Hailed by Guitar World as a “fretboard wizard” and voted “Best New Talent” by Guitar World readers in 1991, Nuno Bettencourt has maintained his relevance since first coming onto the national scene in the late Eighties, thanks to his inventive playing, killer tone and skillful songwriting.
Hailed by Guitar World as a “fretboard wizard” and voted “Best New Talent” by Guitar World readers in 1991, Nuno Bettencourt has maintained his relevance since first coming onto the national scene in the late Eighties, thanks to his inventive playing, killer tone and skillful songwriting.
Best known for his work as the guitarist for Extreme, Nuno also has brought his wizardry to collaborations with a diverse array of artists such as Jane’s Addiction frontman Perry Ferrell and R&B superstar Rihanna.
Extreme's 1990 album, Pornograffitti, is a guitar tour-de-force featuring incredible riffs, an amazing guitar tone (featuring Nuno’s signature Washburn N4 guitar, Bill Lawrence L500-XL pickup and the classic ADA MP-1 preamp) and wildly creative, technically fascinating guitar playing.
Of the many amazing signature licks that can be found on the album, one of the coolest employed by Nuno (see “Get the Funk Out” and “He-Man Woman Hater”) is his “tapped string skipping add9” pattern. The basic idea is found in EXAMPLE 1. What sets this lick apart is its intervallic interest generated by the string skip and the position shift in the tapped note. Theoretically, the line is derived from a Cadd9 harmony (C, D, E, G), but what’s important is its shape.
To execute the lick, your left hand index finger needs to shift a fret down when it moves to a new string, and as those moves occur, your tapping finger hits the same fret on the D and G strings and then moves