Former Creed guitarist, and current Alter Bridge member, Mark Tremonti, discussed why his at home cover of a Metallica classic turned disastrous.
He discussed lessons in a Guitar Autopsy interview, “Every time I’m with another guitar player, I take guitar lessons. I just ask as many questions as I can. Every time you’re around a show, I’m like, ‘Alright, dude, show me that!’
“I’ve heard from you [Rusty Cooley] more shredding than any other player on earth. My main weapon is my legato which is what I got from the legato workout.”
Cooley said, “You’ve always been really great at supporting and giving shout-outs, and stuff like that. I’ve always appreciated that a lot, man. Thank you.”
Mark responded, “I’m not afraid to go and tell people where anything comes from. Remember you gave me the DVDs ‘Extreme Pentatonix,’ ‘Shred Guitar Manifesto,’ and ‘The Art of Picking’ – I take a lot from those.
“One thing was, I think it might have been ‘The Art of Picking,’ where you would pick a pattern but you wouldn’t play it to a metronome, you just play it clean for a minute straight, and I apply that to a lot of what I do now.
“But the legato workout film – if I went from the first exercise to the last, which is crazy because it would take me an hour and 20 minutes maybe, I got to a point where I would have to do that entire workout before I went on stage every day.
“To me, it was almost like yoga for the guitar, like my hands felt stiff, and then after I did the legato workout, they felt free and open.”
He later said, “When I was a kid, I was a big fan of Paul Gilbert, so I saw his fingering patterns, and I fingered it like him. And then I started noticing people doing it the other way, and I was like, ‘Let me try this.’
“To me, one of the hardest things to do on the guitar is to relearn something that you’ve gotten muscle memory for. It’s a thousand times harder than just learning it to begin with.”
Ryan chimed in, “There are a lot of bad tabs in general.”
Mark said, “My favorite record growing up was Metallica, ‘Master of Puppets,’ and I had bought the book, and I played exactly what it said in the book, and it sounded nothing like it. And I thought I was just a terrible guitar player.” Ultimate-Guitar transcribed his comments.
