Rick Beato breaks down Nuno Bettencourt’s jaw-dropping solo from new Extreme single Rise, and yes, it is still impossible to play

Extreme announcing their long-awaited return with new single Rise was the biggest story in guitar that week not because it had been 15 long years since their last studio album, but because it was a reintroduction to the frontier-guitar genius of Nuno Bettencourt, who had just tracked the year’s best guitar solo – and maybe a solo for the all-time list.

Maybe it’s too soon to call it on the last point, but we’d bet good money that when the year ends, nothing is going to come close to the show of electric guitar pyro that Bettencourt puts on in Rise.

Rise was the first single to be shared from the Boston hard-rock band’s forthcoming studio album, Six, and it features Bettencourt in blazing form, constructing a bridge between old-school hard rock with some avant-garde methodology, i.e. using the minor blues scale for basic vocabulary, tremolo picking and divebombs a la Eddie Van Halen, before taking this into a sound and technique that is totally alien and beyond the ken of regular mortals.

Deploying his sui generis picking and muting at hyper-quick speed, Bettencourt takes this solo into the realms of you have to see it to believe it. If it were a lesser player, you’d be wondering if the pedalboard was offering assistance.

As Rick Beato says in his latest YouTube video, it’s the solo everyone is talking about, and the producer, sessionist and Gibson signature artist took some time to break this one down and offer his insight.

For anyone looking for a leg up in learning Rise, Beato offers a secure foothold, walking through the riff in drop D, discussing the chord progression and why that works – as ever with Bettencourt, it’s always clever musicianship, all composed to give the track the tension and energy it needs. Then Beato arrives at the solo.

“Wow! Okay, so the first half of the solos is just incredible,” he says. “It’s very, very, very Nuno. But with the Van Halen tremolo picking. I love this. It’s such an aggressive style, but it’s very much like his Get The Funk Out style in that it’s really his own thing, and it’s so… digging in! And aggressive!”

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This is classic Bettencourt. However, as Bettencourt promised upon the album’s announcement, this is Extreme. Expect the unexpected, and the aforementioned section of the solo that Beato calls “false fingering”, which sounds like a technique players like Shane Theriot gleaned from listening to saxophone players. Either way, It’s something Beato is familiar with, only that Bettencourt’s speed just kills him.

“The note choice and everything, when he plays those blues licks, they’re just blazing,” says Beato. “But then you get to that false-fingering part, which is beautiful. This is the kind of stuff I like to do. I can’t do it fast like him. You can hear that there’s a pattern to it.”