01BLACKBIRD ALTER BRIDGE

(2007)

It was the album that paved the way for Alter Bridge to become the arena-conquering giants we know today. But when guitarist Mark Tremonti recalls the making of Blackbird, he refers to this period as the group’s “darkest moment”, and perhaps the only time it felt like their future was truly in question.

“We honestly didn’t know if we’d survive as a band back then,” he says. “We fought with our initial label and had to argue to get out of the deal when we felt we weren’t getting the support we needed. We were without management or a label, so it was a very in-between phase, just four guys trying to hang on to their career. We were desperate to continue, and luckily we had all the time in the world to write and prepare.”

For this, the band’s second album, they chose to partner up with producer Michael ‘Elvis’ Baskette for the very first time. The creative chemistry was so strong that he would go on to produce every Alter Bridge album thereafter, as well as all of the solo releases from both Tremonti and AB frontman Myles Kennedy.

Recalling the Blackbird sessions, Mark describes the producer as something of a mad scientist, working from within a jungle of chaos, surrounded by towers of pedals and amp heads in the control room, with no shortage of equipment to help bring their ideas to life. “When we had something like a whammy bar dive,” Mark says, “he’d find the coolest tones by mixing all these crazy pedals to make it roar”.

After tracking drums at Blackbird Studios in Nashville, the group ended up recording the bulk of the album at a house on Virginia Beach

– a good 40-minute drive away from the distractions of local bars and restaurants. The isolation did them wonders...

“The control room was the family room and I was in the bedroom right next to it,” Mark recalls. “I remember writing some of the solos as the bass was getting tracked. It felt a very real moment – we were all together, locked away and fighting for survival. Looking back now, it’s one of the best records I’ve ever been part of. The fingerpicked verse in the title track is probably my favourite guitar moment on the record. When I pick up a guitar to test my clean tone, nine times out of ten I’ll be playing that. It just sounds and feels good. I had that part lying around for a few years and wanted to use it in a song... I finally got my chance!

“I grew up listening to Metallica and learning stuff like Thecallof Ktulu, so that’s where it all came from. And I didn’t know it at the time but Myles pointed this out, Frank Hannon from (Californian band) Tesla ended up being a huge factor in that stuff, too. Those influences are where a lot of those fingerstyle intros came from.”

The solo section from the title track is also one of Tremonti’s proudest achievements. The leads start with Kennedy before Tremonti takes over for the second half, both of them sticking with tasteful bluesy lines from the F# minor pentatonic scale. The song is one of the band’s most enduring anthems, and it’s the duality between the two very different players that exemplifies the power of their partnership.

“The Blackbird solo was the last one I wrote right as the album was being made, so the pressure was on!” Mark laughs. “I knew it needed an extra good lead and I think what I played really ended up serving its purpose. I didn’t want to fail that song because I always knew it was going to be important. Brandnewstart is another one I love. I’m really into leads that start half clean with a slightly overdriven sound that gets boosted as the solo goes. It tells a story rather than just blasting you from beginning to end, it’s more of a journey. And actually the song track as a whole is one of my favourite Alter Bridge songs in general.

“Waywardone is also a favourite. The guitar solo has a lot of emotion. I remember doing a play-through of it on Instagram, and a lot of people said it was their favourite solo from that record.”

In the studio, Tremonti’s main axe of choice was his signature PRS in Charcoal Burst, which, unlike most Les Paul-inspired singlecuts, also featured a tremolo bridge. As the group started tuning lower on later albums, it eventually got phased out of rotation.

“We were mainly playing half a step down on Blackbird,” Mark says. “Either in standard or dropped D, with only a couple of songs in drop B – and what I mean by that is only the sixth string tuned down, the rest are still just a semitone below concert pitch. That Charcoal Burst

was good for that record, but on other records we started tuning even lower and the floating bridge didn’t work too well.”

The Charcoal Burst PRS was fed into an open-back Fender Twin for the clean sounds, a Bogner Uberschall and Mesa/boogie Dual Rectifier for the rhythms and a Bogner Ecstasy for the leads. If the tones sound expensive, that’s because they were.

“Though I still have it, the Ecstasy doesn’t really suit my playing these days,” admits Tremonti, who released his own signature, the MT-15, through PRS in 2018. “I prefer a bit more of a modern palm-mute chug sound. It’s a great amp for what it is, but I need an amp that sounds like it’s a bully, something that just ruins all the other amplifiers!

The Ecstasy is more of an elegant thing.

“As for the rhythm tracks, my Uberschall got mixed with my ‘Rev G’ Dual Rectifier – which is one of the most common from the 90s era ones. It’s what I played back in the Creed days. I don’t think I’d found my ‘Rev F’ yet,

I got one of those later and they’re like the holy grail of Dual Rectifiers. I’ve watched them go from $1800 to $4000 to whatever anyone wants to ask these days. If you find a decent-priced one, grab it! Those things are awesome. And then it was a ’65 Fender Twin reissue for the cleans, which has always been my favourite clean tone since I was young. It’s very hard to replicate the sort of sound you get from an open-back twin but I think we got there on the new MT-100S which will be coming out soon. I’d go as far as saying it has the best

clean channel I’ve ever heard on a higher gain head.”

The Blackbird album was also notable for the group finding their “secret weapon” for the studio in the form of a pink Kramer bass with active pickups, which was used to mirror the riffs somewhere in between Tremonti and Kennedy’s guitars and Brian Marshall’s bass. It remains in their sonic arsenal to this day.

“My guitar tech Ernie [Hudson] got hold of that pink Kramer bass,” Mark explains. “We put it through all kinds of fuzz and octave pedals after tracking twice with me and twice again with Myles. We’d do single line runs underneath our guitars to make the riffs sound even bigger. I remember after making the record, the person who owned the bass wanted it back but we managed to talk him out of it. And just recently while we were making our new record Pawns &Kings, it was still there in the studio... we had to hang on to that thing!”

“THE FINGERPICKED VERSE IN THE TITLE TRACK IS MY FAVOURITE GUITAR MOMENT ON THE RECORD”