I don’t think much has been discussed about the Tremonti picking technique, I believe he has amazing technique and speed, killer for rhythm playing aswell. I’m just sad I can’t find super high quality videos from a good angle.
Here’s some rhythm playing from Tremonti:
And here’s a solo that has a line at the end that has always been marvelous to me:
Better audio:
Worse audio:
I’m tired of pretending Creed weren’t good.
Who can forget about this performance? I first saw it years ago, a friend showed me. Still get Higher stuck in my head every time i think of it.
@eric_divers and @Dissonant_Timbres at first I couldn’t tell if you guys were trolling or not lol! I’ve always enjoyed Creed, but there were some moments (at least in that 2009 show) where I could see the haters still hating, hardcore fans still loving it.
I thought they were great. Now, ignorance being bliss, there are some things Stapp does that I never thought of until I got vocal lessons for 2 years around 2008. My teacher was a Peabody grad who loved rock, so she was attempting to teach me classical technique for the rock singer (or, backup singer, in my case). Scott Stapp was her whipping boy for an anti-technique known as “swallowing”. If you don’t quite know what that is (and mods, don’t ban me, I’m not being dirty, I promise) think “Cher” or “Elvis” or Eddie Vedder, or (for you heavier dudes) Howard from Killswitch, or (for the religious) every professionally recorded praise and worship singer, ever. It’s essentially tightening the muscles in your throat like you would if you were yawning. “Swallowing”. It’s a no-no for technical reasons, but it’s also…pretty obnoxious once you realize it’s there. It’s probably passible when used for color (Jewel does it, sometimes). But just cruising on it always…yeah.
Back on track, not sure why Tremonti doesn’t get more love. Great player, great sense of melody really good tone, for that genre (lead and rhythm). He looks to me like what Troy would call “a wrist player”. That cool rhythm stuff linked above is likely RDT. Never really analyzed his technique before…because back when I was into him I knew nothing about technique.
But anyway, he’s awesome, Creed’s awesome. Even if Scott sang from his throat lol! I’d still rock out to My Sacrifice, Higher, and Who’s Got My Back Now (a very underrated tune from that era.
Oh I was absolutely not trolling.
I’ll start dropping my Limp Bizkit hot takes but people probably aren’t ready for that TED talk.
Not to derail too much but Scott’s recent solo stuff for Napalm records with Yiannis Papadopoulos on guitar is good stuff.
Scott Stapp was an arrogant prick and made pretty much everything from their second album on tough to stomache, though their debut really was pretty good. But, if you could tune him out, Tremonti wrote some pretty damned cool riffs.
I liked them way more when they booted him and started calling themselves Alter Bridge. I don’t think Tremonti’s leads were all that great on their debut - his phrasing was rhythmically very repetitive, with phrases all beginning and ending at about the same point in the beat in his playing - but the riffing was still great, and Myles Kennedy is an amazing singer. Pretty good guitarist too, as it happens, and Tremonti continued to evolve as a soloist himself.
Dang, I still love Eddie Vedders vocals on their first album regardless
Well, that’s cuz he’s awesome 
He still does enough very interesting things with his voice and has a good tone quality. The sad thing is, with all the singers who do this…they’d sound even better if they didn’t (or did less of it). The voice is an incredible instrument and everybody’s “body” is different. That’s why so many people can sound so drastically different. When you have the muscles around your throat tensed up, you take a hit on some natural resonance. It would be like if a great acoustic guitar play clamped their instrument really tightly into their body and didn’t allow the top/back to resonate naturally. They’d still sound great, but they’d be missing out on the natural resonance of the instrument.
As mentioned above, Tremonti is broadly categorized as a wrist player - I’m not sure how important it is to analyze beyond that.
I was never a Creed fan (not trying to break up the love party!), but every time Mark’s name comes up I recall this video.
Ha I LOVE that video. Absolutely killing it on a guitar that isn’t even his. Rusty is a mad man!!!
The other thing I love about Mark, is that my very favorite PRS that I own is a pre-lawsuit black single cut. It’s essentially Tremonti’s guitar without the signature and high end inlays. I even bought his bridge pickup and swapped out the stock one that came with the guitar. I just love that guitar.
I have a pre- or immediately-post lawsuit singlecut too and that thing sounds awesome. I forget what pickups are in it, some sort of moderate output PAF style Duncans that my buddy who owned it before me put in, but it’s just a very thick sounding guitar. That into a Mesa does make me think Tremonti, for sure.
Absolutely. Back in the day I played mine through a modded Triple Rectifier (which also sounded SO good…just…unlike the stock Mesa Triple Rectifiers entirely). The only problem with that guitar??? A shoulder killer, much like the famous guitar they got sued over lol
One of my favorite Tremonti parts isn’t even flat picked. I think this was the first fingerpicking part I ever learned.
Man Stapp is rough here glad he finally kicked his demons.
@drew agreed he was an ass fueled by his substance abuse.
@joebegly So swallowing is the vocal technical term for the technique that produces what is colloquially termed “yarling” aka the stereotype 90s emotive rock signing style that got popular with Eddie Vedder? As much as yarling gets clowned on id rather every singer sing like this opposed to the whiney clean singing of the post hardcore era afterwards it’s a big reason I’ve never gotten into bands like Periphery. Keep on yarling in the free world.
You mentioned Jewel so I have an excuse to post my favorite bit of Woodstock '99 footage. I wonder if there’s an overlap between swallowing and the techniques used in yodeling since her background is she grew up yodeling with her dad in Alaska.
Really like Tremonti. Awesome player. His solo in Arms Wide Open (from the video with the strings) I think is one of the best melodic solos I have heard. Great player.
Tremonti is a great example of a player who didn’t let success stop them from improving.
But we don’t need to go so far as to say Creed weren’t all that bad, that’s up there with “actually Load and Reload were decent”
Rhythm Playing looks like textbook reverse dart thrower to me (and it’s awesome!) — see recent lessons and YT vids by Troy etc.
Upon first listen, I think this has a lot of repeated notes, so it’s a bit like right hand doing tremolo and left hand doing some fretting motions without exact synchronization. EDIT: listening again I think he’s going for some kind of pedal tone lick where some notes are repeated once, and others twice. Check out the slow motion on YT and I think you can hear it.
But I still think this is not done in a super exact way, more in a “rock’n’roll swagger / just go for it” kinda way 
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Not a knock on the playing, it can be a cool effect and I heard John Petrucci doing similar things (e.g. the tremolo section of the “Spirit Carries On” solo).
But if you were trying to listen to it as “one note per pickstroke”, maybe that’s where you could get confused or perceive it as more mysterious than it really is.
I enjoyed Creed. Stapp’s stupidity notwithstanding, those are good records. I also enjoy the odd Nickelback song. Why they became a punching bag I don’t know.
Their ‘pop’ reputation doesn’t change the fact that the music was good.
As for Metallica - Jason Newsted said it best “People call us sellouts. Yeah…every venue we play at, we sell out.”
That “whiney” thing is the other vocal no-no my teacher had me try to avoid. It’s a form of nasality, also not a “proper” technique. But like anything it’s about how it’s used, what people like etc. Country music fans have to love that sound in male singers or they’re largely out of luck, unless they only listen to singers who know how to avoid it like Keith Urban and Vince Gill (both also awesome guitar players). I have several favorite rock singers but if I had to pick just one it’s probably Chris Cornell. He was a little nasal sometimes. When it’s done sparingly it’s a cool effect. Like swallowing, I’d rather not hear it continuously, but that’s just me.
Well, that’s gonna be the coolest thing I see today, on pretty much every level. I’ve always really liked Jewel but admittedly I haven’t checked out much of her live stuff. I got into her when she first rose to popularity and there was no YouTube in those days, so I was stuck with the studio recordings. Cool to see her cut loose like that, she’s a vocal powerhouse. To me it’s a great example of using different colors. I’ve lost track of how many different vocal tones/styles she showed off in that performance. It’s all intentional, so she’s got amazing technique, clearly. And of course, she looks amazing (don’t ban me Tommo, I kept it classy) 
After nearly a decade of trying to “make it” in the industry (and failing lol), I refuse to fault anyone for selling out. You’re choosing between what you’re currently doing (probably playing the exact music you like, but making little to no money and barely getting by at life in general lol) or what you could be doing (changing some aspects of what you do, still getting to do what you love for a living, the lifestyle etc, and in some cases making bank). Even the sellouts work their asses off.
I could easily go on a rant about how great Nickelback is. Yes, some of it’s contrived material, but the songs are really well put together. I think the main thing I really enjoyed about them was their sound quality, because I was heavily into audio engineering around 2010 - 2012. Sure, lots of compression/limiting, but I haven’t found a rock record yet that I think sounds better than All The Right Reasons. That was always my reference mix. Incredible guitar, drum and bass tones. Randy Staub is just “the man” when it comes to mixing. While the mix seems like it would have little to nothing to do with the artist…I stumbled upon a forum where the audio engineer of that album and the industry veteran Mike Shipley (Def Leppard mixer), who mixed the tracks that Randy didn’t, weighed in on the quality of the tracks. Pretty sure Mike said in all his career he’s never received tracks that sounded that good prior to him mixing. Nickelback is as talented and hard working as anyone in the genre. They just might be the last “big band” too, since they came in at the tail end of the industry upheaval.
I sometimes think it’s a category mistake to point out that rock singers aren’t doing “technically correct” singing, tbh it’s often more akin to euphonious shouting, and that’s ok