Nuno Bettencourt shares the secret to a great guitar solo

30:20Nuno 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.

In a conversation with Q's Tom Power, 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 [and] 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 something Queen's Brian May once touched on in an interview, referring to Bettencourt's solo on Get the Funk Out as "the epitome of what a solo should be on a record … it sounds like it's coming straight out of inside him."

"The fact he said that it's coming from inside of 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.

So how exactly do you do that?

"The most important thing is the song," Bettencourt explains. "I always let the song tell me what I'm going to do. You service the song, you never get in the way of the song. The song is what will be there long after you're gone…. You're going to match the emotion of [the song], and when you do that, it's unstoppable."

Extreme just wrapped up the Canadian leg of its North American tour. The band's sixth album, Six, is out now.

The full interview with Nuno Bettencourt is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. He also talks about Extreme's new album, their big hit More Than Words, and why Eddie Van Halen is such an important figure in rock music. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Nuno Bettencourt produced by Mitch Pollock.