“If you come up to the factory and draw it with me, I’ll do it!”: Mark Tremonti reveals how Paul Reed Smith challenged him to design his “coolest” custom guitar
Of all the guitars in Mark Tremonti’s arsenal, there’s one he regards as his numero uno. And that’s Stella, a bold design the Creed and Alter Bridge man worked on personally with PRS head honcho Paul Reed Smith.
If you’ve been lucky enough to catch Creed at one of their 2025 shows, you’ll have seen Tremonti donning the Explorer-esque build throughout the set. And in a new interview with Revv Amps recorded before the band’s Edmonton, Alberta show in August, he recounts how the guitar became a reality.
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“I was talking to Paul about doing a new guitar design, and he was like, ‘You know what, if you come up here to the factory and draw it with me, I’ll do it,’” Tremonti says.
“So I went up there, we got on the dry erase board and started drawing shapes, and once we got kind of close I was like – when Paul started getting close – I said, ‘What about these lines here if they did this,’ and he just gave me the pen and let me draw what I envisioned. And between the two of us we came up with a design.
Next, Tremonti recalls, Paul and his team transferred the drawing to a computer programme which allowed them to visualise the guitar in three dimensions.
“It looked amazing, and they built me two of them,” he goes on. “The first was a black one, the second one was brown. The brown one was my favourite for years until they made this one…
“This is one of the best-sounding and -playing guitars I own. I absolutely love it. I named it Stella before I had my baby girl. We always planned on naming our daughter Stella, so I was like, we haven’t had a daughter yet, so I named it Stella before my daughter was born.
“[It’s] definitely one of my most talked about guitars, one of my most played guitars. Of all the guitars I’ll play tonight I’ll probably play this the most.”
Elsewhere, Mark Tremonti showcases his #2 guitar, a Charcoal Burst single-cut PRS with a Dimebag Darrell sticker on its lower bout.
“When Dime passed, a fan was handing out stickers at a House of Blues show we were at,” he says. “So I just immediately put it on here. Vinnie [Paul] even came up to me and thanked me because he had heard I had put this on there. This is my tribute to Dime.”
Watch the full interview below:
The post “If you come up to the factory and draw it with me, I’ll do it!”: Mark Tremonti reveals how Paul Reed Smith challenged him to design his “coolest” custom guitar appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
