Nuno Bettencourt has revealed that he recorded using a seven-string guitar for the first time on Extreme’s new album, Six.
In a new interview with MusicRadar, Bettencourt states that for the most part, his gear choices on the record remain unchanged, with the notable exception of two of the album's tracks: Small Town Beautiful and X Out.
“When it comes to gear, anyone who has talked to me over the years knows I am boring as fuck,” says Bettencourt. “I am a creature of habit. I have my Rat pedal filtering things out [and] I have the Marshall DSL [JCM] 2000.
“I used the Nele for Small Town Beautiful, some places where you can tell it is a little bit of a different tone, a Tele/Nele tone, and that’s it, man. I used an N7 seven-string for X Out for the first time in my fucking life! The first time in my life that I was using a seven-string.”
Both the Nele and N7 sit in Bettencourt’s line-up of Washburn signature guitars. The N7 is, as you might guess, a seven-string variant on his enduring go-to, the N4, featuring a Seymour Duncan '59 neck pickup and Duncan Distortion at the bridge.
The Nele, meanwhile, is a T-style signature model that was introduced back in 2020, featuring Seymour Duncan Vintage Stack and Bill Lawrence L-250 single-coil pickups, alongside a six-way pickup switch.
Despite this rare tonal switch-up, Bettencourt maintains that playing a seven-string on X Out does not mean Extreme are in the business of chasing trends.
“We are not trying to do what’s happening now,” says Bettencourt. “We might be influenced by what’s happening now. We were influenced by what happened in the ‘90s. We were influenced by what we are always influenced by. But I’ve never sat down to write a song, like X Out – 'and it’s going to be something, and it’s gonna do this'. Or 'I am going to write a song like Hurricane'.
“Every day you write selfishly, self-centeredly. Write what you want and then you pick the best fucking songs you have for the album, and that’s it.”
Indeed, Bettencourt says Hurricane made Steve Vai and Tom Morello cry, so you would hope it made the cut...
