I was going through some old hard drives and found some old videos of Troy.
I belive I got these from the old John Petrucci forum. I could be mistaken but when I was a young man The JP forum was the place to be. Before youtube really was a thing this was the place you could find videos of new amazing players.
Just thought you guys would enjoy these. And Troy and/or Brendan - these are unlisted on my channel. They are not for public but if you want me to remove them I will of course do so.
We (the people) are waiting for a solo album by this guy 
\m/
Nice playing, CtC should def interview this guy!
But yea, seriously, this is some out of control shredding:
Wow! Troy is really holding back while showing CtC material!
I hadn’t seen the lightning video before - that’s some badass shredding!
Just an FYI the “Lightning” video, that’s a lip sync — I’m not even plugged in, which should be obvious. The others were done multiple times to get the different camera angles but I don’t remember which angle or angles the audio came from. The Freight Train clip is horrendously sloppy no matter how you slice it.
We’ve got plenty of more cleanly played and consistently filmed stuff for people to learn from these days so there’s really no reason to put any of this on the web site other than historical curiosity.
The “ships” video is fantastic Troy, don’t be too hard on yourself!
Nobody can actually play that solo, you did a good job!
But I much prefer the way you play now!
The Ships video is somewhat better played, yes, but the sound is frankly terrible. I didn’t even own an amp. All I had was the Washburn N2 guitar and GarageBand running on 12" Powerbook. So I was using whatever built-in amp sim thing they had then. And the Washburns are famously shrill, even the N4 I got later, which has these super bright Bill Lawrence pickups that Nuno actually uses. That’s his sound, but through a better amp, and of course his fingers.
Funny story after I put that up I got an email from a typical sounding email address, like "[email protected]" or something like that (I’m making that up, but it was similar), asking about the tones and how I got it to sound so much like Yngwie. Which I was thinking, uh, I don’t know, doesn’t sound like Yngwie to me! The guy writes back, he goes I’m Jeff Loomis from the band Nevermore. Neither of which sadly I had heard of at that time. Somehow we ended up talking on the phone and he was asking about the guitar tone again. So I told him about the Powerbook and the low-end Washburn. I didn’t know what to ask a guy in a band, so I was like, uh, what amps do you guys use? He was, something something Rectifier. And I was like, ok, cool. But in truth I didn’t know what that was at the time either! The whole thing was hilarious.
The “Lightning” clip is actually fine, playing-wise. But there’s nothing in any of these that we don’t already have on the web site in large quantity with much better and more straightforward presentation. So again, this is why this stuff isn’t up here.
Just goes to show how much tone is neither in the gear nor the fingers but in the phrasing and note choice.
Or that Loomis had gone severely deaf from standing too close to a massive stack of Mesas.
You’re probably right that he was thinking more about the overall phrasing. So much of the sound of any dwps-oriented style is rooted in the way the technique leads you toward certain kinds of lines, played with a very specific combination of picking, legato, sweeping, etc. It’s not enough to do “neoclassical”. You really have to do “neoclassical Gypsy” to get the vibe. And many players who fell into an upstroke escape picking style do play this way, without even realizing it.
Is it just a prejudice of mine, or most of the legato that sneaks into mostly-picked phrases tends to be pulloffs? I.e. I can’t think of an instance where YJM plays pick-hammer-pick for example. I tried this and never got the hammer to blend in nicely with the picked sounds, while the pulloff is a bit more aggressive so perhaps it fits better.
Yes it’s mostly pulloffs but Joe Stump for example uses hammers and he gets good results with them: