Nuno Bettencourt has been the lead guitarist and songwriter for the band Extreme for four decades.
In a career-spanning conversation with Q’s Tom Power, the lead guitarist of Extreme explains why executing the perfect guitar solo has nothing to do with your technical ability or how fast you can play.Nuno Bettencourt: The secret to a great guitar solo
It shouldn't come as a surprise that if you want to play a truly great guitar solo, you have to become a truly great guitar player. And to do that, you have to practice — a lot., Nuno Bettencourt, the lead guitarist and songwriter for the band Extreme, recalls practicing up to 16 hours a day as a kid. But before he even picked up a guitar, he first learned how to play the drums.
"I think every musician should learn how to play drums as part of their beginnings because it teaches you pocket, it teaches you feel it teaches you how to play with a band," he says. "Once you wrap your head around rhythm and drums … you have so much more to offer on the other three minutes of the song, not just the solo."
If you're not familiar with Bettencourt or his band Extreme, you should know that his guitar solos are legendary for their technical wizardry and emotional spontaneity. That's somethingas "the epitome of what a solo should be on a record … it sounds like it's coming straight out of inside him.", not from the exterior … that's all I needed to hear," Bettencourt says about May's comment. "That was like, mission accomplished.
For Bettencourt, executing a perfect guitar solo has nothing to do with how fast you can play or how proficient you are. Rather, it's something more intangible."If you're not playing at all times — whatever tempo, whatever speed, whatever you do — with passion and emotion, and actually touching somebody with your guitar solo, like raising the hairs on their arm, then you shouldn't be playing at all," he tells Power.
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