John Peter Petrucci (born July 12, 1967) is an American guitarist and songwriter best known as a founding member of the progressive metal band Dream Theater. John Petrucci has produced every Dream Theater album, with Mike Portnoy, since their 1999 release, Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes from a Memory. Petrucci was named as the third player on the G3 tour six times, more than any other invited guitarist. GuitarOne ranked him as the 9th Greatest Shredder of All Time. In 2009 he appeared in the No. 2 position in Joel McIver's book The 100 Greatest Metal Guitarists. Petrucci first played guitar at the age of 12 when he noticed his sister was able to stay up past her bed time to practice. He soon dropped it when his plan failed. He started to play again at the age of 12, when his friend Kevin Moore asked him to play in a band with him. Kevin Moore later became the first Keyboardist of Dream Theater. Petrucci attended Berklee College of Music in Boston with childhood friend John Myung, where they met future bandmate Mike Portnoy. These three decided to start a band after inviting two other childhood friends to join the band. They started off as Majesty, which later became Dream Theater. Petrucci's main project is Dream Theater, but he is also part of project band Liquid Tension Experiment and has appeared as a guest on several other records. Petrucci has released a guitar instructional video, "Rock Discipline", which covers warm up exercises, exercises to avoid injury while playing, alternate picking, sweep picking, chords and other techniques for developing one's guitar playing. Petrucci also has a book named "Guitar World presents John Petrucci's Wild Stringdom", which was compiled from columns he wrote for Guitar World magazine, bearing that same title. In 2001 he was invited by Joe Satriani and Steve Vai to tour with them on the popular G3 guitar tour, which exposed him to a massive number of new fans and inspired him to record a solo album. Suspended Animation was released on March 1, 2005, and made available for order from his web site. He also appeared on the 2005, 2006 and 2007 G3 tours. In 2007, John Petrucci went on G3 tour again, this time with Joe Satriani and Paul Gilbert.