Embarking on a Tonemission with John Petrucci
Backstage at a Dream Theater concert in Birmingham in February 2023, John Petrucci discussed with us his vision of creating a online community centered around guitarists searching for the perfect tone. It was an ambitious concept and one that we expressed a great deal of interest in helping turn into reality. Over the next few months, with the help of John’s guitar tech Maddi Schieferstein and engineer James ‘Jimmy T’ Meslin, the project evolved considerably. The end result was Tonemission, a guitar software brand that utilises revolutionary impulse response (IR) technology to allow any player, beginner to expert, to easily replicate John Petrucci’s iconic guitar tones!
Whilst hard at work with Maddi and Jimmy T creating the IR’s, John set about forming a small team of talented creatives to create visual materials for Tonemission. The logo, branding and product packshots were designed by Sean Mosher-Smith/EchoDesignLab and promotional and product demo videos were produced by Cooper Carter. Our task at Crystal Spotlight was to bring everything together and present an engaging website and digital storefront for the brand and it’s debut product, The John Petrucci IR Collection: Vol. 1.
With the website, we wanted to communicate the product effectively using large background images and video that bring the visitor into the world of Tonemission. We created dedicated sections that go into detail about what’s included with The John Petrucci IR Collection: Vol. 1, including it’s three distinct ‘packs’, ‘Terminal’, ‘Liquid’ and ‘Dreamworld’, all of which allow the user to unlock guitar tones recorded across albums John recorded solo, with Dream Theater and Liquid Tension Experiment. We worked hard to ensure parity of design between what we were creating for the Tonemission site and what Sean Mosher-Smith had set out in his branding materials and logo.
As for the digital storefront, we wanted this process to be as straightforward and seamless as possible for the user. We made use of payment gateways such as Apple/Google Pay and PayPal to simplify the transaction process.
In addition to the website and digital store, we also built Tonemission a custom technical support system to allow Maddi and Jimmy T to quickly help product buyers with any questions and queries. We also managed the brand’s marketing campaign on socials, with the creation of multiple social channels for the brand and also leveraging John’s dedicated online fanbase for promotional opportunities.
Tonemission launched in July 2023 alongside its debut product, The John Petrucci IR Collection: Vol. 1 and was very positively received by John’s worldwide audience of beginner to advanced guitarists. The launch was also widely covered in the music media by global publications like Guitar World, Guitar.com, MusicRadar, Yahoo & more.
A massive thanks to John, Maddi and Jimmy T for placing their trust in us to take on multiple complex responsibilities for this project – given the enthusiastic and passionate response from both fans and the media, it was clear that the months of hard work and sleepless nights paid off!
Check out Tonemission.