple of times 2/3 weeks before the concert.

11/3/2002 DT absorption day:

Finally Free outro (intro tape)
1.  New Millennium
2.  The Mirror
3.  Lie (w/ Tool jam)
4.  Through My Words
5.  Fatal Tragedy
6.  Blind Faith
7.  Lifting Shadows Off a Dream
8.  Beyond This Life
9.  Hollow Years
10.  Instrumedley:
11.  I The Dance of Eternity
12.  II Metropolis pt.1
13.  III Erotomania
14.  IV The Dance of Eternity
15.  V Metropolis pt.1
16.  VI A Change of Seasons
17.  VII Ytsejam
18.  VIII The Dance of Eternity
19.  IX Paradigm Shift
20.  X Universal Mind
21.  XI The Dance of Eternity
22.  XII Hell's Kitchen
23.  Lines in the Sand
~~~intermission~~~
24.  Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence:
I Overture (orchestra-only intro tape)
25.  II About to Crash
26.  III War Inside My Head
27.  IV The Test That Stumped Them All
28.  V Goodnight Kiss
29.  VI Solitary Shell
30.  VII About to Crash (reprise)
31.  VIII Losing Time/Grand Finale
~~~encore~~~
32.  The Spirit Carries On
33.  Children of the Damned (Iron Maiden)
~~~2nd encore~~~
34.  Learning to Live
 
 

It was a 3 hour drive and I was totally mindblown.. 
The next day a new fan was born: bought SDOIT, played grey before the next buy: LSFNY.
Didnt care for tv but played de DVD for hours and hours reliving that beautiful evening of November the 3th.

Hooray! 

[Onno]

When BC&SL came out, I read a review of it in a metal magazine, and immediately decided to give it a listen. I was blown away.

[PwnsomeWin]

I found out about them through Rock Band 2. Panic Attack was the first song I heard by them. When Constant Motion was released as DLC, I listened to it, and thought it was awesome. I started listening to other stuff, and since then, I've loved them.

[mike099]

Sorry, I am one those newbies that started one of these topics months ago

I was watching the Rush in Cleveland video on cable and the video for OTBOA came on.  Exactly what I was looking for, a hard driving song with a singer that did not scream at me.  I was hooked and own most of the studio catalog.

[aprilethereal]

My father bought Train Of Thought, so I decided to borrow the CD and rip it to my computer. One day, I was listening to some music on random (I normally never do that, no idea why I decided to do it back then) and Stream Of Consciousness came on. I immediately fell in love with it and checked out the rest of the album. I was hooked instantly

[mikemangioy]

well, I think i'm the newest of you guys. My story goes like this:

year 2009: I was 10 then. I received a Wii and Guitar Hero World Tour. There was Pull me Under on it. Didn't care at first, as most of the band I fell in love with

year 2011: 12 y/o. At my drum school, here in Italy, my teacher says "Hey, wassup, Mike Mangini's coming for a clinic here!" and I was like "Who is this guy" "Dream Theater's new drummer!" "Oh, DT, I heard a song some time ago." (Note: at that time I was really getting into the metal scene, listening to the big 4 of thrash, and some other bands too) He showed me some videos of Mangini rockin' his giant kit. I was shocked by his talent and the massiveness of his kit (is that even a word?). So, along with this, there was a fellow drummer of mine who was a big DT fan, and he was constantly playing the drum rythm of Under A Glass Moon. He was totally obsessed with it. So the actual first song I really heard from Dream Theater was UAGM.

year 2012: in the studio with my school, my friend played Trial Of Tears. This was a bad move for my unborn interest for DT, UAGM didn't hit me musically, and I thought "Man.. this song is boring.. maybe DT aren't my thing". This was up until the MM clinic was starting to get near. I thought "Man, I have to get documented about him and what he did in DT". So I watched "The Spirit Carries On" documentary. Fell in love, but not so much, with The Dance Of Eternity.
Enter Mike Mangini, and his awesomness. The guy was extremely hilarious and so much talented. He played a 20 min. drum solo which was like 
and at the end of the clinic he played a song from ADTOE. That song was Outcry. That song: the metal/epic elements, the insane instrumental section that Mike played like if he was drinking a glass of water, hit me so much. I fell in love with DT since then. I feel like the most lucky DT fan because I  fell in love with the band and like 10 minutes later I got an autograph and a photo from their drummer.  My first album was Octavarium.

year 2013: after learning every song from the catalog, in January JP announces the new album. I was like "New album = tour = concert nearby". And yes, I did it. I bought a ticket for the Rome concert this January, and when the ticket arrived I looked at it. It said "An Evening With Dream Theater". I almost fainted when I noticed it. 3 whopping hours of concert are waiting for me in 6 months. And a new great album in even a shorter time!

oh, I love this band so much. I also think I improved a lot in technique as a drummer. Also, they opened me a whole new scene, the prog scene. I was already a Rush/Pink Floyd fan when I started listening to DT, but they brought me a lot of other stuff: Opeth, Porcupine Tree (another clinic-event with Gavin Harrison, in which I did the translator for him  ) and the side projects like LTE, Adrenaline Mob and recently The Winery Dogs. Currently I'm in a DT/Porcupine Tree period, because I'm listening to PT just to make time pass up until September. At that point new album to the max and at January concert 

tl;dr: Mike Mangini did a clinic, played Outcry, fell in love with the band after a few months of doubts.

[dragonmaster715]

i originally found out about DT because my dad was a big DT fan, and one day he wanted to show me some DT music, so he played metropolis Pt 2. i really liked it, but i didnt get into DT yet, and i didnt know it was metropolis pt 2 at the time. i finally got into DT when a year or two later my friends convinced me to listen to the ministry of lost souls. i loved it, and i right away got systematic chaos. i didnt even like metal before i heard DT, but i loved the entire album. thats basicly how i got hooked

[TAC]

Went to see Iron Maiden at The Ritz in NYC on June 8, 1992. Got there early to get a good spot, which of course means suffering through some no name lame ass band.
This group called Dream Theater hit the stage, and within 30 seconds, I had to pick my jaw up off the floor.

My avatar is a picture of the marquee that I took that afternoon.

[Elite]

Here we go again!

Saxophone lessons; my mother always drove me there when I was young. As far as I can remember one of three CDs would be playing in the car: Images & Words, Metropolis Pt. 2 and 'Legacy' by Shadow Gallery. I always liked them, but back then I was still indifferent about music as a whole. Later when I started listening to music more I got into metal somehow and found this song called 'Under a Glass Moon', which I remembered from 'so long' ago (which in reality only wasn't too long ago). I bought Images & Words when I was 15 and loved it. I later found Awake in my mom's CD cabinet, put it on one morning when she was away and was completely amazed. Those two still remain my two favourite Dream Theater albums.

Fun note; when I did my album top 50 I&W came in at #1, while Shadow Gallery's 'Legacy' took the #2 spot. So much for indoctrination, right?

[Tomislav95]

Today I was thinking how long didn't we had thread like this And that reminded me I heard (saw) about DT on t-shirt (ToT) of one Serbian pop-rock drummer

[MoraWintersoul]

Today I was thinking how long didn't we had thread like this And that reminded me I heard (saw) about DT on t-shirt (ToT) of one Serbian pop-rock drummer

DUDE, which one

[The Trooper]

1988-a band I knew opened for Majesty. Saw them that night...................the rest is history.

[Jaffa]

My story's not very interesting.  I just had a friend who talked about Dream Theater all the time, and I eventually decided to check them out myself.  That's all there is to it. 

[tedesco23]

I go back almost as long as The Trooper.

I grew up in Commack, Long Island, and back in the mid to late 80s John Petrucci taught guitar at Focus II, a music store around the corner from my house. So I knew folks who knew of this band, especially friends of mine who were just starting to learn instruments back then (I was born in 1975). Anyway, fast forward to 1989, and my bass teacher--who was a Berklee graduate--comes to lessons with a cassette, says he ran into his friend John from Berklee who had given him a tape of his band's new album. My bass teacher wasn't much into heavier music, but he figured it'd be right up my alley. That was John Myung, and the album was WDADU.

It was a wild time. I had the tape, I copied it for some of my friends, and we were a bunch of 14 and 15 year old kids who had discovered pretty much the best band ever. We felt like we were in on some secret--we were too young to know much about the local music scene, and this was pre-internet, so we had this amazing tape by a band that nobody else knew, and we all just played the damn thing to death.

I'll also never forget the day I walked into my local music store (Music Den, for any Long Islanders here) and saw Images and Words in the new releases. This band, this amazing band that it seemed like me and only a handful of others knew about, had a second album! I was literally shaking when I brought it up to the register, and all I could say to the guy at the counter, over and over again, was "thank you!"

[Xanadu]

Around christmas 2001 i guess. My uncle had just gotten LSFNY and showed it to me. The rest is history.
As a 15 year old guitar player and metalhead, i had never seen or heard anything like it. Been a fan ever since 

[Marion Crane]

1994 - A buddy of mine bought I&W on cassette and we listened to it on a road trip.  End of story.

[Scorpion]

Anyone here know Frets on Fire? It's basically a free guitar hero clone with tons of user-charted songs. When I got the game, I just got the biggest song pack, figuring that it would keep me busy. It contained ITNOG, on which I was hooked after I finally managed to survive that unison section.

Got LAB (I usually start with live releases unless I know that a band isn't very good live), then ToT. The rest is, as they say, history.

[dparrott]

1992- On Rock Video Monthly. Saw "Pull Me Under" and ran out to Sam Goody and got the longbox CD version on Images and Words. A month later, found WDADU on cassette on Columbia House. Even MP was surprised to see that tape when he signed it for me in '02...

So much win, for mentioning longbox CDs, Columbia House and SAM GOODY in one post. 

   I was old school like that.  PMU and Take The Time on Headbanger's Ball for me, went on from there.

[Lucidity]

I heard the song Impulse by An Endless Sporadic on Guitar Hero 3 in 2009, before I had a clue what kind of music I liked or what prog was. I loved their music, and iTunes recommended I listen to this band called Liquid Tension Experiment. So I did, and I loved it, and I kept hearing the name Dream Theater tossed around. I listened to some of their stuff, didn't like it, forgot about it.

Flash forward to late 2011. My art teacher sees me drawing a logo for LTE in my sketchbook and recognizes it. She asks if I listen to Dream Theater, and I say that I've heard of them but never really given them a good listen. So eventually later I go on vacation up in Cape Cod, and I stop at this musical store and get my dad to buy Systematic Chaos on vinyl to get my first taste of DT. I didn't really like it at all (at the time, I was extremely metal-phobic and thought metal was horrible [I still don't like metal, but I like prog metal]), except for Forsaken, which I loved.

So from there I listened to some more of their stuff, not liking much of it, but I did like A Rite of Passage (I know...), and A Nightmare to Remember, which I loved (I was like, "Why do I like this? This is metal!!! Metal can't be *good*!"

And then for my 13th birthday, I asked for some DT... I got Scenes from a Memory, Six Degrees, and Octavarium all on CD (I was so lucky, considering my parents don't know what a DT is, but got all the right albums for me to be introduced properly). I ended up loving all of it, then I bought ADToE, which had just come out, and I loved it, and so forth. I was hooked. I listened to and purchased their (debatable...) entire discography within a month or two.

tl;dr: Liked An Endless Sporadic, moved onto LTE, got into DT some years later

[Bolsters]

What I'm about to say is probably borderline regarding the rules, but it was so long ago and the method no longer exists, so I think I can get away with it.

Anyway, I am uncertain how I got onto the band in the first place, but my first experience with Dream Theater was in 1999 when I downloaded a handful of random songs on, of all things, Napster. Back then I was about 15 or so and didn't care about supporting artists by buying things or care about sound quality (I was an asshole at 15), so Napster was how I found new music back then, and how I aquired any music I wanted. There was no Youtube to sample artists and on a 56kbit dial-up connection I don't think streaming would have worked too well anyway, so I'd just search a band and then grab a few songs at random. If I liked them, I'd get more and build albums, eventually entire discographies, in horrible 128kbps.

Surprisingly, that didn't happen with Dream Theater though. I liked most of the songs I downloaded and listened to some of them a bit, even burned them to a CD so I could listen to the songs away from my computer. But, for some reason I was never compelled to go any further, so after a while I stopped listening to those songs and moved on to other things. It wasn't until about 2003 that I was cleaning out a lot of crap on my hard drives and came across a folder of random MP3s from Napster, and I listened to some of the things in there again. I was buying CDs by this point and it was from listening to those MP3s again that I decided to go out and buy Awake and Scenes From A Memory. So that was the beginning.

I don't remember all the songs I had that ultimately got me into the band, but some of them were: Another Day, Pull Me Under, Hell's Kitchen, Fatal Tragedy, Beyond This Life, The Mirror, Space-Dye Vest, Hollow Years, Peruvian Skies.

[dongringo]

I was in Cali, Colombia in 2003 and me and a friend of a friend struck up a conversation about music, had a lot in common so he loaded me up burning disc after disc of mp3s for me to take home. When I returned to the U.S. I gradually listened to the tons of music and ran across ACOS. I liked it, but wasn't floored. Fast forward to:

Salt Lake City in 2004 or 2005, went to a local independent record store, was browsing and noticed Octavarium. Remembered the name Dream Theater and liked the cover. Asked to listen to it. Was absolutely floored by what I heard. Skipped through the tracks, but listened to all of Sacrificed Sons. Octavarium is still my favorite to this day.

[Sketchy]

In my penultimate year of Sixth Form, there was a a chemistry field trip to a local pharmaceutical laboratory (it was an interesting trip, too, no less), but at one point, I left my pen in a lab coat and realised half way through lunch (I like my fountain pens, so I wasn't going to leave it there). Thus, I asked if I could go and get it (a technician who worked there had to come with, as doors needed codes and stuff to open and it was on another floor.) I can't quite remember how, but we got onto the subject of bass (I'd recently picked up bass guitar), and thus the subject got onto Yes (he was a huge fan of Yes).

I mentioned I was really into this band called "Spock's Beard", although I'd only heard one of their albums, as you could never find the damn things in music shops over here, and he mentioned that he was really into this band with an amazing bassist, and the band was called Dream Theater, and that one of the best gigs he'd seen was DT/Spock's Beard.

Previously a friend of mine had tried to suggest DT to me, but I resisted as I didn't like metal, but if someone who was massively into old prog was suggesting them, then what the hell? That summer, I was on holiday on a road trip with my father down the west coast of America, and I found a Dream Theater album in a shop, so I bought it. Metropolis Pt 2, it had the tracklist divided into "Scenes", so this has got to be pretty proggy, I'll give it a listen.

And I did.

First song: Kind of ordinary accoustic opener.

Second: Instrumental. Ok, these guys are good.

Get to the keyboard solo in Fatal Tragedy

 

[BlackInk]

In 2008 my dad played In the Presence of Enemies Part 1 in the kitchen.

[?]

I've probably told this story before, but I have a phone and some spare time, so what the fuck:

Back in 2009 I was into melodic metal bands with soloing keyboardists (being an amateur keyboardist myself) and I watched some "Janne Warman (Children of Bodom) vs Jordan Rudess" video. It included a solo by Janne and Jordan's solo from LSFNY. I automatically thought Jordan's solo was boring, because he used a piano patch instead of a proper lead tone (fucking stupid, I know) and I was a huge Janne fanboy anyway and I thought no-one could beat him, except maybe Jens Johansson.

I kept hearing praise for DT and I found the idea of huge epics interesting, so I wanted to try their music. I listened to snippets of Pull Me Under and Caught in a Web, but James' voice turned me off in both songs. I thought he sounded like a woman in PMU and the grittier singing in CIAW just annoyed me.

However, I visited a store and at the CD place they were playing BC&SL, which sounded nice. I visited another store after that and bought BC&SL and ACOS, because they were the only available DT CD's. Unfortunately neither release clicked with me, although I liked the heavier moments on Black Clouds.

I still wanted to give DT a chance, because I knew I could love them, so I bought I&W and Awake. At first I only liked a few songs, but one day I listened to those albums in full on my MP3 player on a car trip and suddenly they just clicked! It was a wonderful feeling and that's the moment when I finally became a DT fan for real.

I got the rest of the DT albums within the next 4 or 5 months and I loved all of them except FII, because I had become a helpless fanboy Later I've become more critical of DT's later albums and my tastes have shifted in favor of less technical music, but I still love DT and that's all that matters.

[MoraWintersoul]

1988-a band I knew opened for Majesty. Saw them that night...................the rest is history.

I go back almost as long as The Trooper.

I grew up in Commack, Long Island, and back in the mid to late 80s John Petrucci taught guitar at Focus II, a music store around the corner from my house. So I knew folks who knew of this band, especially friends of mine who were just starting to learn instruments back then (I was born in 1975). Anyway, fast forward to 1989, and my bass teacher--who was a Berklee graduate--comes to lessons with a cassette, says he ran into his friend John from Berklee who had given him a tape of his band's new album. My bass teacher wasn't much into heavier music, but he figured it'd be right up my alley. That was John Myung, and the album was WDADU.

It was a wild time. I had the tape, I copied it for some of my friends, and we were a bunch of 14 and 15 year old kids who had discovered pretty much the best band ever. We felt like we were in on some secret--we were too young to know much about the local music scene, and this was pre-internet, so we had this amazing tape by a band that nobody else knew, and we all just played the damn thing to death.

I'll also never forget the day I walked into my local music store (Music Den, for any Long Islanders here) and saw Images and Words in the new releases. This band, this amazing band that it seemed like me and only a handful of others knew about, had a second album! I was literally shaking when I brought it up to the register, and all I could say to the guy at the counter, over and over again, was "thank you!"

Holy fucking shit

[JLa]

Summer of 2001. I had been to a sort of band camp during summer, and we were sitting in a bus on our way to play a concert. One of my mates handed me a discman (yeah, we used portable cd-players back then!) and told me to listen to "number five". I skipped to the fifth track and pressed play, and suddenly my ears were filled with the most amazing music. Melodic, virtous, heavy, melancholic ... I had never heard anything like that before. The song seemed to go on forever, but when it eventually stopped I was left with this huge grin on my face. I gave the discman back and was like "dude! What was that?!" He answered "Liquid Tension"-something, a band neither I nor any other of my friends had heard of. Huh. I would never forget that music, that's for sure.

Autumn came, back to school, and there I told one of my other friends about this Liquid Tension-thingy. "Isn't that the guys from Dream Theater?", he asked. "-Don't know, but what is this Dream Theater?" A few days later he brought me "Once in a LIVEtime and I borrowed it for a while. I can remember that I thought the music was good, although somewhat too complex to my ears, that the keyboard/organ was kinda annoying and the vocals were bloody awful. Everytime something cool happened musically, that horrendous vocalist had to ruin it. I gave the cd back. Thanks, but no thanks ...

Later that year, I was browsing through a record store and saw "Awake" in the bargain-bin. My mate still spoke really highly about them, and I thought I could give them another try. It turned out this was miles better than the live recordings I had been listening to earlier. After some time of listening, I don't remember exactly how long, let's say two weeks, "Erotomania" just ... clicked. ( <- me). Then "Lifting Shadows of a Dream". Then "Space-Dye Vest". Then everything else on the album.

After that, I spent many months and even more money tracking down all the Dream Theater albums, as well as various side projects and other bands I read about on forums and such. My cd-collection grew rapidly, and I had found myself a new favorite band.

And the mysterious "number five"? Liquid Tension Experiment - When the Water Breaks. Still my favorite song.

[Tomislav95]

Today I was thinking how long didn't we had thread like this And that reminded me I heard (saw) about DT on t-shirt (ToT) of one Serbian pop-rock drummer

DUDE, which one

It's band Amadeus. They are privately listening to rock but their music is directing towards folk and we know that's not good thing on Balkan

[Kotowboy]

Friend : Have you heard Dream Theater ?

Me : I have not !

Friend : Listen to Dream Theater !

Me : Ok !

Fast Forward to Sat July 28.... And here we are 

[Jaq]

I saw Pull Me Under on Headbanger's Ball.

Well, it's true. 

[Destiny Of Chaos]

Growing up, my favorite genre was heavy metal. My favorite bands were the usual suspects like Metallica and Ozzy. In 1995, I heard Pull Me Under on the Radio. But it wasn't until the 1997 that I truly got into the band.  My step dad played bass guitar. He joined a band, and they sent him home with two cassette tapes. One was a copy of Images & Words, the other, a copy of Awake.  I pretty much took those tapes from him, because the music absolutely blew me away. Plus, he was never going to come close to replicating John Myung anyway.

[Systematik88]

Back in 2004 I was just starting a band up with my friends. I played keys so one the drummer in my band showed me DT and jokingly said "play like  this guy". I heard Rudess play stuff from Glass Prison and how fast his fingers were and thought it was the coolest thing in the world.  Octavarium was soon released after and I spun that thing thousands of times.  I always felt a connection and inspiration from Rudess as a keyboard player and loved how time signature changes made you think more and react to the music you were hearing. 

Bam. I love DT.

Bring on the new album!

[aXygnus]

Used to go to this competitive Pokemon site back in 2007, 2008, I was big into that back then. This friend of mine once posted a Rate My Team (where we would give advice to each other about the teams we were using) using a Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence concept. After talking to him a bit, he recommended the album to me (and for 5 years, I thought the song was the only thing on it). I loved it. Then he told me to listen to In the Name of God. I loved it.

[nicmos]

heard PMU on the radio in Fall of 1992, whatever the hard rock radio station in Los Angeles was at the time.  It was the best song on the radio I thought.  I told my older brother about it since we liked similar music, and for Christmas, he got me the cassette version of I&W (I didn't have a CD player yet.)  I loved that cassette, although the prog-wankery was pretty new to me at the time (Rush was my favorite band at that point but was as proggy as I got) so I didn't actually like the instrumental part of Metropolis that much back then.  But the rest was so good it didn't matter.  When I finally got a CD player the next year, I&W was one of the first CDs I bought to replace the cassette.  I don't remember in the pre-internet days how I found out Awake was coming out, but I know I was looking forward to it and got it as soon as I could.  Been buying the new releases as soon as they come out since Awake.

[PwnsomeWin]

Anyone here know Frets on Fire? It's basically a free guitar hero clone with tons of user-charted songs. When I got the game, I just got the biggest song pack, figuring that it would keep me busy. It contained ITNOG, on which I was hooked after I finally managed to survive that unison section.

Got LAB (I usually start with live releases unless I know that a band isn't very good live), then ToT. The rest is, as they say, history.

LOL. I was obsessed with that game. xD