Chad Bowar from About.com: Heavy Metal spoke with RATT guitarist Warren DeMartini recently about a number of topics. A few excerpts from the chat follow:

About.com: Heavy Metal: What’s the status of your next studio album?

DeMartini: "For this one we decided to do something different than we’ve ever done in the past. We packed up and went to the East Coast. The producer we decided to go with (Michael "Elvis" Baskette) has a studio on the Chesapeake Bay, and it’s really nice. It’s a different approach than we’ve ever done. It’s more of a combination of touring and recording, as opposed to recording in your hometown where you go home every night and have the usual barrage of phone calls. With this, everybody went to the studio and stayed, lived there. It was amazing. We’re about halfway through. We’ve got 12 songs recorded. By the time we had to hit pause (to go on tour) we were just about to start the lead and background vocals."

About.com: Heavy Metal: Is there a release date yet?

DeMartini: "It’s looking like it will be released in either February or March of 2010. You never know how these things are going to turn out, but if the atmosphere is any indication, it should be really good. We've had an incredibly good time making this record."

About.com: Heavy Metal: As you look back at Ratt’s catalog, are there any albums that you think are underrated or didn’t get the attention they deserved when they were originally released?

DeMartini: "Ratt got so big so fast that there wasn’t any time to learn anything about controlling our own schedule. It took on a life of its own. Looking back and listening to some things, I feel like it would have been better if we could have taken a season off. It was just record, tour, record, tour for five or six years in a row. It was hard to find the time to do everything properly. You do 175 shows with no break and then you go into the studio. You learn quickly, but most of it was pretty close to the mark."

Read the entire interview here.