Synyster Gates

“It's really fun to just get on a bike and just go and, I guess in a way, to be able to leave the tour and not be confined and all that kind of stuff.”

“We're more about other things over odd timings: orchestration, composition, horn/vocal arrangements - that's where we get super weird.”

“Sometimes, with more progressive songs, you lose that feel somewhere along the line, but 'This Means War' never quits - the energy is always there.”

“We're fortunate that our fans worldwide have really embraced our evolution. We know how lucky we are. We want to change people's lives. I'm not saying we're God's gift, but we're trying to make a difference.”

“He happens to be my father and an incredible musician. When he gets lucky, we let him into the studio for 20 minutes to hear a song which has been previously written for him.”

“I try to, at least, think very melodically, and my band forces me to think very melodically.”

“Everybody's lost somebody, and I think they all miss them incredibly.”

“We tried our best for so long to make the heaviest record we could make.”

“Rolling Stones came later for me. I was a Beatles guy. All of us were pretty much more along the lines of Beatles guys than we were Stones or Elvis.”

“Just based on the primary adage of the necessity breeding innovation, it was just like 'Well, what makes me the guitar player that I am?' and I feel like I listen to so much different music, and I'm a student of so many genres of music, and I feel like it's fun to apply those things and anything super applicable to any type of music.”

“In a studio situation, I'm able to dig deep and come up with stuff that all the guys think fits the vibe of the song. And I think that's partly due to the fact that I grew up listening to just about everything under the sun. I'm very open to music, and I like to do things in a traditional and musical way.”

“I used my Schecter for all my rhythms and most of my solos, certainly the fast solos.”

“Our singer, Matt, was reading Stephen Hawking and other physics-related books, and I was reading entrepreneurial books, and we all started discussing the new technologies that were taking over the world, from 3-D printing to space travel. These conversations starting leading us to think of how we could portray these things in a musical way.”

“During our formative years, it was all about, 'What did Metallica do?' and 'How do we do that?' and then you try and find an identity of your own, but they're still... They were the pioneers and the trailblazers.”

“When kids invest their time and money in coming to see us, we owe it to them to give them the best night of their lives.”

“Korn is great friends of ours, so to be on tour with friends is usually our number one. We've been very blessed to meet a lot of great bands, successful bands, that we can go tour with.”

“We make sure we have total artistic control with our albums. We were working with Interscope Records, and they had a hard time with us having all the control. So when we signed with Warner Bros., we told them we would be working hands-on with our producer, and they were cool with it.”

“If you write a country song, and it's the best song you've ever written but throw it out because you're a metal band, you'd be an idiot.”

“I think, back when I was younger, I was a lot more confident about certain things that I would write, and I didn't need the band's blessing or agreement; I would just kind of fight for it 'cause I knew it was good. And then the problem with getting older, especially when there's some success involved, you have a different measuring stick.”

“My fans, they know my dad as Guitar Guy or whatever, and he's kind of just this shredder that plays on my records sometimes. But they don't know his ear and how rich his harmonic scope is.”