Mark Tremonti's guitar strings: the Alter Bridge and Creed rig, sourced

Mark Tremonti is the guitarist behind two of the biggest-selling rock acts of the late 1990s and 2000s. Born April 18, 1974, in Detroit, Michigan, he co-founded Creed in Florida State University's orbit with singer Scott Stapp, an old high school acquaintance. Creed's debut My Own Prison (1997) and its follow-up Human Clay (1999) turned the band into a stadium act; Human Clay alone has been certified multi-platinum. The band splintered in 2004 under tension between Stapp and the rest of the group, Tremonti in particular.

Tremonti didn't stop. He, bassist Brian Marshall, and drummer Scott Phillips formed Alter Bridge that same year, recruiting Myles Kennedy on vocals and second guitar. Per Alter Bridge's own Wikipedia discography, the band has released eight studio albums since, from One Day Remains (2004) through Blackbird (2007), AB III (2010), Fortress (2013), The Last Hero (2016), Walk the Sky (2019), Pawns & Kings (2022), and a new self-titled record in 2026, outlasting Creed's original 1997-2004 run several times over. In 2011 Tremonti also launched a heavier, more shred-forward solo project under his own name, releasing six albums through 2025's The End Will Show Us How. D'Addario's own artist page credits him as Guitar World's "Guitarist of the Decade."

Across all three projects, one thing hasn't changed: the guitar. Tremonti has played a PRS signature model exclusively since the early 2000s, and he built the string gauge himself.

A custom D'Addario hybrid gauge on a PRS Mark Tremonti Signature, played almost entirely into his own PRS MT 100 head.

Tremonti's relationship with PRS started almost by accident. While Creed was touring behind My Own Prison, PRS reached out and sent him a McCarty model to try. He loved it enough to play it exclusively for a stretch, but wanted something built specifically for his style: heavy palm-muting, thrash and shred influence, and a traditional blues sensibility underneath all of it. PRS answered with a custom neck carve (now called the Tremonti neck shape) and a pair of aggressive, custom-voiced Tremonti humbuckers with a hotter bridge pickup and a medium-output neck pickup.

The current production model: a solidbody with a maple top and mahogany back, a violin top carve, a one-piece mahogany neck at 25" scale with 22 frets, a 10" radius rosewood fretboard with bird inlays, PRS Phase III locking tuners, and either a PRS Adjustable Stoptail or PRS's patented tremolo bridge depending on the build. It ships from the factory strung with PRS's own Signature 10-46 set, a standard gauge well short of the custom hybrid Tremonti actually plays.

Premier Guitar's 2023 Alter Bridge Rig Rundown put names to several of his stage guitars: "Brown Sound," an early-2000s model in brown burst with a tremolo bar and his main Eb-standard touring guitar; "Dime," his second PRS single-cut with a whammy bar, named after Dimebag Darrell; "Stella," a one-off body shape he co-designed with PRS and named after his daughter, not intended for wider production; "Fenton," a 20th-anniversary model with hand-painted art by Joe Fenton, one of only 20 built; and "H.A." (Hell's Angels), the second prototype of his original signature model, still carrying early prototype pickups.

The hybrid gauge solves a problem a straight off-the-shelf set can't: Tremonti wants the top strings light enough for fast lead lines and vibrato, but the bottom strings heavy enough to stay tight and punchy when he drops to Eb standard and leans into palm-muted rhythm parts. A single 11-49 set would make the top three feel sluggish for lead work; a single 10-46 set would leave the low strings a little loose once the whole guitar is tuned down a half step. Pulling the top three from a 10-46 pack and the bottom three from an 11-49 pack gets him both at once, without changing brands or wire type.

It's the same logic behind PRS's own build for him: the Tremonti humbucker's higher bridge output was designed specifically to keep palm-muted rhythm parts tight and articulate rather than mushy, which is exactly what heavier wound strings are also doing. The neck carve, the pickup voicing, and the string gauge are all solving the same problem from different angles.

Every guitar Tremonti has shown on camera is some version of his own PRS signature, sourced from Premier Guitar's 2023 Alter Bridge Rig Rundown.

Two standard D'Addario packs, combined into one custom set. Not a single packaged product, and not the D'Addario set his own artist page markets alongside his name.