The tritone spent a few centuries banned by the Church for sounding like the devil clocking in for his shift, and here I am building an entire lick out of it. Sorry, medieval music theorists — the diabolus in musica now has a Patreon.
This nine-second lick is my love letter to Nuno Bettencourt's angular funk-metal on Extreme's "Cupid's Dead," stacked from tritone triads that flat-out refuse to sit down and behave. Short, spiky, and mildly evil — exactly the kind of thing that sounds like a mistake until you land it on purpose.
How the tritone triads lick works
Here's the nerdy bit. A tritone is that maximally awkward interval sitting dead in the middle of the octave — the augmented fourth, the flat five, the one your ear can never quite predict. Grab an ordinary triad shape and slam a second triad a tritone (six frets) above it, and the two clash in the most gloriously unresolved way. That's the whole trick behind the angular sound Nuno weaponised on "Cupid's Dead."
The useful takeaway: you don't need a new shape, you need a new distance. Take a major or minor triad you already know and move it exactly six frets. Your fingers stay lazy, your harmony turns menacing. And because the tritone splits the octave perfectly in half, that same shape keeps coming right back around — which is exactly why diminished ideas feel so slippery and symmetrical.
Play it clean and it sounds like a wrong note; play it with conviction and suddenly you're "exploring dissonance." Confidence is the only difference, and I have almost none of it. Grab the PDF and Guitar Pro file on my Patreon and go annoy the neighbours in a harmonically sophisticated way.