If you are looking for a Mike Portnoy drum solo on record, you need to know where to look: unlike Neil Peart, who put a solo on almost every Rush live album, Portnoy’s official solos are spread across a live album, a concert DVD and his instructional videos. This guide goes through them one by one – where each is, when it was recorded, and what else is on the same release – so that you know exactly where to look.

Who Portnoy is, in brief

Portnoy co-founded Dream Theater with guitarist John Petrucci and bassist John Myung while they were students at Berklee College of Music, and was the band’s drummer from the beginning until he left in 2010. In 2004 he was voted into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame, the second-youngest musician ever inducted after Neil Peart. Away from Dream Theater he has played with Transatlantic, Liquid Tension Experiment, Flying Colors and many other groups. In October 2023 Dream Theater announced his return, and he is on the band’s 2025 album Parasomnia.

“Mike Portnoy Drum Solo” — Once in a LIVEtime (1998)

The first official Portnoy solo on a Dream Theater album is on Once in a LIVEtime, the band’s second live album, released on 27 October 1998. It was recorded at Le Bataclan in Paris on 25 June 1998, on the tour for Falling into Infinity, and the solo appears as a track of its own, simply titled “Mike Portnoy Drum Solo”. It shares the album with the keyboard player of that period, Derek Sherinian, who has a short piano solo track of his own, and with pieces from the whole of the band’s first decade. For a single standalone solo on a regular live album, this is the one.

The drum solo on Live at Budokan (2004)

The Portnoy solo people ask about most often comes with a detail that is easy to get wrong. Live at Budokan was filmed at the Nippon Budokan in Tokyo in April 2004, on the tour for Train of Thought, but the drum solo is not part of that concert: it was cut from the Tokyo show for reasons of time. The solo on the release is on the second DVD, as a bonus, and was recorded at the Osaka show on the same tour. So if you are looking for Portnoy’s Budokan solo, it is on the Live at Budokan DVD, but it was played in Osaka.

The instructional videos

Much of Portnoy’s solo playing on video is on his instructional releases for drummers. The first was Progressive Drum Concepts (1996). The best known is Liquid Drum Theater, his first video for Hudson Music, a two-disc set that won awards when it came out at the turn of the millennium. It was followed in 2007 by In Constant Motion, three discs and more than seven hours long. Its first disc covers the music of Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence, Train of Thought and Octavarium; its second his side projects, including Transatlantic and his tribute bands to the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, The Who and Rush; and its third is the one for solo hunters, with three live drum solos played as duets with guest drummers Charlie Benante, Jason Bittner and Richard Christy, plus previously unreleased live solos.

Beyond the solos: the drumming inside the songs

Much of Portnoy’s best-known drumming is not in solos but in the instrumental sections of Dream Theater songs, played together with Petrucci and Myung. If you want to hear it in context, the long instrumental passages on Images and Words (1992) and Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes from a Memory (1999) are good places to begin, and In Constant Motion takes songs from three later albums apart section by section.

Where to start

If you want one solo on a regular album, go to “Mike Portnoy Drum Solo” on Once in a LIVEtime. If you want to see him play, the Osaka solo on the second DVD of Live at Budokan is the one to watch. And if you want to understand his playing, In Constant Motion gives you both the solos and the explanations. Portnoy has also paid his own homage to Rush with one of his tribute bands, which makes my guide to Neil Peart’s drum solos a natural next read.

Go deeper

For the band itself, start with the Dream Theater band guide, the best Dream Theater albums, the best Dream Theater songs and where to start with Dream Theater. The rest of the band gets the same treatment in my guides to the best John Petrucci solos and John Myung’s bass solos. For drum solos across the genre, see the best prog rock drum solos of all time and the countdown of the best prog drummers of all time, or browse the prog musicians hub. The story of North American progressive rock and metal, Dream Theater included, is the subject of Beyond the Atlantic, the fourth book in my Beyond the Sound series.

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