“I opened the door... he had the guitar in his hands. It was him playing the jazz. I had no idea that he was that good”: Mark Tremonti on Alter Bridge’s “secret weapon” and his soloing strategies for avoiding the same old pentatonic patterns

Mark Tremonti throws the horns and points to something during a live performance with Creed. His signature PRS singlecut is strapped on his shoulder.

If Mark Tremonti is feeling any jet lag from flying into London for a round of press interviews for Alter Bridge’s eponymous new studio album, he isn’t showing it.

Here in a well-kempt west London hotel, it could be the coffee doing its thing, or it could just be that Tremonti and Alter Bridge frontman/guitarist Myles Kennedy are still basking in the afterglow of getting to make an album in 5150 Studios, the Los Angeles recording facility that the late Eddie Van Halen built from the ground up.