The Boston rockers take the funk out in favour of acoustic balladry. We take a look at Rockschool’s Grade Six arrangement

Released as the third single from Extreme’s 1990 album Pornograffiti, More Than Words saw the band depart from their usual funk-metal style for a strippedback acoustic and vocal harmony approach. Nuno Bettencourt’s dazzling acoustic guitar work is characterised by two features: syncopated offbeat chords and muted strikes. To capture these, try to get to a point where your picking hand technique flows automatically – it needs to be loose enough so you can pluck the strings cleanly, whilst keeping the rhythmic momentum. The chords can usually be played using one shape at a time, with the picking hand ‘breaking’ these into smaller fragments. In bar 1 for example, you will only need one G chord shape, and by following the tab you will see that the picking hand pattern creates the variety, including a G/B inversion before shifting to Cadd9 and a new chord shape. Watch out for the specific dynamics of bars 15-18, as these deliberately underpin the emotion in the vocal.