Guitarist Mark Tremonti divides his time between three different bands - Creed, Alter Bridge and his namesake metal project Tremonti.
He tells MusicRadar: "Melody drives all the bands I'm in. If you apply melody to the guitar—because many melodies follow guitar lines—melody becomes the most important part. It's the glue.”
But there are differences between projects, too. “The Tremonti band is the easiest because it's any kind of speed metal influence," Mark says. "Alter Bridge is more experimental, progressive and atmospheric, and the Creed stuff is grandiose and anthemic.
"I have an intuition. When I hear something, I know what category it falls into."
While Mark spent most of 2024 touring with Creed, on the writing side of things his intuition guided him toward Tremonti's latest record, The End Will Show Us How, which drops on 10 January 10, 2025.
It’s a heavy and utterly guitar-laden listen.
Mark is also thinking about a follow-up to Creed’s 2009 Full Circle. "The turnouts we had on tour were great because we hadn't toured in so long,” he says. “But I think the next time we come out with a new cycle of touring, there will probably need to be new music.”
Here, Mark talks about the most important guitars and songs of his career.
How do today's guitars compare to the ones you learned on?
“In this day and age, you can get a much better instrument for a better value. The prices were lower back then, but just a relative price. If you take out inflation, back in the day you had to spend a ton of money to get a decent guitar—and they were nowhere near as good as they are nowadays.
“There was a period when I was growing up where there wasn't much you could get your hands on. The first decent guitar I bought was about three hundred bucks—and back then, that wasn't so cheap. But nowadays, the SEs that PRS makes are just absolutely fantastic. They play as good as anybody needs a guitar to play.”
What guitar has been the game-changer for you?
“One is the [PRS] Charcoal Burst that I play the most, and I have the Dimebag sticker on the back. It's the most well-known guitar that I play. I love it. It had a fixed bridge, and it's the guitar I play the most out of anything. That guitar speaks to me.
“And, of course, there's the Stella guitar that I hand-drew with Paul Reed Smith in his office. I've played that onstage a bunch. It’s got a different shape, and it feels great. It's balanced really well, sounds great, and plays great. It's one of my favourite guitars in the world.”
Which guitarist is your biggest influence?
“I try to learn as much as I can. Whenever I'm on tour, I try to learn at least one thing a day—and I try to mix it up. I try not to stick with one guitar player. I dive into a bunch of different people's styles.
“Lately, I've jumped into Shawn Tubbs, who is a great player. And there's a guy named Zach Adkins, who is a tremendous player. I'm always learning. It's a never-ending quest.”
In terms of technique, what was the last new trick you learned?
“I try to incorporate all different types of economy-picking approaches. It's something I wish I would have dived deeper into at a younger age. A lot of people think, 'Oh, you've just got to alternate-pick everything’, but a lot of these guys who are more advanced with their right hand are definitely incorporating a lot more economy picking than they might even know. It's a nice habit that makes your right-hand approach way easier—if you approach it the right way.”
What was the last piece of gear that you were excited about?
“I purchased a new Dumble [amp] that I absolutely love. I'm a Dumble fanatic, so those are my pride and joy nowadays. I'll sound like me through most amplifiers I plug into, so I like to find amps that make me play differently, like Dumbles, old Fenders, and unique stuff that adds colour to my sound.”
How much did you practice in the early days, and how much do you still practice now?
“I get to practice most when I'm on tour. When I'm at home, it's a little tougher because I've got a three-year-old daughter who takes up most of my day, which is great. But when I'm on tour, on some days, I'll practice five or six hours if I'm having a good day.
“On a show day, I'll play for at least three hours. When I'm on tour, I'm in top form because I'm playing all the time and because I do clinics in the morning, which is another couple of hours of playing. Outside of that, it's practicing for a few hours to stay in top form.
“When I get home, I get into songwriter mode, and that's when my lead guitar playing goes down a bit because when I'm writing songs, I'm not really learning things on guitar but trying to create on guitar. That's always the tough part. When you write an album and have to do leads, my lead playing is the weakest. And when I'm on tour, it's the strongest.”
As a player, do you have any bad habits?
“I'm very upstroke-centric. That's a strength in some small ways, but it's a disadvantage in a lot of other ways. It's something that I've tried to kick, but recently, I've told myself, 'Listen, that's just the way I play. I'm going to try to make the most of it.’"
Is there anything you can't play that you'd like to?
“I've tried pretty much everything that there is to try - within reason. But when you hear a guy like Matteo Mancuso come out and do his incredible technique, you try to approach that, and it's just such a new animal that it would take years and years and years to get that feeling of using all five fingers on your right hand the way he does.”
What technique did you have to work the hardest to master?
“What I've tried to get under my fingers is doing patterns of five in odd note groupings, but all alternate-picked. There's a solo on Let That Be Us [from Tremonti's Marching in Time] where you can really see that [technique] in the forefront.”
What is one song or performance that you're most proud of?
“From the new [Tremonti] album, I'd say the title track, just because it's more unique and less straightforward. It's in an odd-tuning, Open G minor, which allows for different chord voicings and different approaches when you write a solo. It's a journey.
“It's really rewarding when you can pull that off. When you have to come up with a solo, I consider it like searching for treasure. When you're in these unique and different tunings, when you come up with ideas, you feel like nobody's ever done it before, and it makes everything satisfying.
“For Alter Bridge, Blackbird is my most proud moment. It's got a little bit of everything. I like the mood, and I love the fingerstyle. A big part of how I play guitar is my finger-style approach, and that's the way that song starts.
“And for Creed, there's a song called Time, my favourite song from the Full Circle record. Before that, it was Faceless Man.”
And what do you play when you're just relaxing and playing for fun?
“I just find a new alternate tuning, explore it, and try to write something. Like I said, I'm trying to find that treasure within the tuning, chord voicing, or whatever pattern you can find that's never been written before that this odd tuning sparks in my imagination.”
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