Speaker 1
The following is a conversation with Rick Beato, legendary music educator, interviewer, producer, songwriter, and a true multi-instrument musician, playing guitar, bass, cello, and piano. Rick, with his incredible YouTube channel, celebrates great musicians and musical ideas and helps millions of people, including me, fall in love with great music all over again.
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You had, I think, an incredibly fun and diverse beginning to your music journey. I heard somewhere that one of the things that made you fall in love with music was uh listening to guitar solos, some epic guitar solos. Uh what's an early guitar solo that you remember you connected to spiritually, uh musically where you're like wow, there's magic in this?
Well the first solo that I learned was Hey Joe. It was actually a good beginner song you, know, when I first started playing the guitar because it has pretty simple chords, right. So it's like E_C_G_D_A_. And I learned the solo and I figured out this like oh it's this pentatonic scale E_M_I_ or pentatonic scale that'll do it. I didn't know that's what it was called, but I learned this thing and it's like whoa he's just in this one shape here. Now there was no you couldn't go look anything up.
just if you could figure out the notes, you noticed that there was a little pattern to it. And then I I got so obsessed with it, and I showed my younger brother John who started playing guitar right at the same time I did. So I was fourteen, he was eleven, and I would play rhythm for him for five minutes while he would solo over Hey Joe. And then as soon as I'd start soloing, he'd throw the guitar down, then we'd get in a fight. And so my mom eventually was like, what is going on here? And I was like John,
play rhythm. John won't play rhythm for me. She's like okay, I'll play rhythm for you. What what are the chords? And and I was like okay, it's like E_ the C_G_D_A_, and so my mom would literally play rhythm for twenty minutes while I'd play. That's amazing. I when I when I look back on it now, my mom's been gone for ten years now, and when I look back on it, it's like my God, my parents were so cool.
You mentioned that Hey Joe, and Hendrix in general is kind of known for the rhythm not being simple rhythm, just the chords that you mentioned. It's what you do with those chords. It's almost improvisation on the rhythm side.
He did all those c really cool chord fragments uh riffs and things like that that's just part of his that's the Hendrix style.
What do you think? I mean many people put Hendrix as the greatest guitarist of all time. What do you think is p part of that?
You know I I make lists.
You do. If you somehow don't know who Rik Beato is, go on YouTube right now and watch your excellent interviews with musicians, watch your breakdown analysis of different songs, and uh watch your top twenty lists where you're very opinionated, sometimes very uh openly critical about certain kinds of song. It's fun. Opinions are fun I, know.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, a lot of variety, but Hendrix did you show up here today Rik trying to tell me that Hendrix is not up there. I just am getting that vibe right now.
No I'm not I but I don't want to to say greatest you know you you can say well there there are people that it that inspire Jimi Hendrix, Charlie Christian older, guitar players Charlie Christian, Django Reinhardt were the first to really big and probably and Andrei Segovia were were three of the giants of the twentieth century as far as guitar influences for most of the players that were to follow.
So jazz guitarist and composer active mainly in France as well as regard as one of the greatest guitarists in jazz history.
So Django was um well there's a huge movement right now, gypsy jazz movement as they call it, that is um kind of built around this style of music that he played back in the early twentieth century. One of the things about Django is that he was in a fire and he had two of his uh third and fourth finger, so his his ring finger and pinky were essentially melted together, he had no use of them, although he could use them while he was
hoarding, but a lot of these incredibly fast lines he's, just playing with two fingers and it's r amazing.
That what is that? So that's gypsy jazz.
That's gypsy jazz, yeah.
Him, Stephane Grappelli, he's a violinist that played with him a lot.
How much is this is a improvisation?
Everything he's doing there is improv improvised.
Feels so free.
Yeah.
and fun like swing and then that leads to uh he said pretty bebop. So bebop was the kind of jazz that was also influential on you and your own life journey and it's this complicated legendary kind of jazz that was very influential on the music that followed. So what what was bebop?
Well after the s the big bands were happening in the you know from the twenties through the forties uh small people would go out and play in small groups that they would tour with and uh Charlie Parker who's really kind of the one of the main figures of early bebop really developed the language of it. Usually the the music that they're playing over are standard chord progressions that that they would use as vehicles to improvise over. A lot of them were
A_A_B_A_ form. And Charlie Parker created this uh language of improvisation that was far more sophisticated than the swing players of the big band era. You know, think of people like Benny Goodman uh of that era. They would have really fast tempo songs, angular lines, chromaticism, things like that, chromatic n notes.
Chromatic notes are just notes next to each other on on on the on the same board.
I like to think of as connecting notes Connecting. you're putting in more notes than are supposed to be there and so doing creating some interesting texture.
Yeah, so that is one of the most difficult styles to master. Because all these things are a language. Blue's playing, they're all just languages, right? It's like just like you'd learn any type of language. Um my dad loved bebop. Now when I was a little kid and he's listening to these bebop records, whether it's Charlie Parker or Dizzy Gillespie or Oscar Peterson, Joe Pass, great jazz guitar player, I'm just hearing this stuff. I don't know any
different. My dad was not a musician, but for some reason he liked incredibly sophisticated music that was very technical and um I just heard it and just was like oh yeah, okay cool, and not realising that it was developing my ear, because I really bebop is one of the hardest to improvise in that style, in that language of bebop, it's very difficult to do.
Mm-hmm. And hearing it as a kid is one of the things that I think enables you, just like languages, enables you to learn it as opposed to somebody that's never been exposed to it and tries to learn it as a teenager. So I think it's very similar to learning languages which kinda is like my theory on perfect pitch that every child is born with perfect pitch and they start to lose the ability around nine months
Mm-hmm.
when people become culturally bound listeners, when babies do, they start out as citizens of the world. You know, they can they have the phone the the neural pathways to hear the sounds, the phonemes of all sixty five hundred languages spoken on earth. But then around nine months they begin to lose that ability and they when they become these culturally bound listeners there's a great YouTube video with this woman Patricia Cool, she's a language
And I watch this, the linguistic genius of babies. I saw this in two thousand ten, this lecture that she did, like a TED talk. And she talks about this, that kids they did a an experiment. They exposed kids to Mandarin three times a week for twenty five minute sessions, just a person speaking Mandarin to these babies. And they were able to recognize the sounds, the phonemes of that language even later on. And
when I realized that my son Dylan had perfect pitch, I thought why does Dylan have perfect pitch, but no one in my family had ever had perfect pitch. And I thought, well it must be because of the things I exposed to him prenatally and then in the first nine months of his life. 'Cause that's the only way I could explain it.
We're gonna return it your past. We gotta go to Dylan. You mentioned Dylan. I guess it's in part one of the origin stories of uh you putting out videos into the world is the early videos you did with Dylan. A set of videos on his perfect pitch and for people who don't know. And maybe you can speak to what perfect pitch means.
ability to identify any note without a reference tone. So um you can play it doesn't matter how quickly they are that they can per a person with perfect pitch can hear a note and immediately identify it. Or a collection of notes.
And taking a tangent upon a tangent you also have a course on ear training.
Yes, but my course is for relative pitch not, to be confused with perfect pitch.
Is it fair to say that relative pitch as far as the thing you would learn is more useful for musicians?
Yes.
Can you explain the difference between the two?
relative pitch is basically learning how to identify pitches relative to a a stated tonic or something that you've heard or just relative to each other. If you hear a note and then you hear another note after it you can recognize let's say it's a minor third interval. So if you're on the note A_ the next note would be C_. So once you're given a reference note you can use relative pitch to d to identify the relative nature from one pitch to another.
And intervals make up scales and intervals make up cores and so that if you develop it to any degree uh r relative pitch you can understand you can hear the music better. So what what does it take uh since we're taking a tangent on a tangent, what's uh what does it take to train your ear? What's uh a T_L_D_R_ on the course before people go out and sign up?
It's just practice basically. You start with intervals, typically with small intervals like minor second, major second. So minor second would be half step, major second would be whole step.
Are you listening to the tone one after the other or two of them together?
Both. So played separately it's called melodic intervals right, like a melody. And harmonic intervals are played like a harmony together. So you have to be able to identify them both both ways.
With an early journey like we'll give people a preview of what they should like what does that look like? What does what does practice look like?
Well my course it will play you an interval and then you identify it by clicking on whether it's you know a major third or minor third or major six or minor six or perfect fifth or tritone whatever, it is and and it will teach you gradually over time how to recognize all the intervals.
So you you listen to a melodic interval or a harmonic interval ho how quickly does the ear in the various age groups that we humans are in, how quickly does the ear learn the different intervals? Is it uh a week, two weeks, a month, two months, five years?
I think you'd do it pretty quickly. Within you know if you practice within a couple months you can you can really make um a lot of progress on it if you practice daily.
What benefit does it have to uh to you as a musician in general?
Well it's great if you wanna hear a chord progression if you're trying to figure out a song and you just say oh that's going from the six minor chord to the four major to the five major to one major and you can just identify it immediately and then you figure out what the first chord is then you know what the rest of the chords are 'cause they're in relation to whatever that first chord is. And for learning solos for example or learning melodies, being able to sound something out.
Now do you recommend people couple that with m uh music theory uh in ter in terms of education, the uh the education journey?
They have to be taught together because these terms are really music theory, right? I thi those intervals, major second, minor second, major third, minor third, perfect fourth. So as you're doing that and then uh you once you learn the intervals, the twelve intervals and an octave, then you and you learn 'em both melodically and harmonically, so played together and separate. Then you learn chords. And so then you learn to identify major minor, diminished, augmented, suspended
chords, things like that. Well, you're basically learning music theory at the same time with that 'cause w learning music theory is just the name of things in music.
So there's the sound of things. There's the name of things. And then there's the haptic like playing the thing probably. So playing chords, playing scales, you have I believe a course on scales and on chords. Okay, since we're doing the tangent, let's go. How do you recommend people there's a bunch of people listening to this that are curious about uh how they can start in playing guitar, maybe even playing piano on me, maybe playing other instruments, although guitar of course is the greatest in
Absolutely. What are the early steps of that journey What? what do you recommend people do in general?
Well if you're a beginner uh getting a good beginner guitar course and learning first of all the open chords in first position uh lot of songs can be played that way, a lot of old songs can be played that way, maybe not new modern songs necessarily.
So learning a few chords and with an eye towards maybe playing a song.
Yeah, with an eye towards you learn you learn the chord shapes and you learn how to strum basic patterns to begin with. I think the first thing for learning guitar is actually how to position your fingers so that you c you don't mute strings that you don't want to mute. That's the hardest thing for people to do basically is to get their fingers arched to where they if you're playing a C_ major chord, your index finger's on the first fret of the B_ string and you have to have that open E_ string ringing there and it's hard for people to make
those micro micro adjustments. You take it for granted like you've been playing guitar for, I don't know, how many years forever, right? And you don't even think about stuff like that when you're playing a guitar solo. Every little thing that you do if you're playing your comfortably numb guitar solo, you have to out of mid-air strike the string that your finger's on to play the note, and these are all fine adjustments that you're doing.
Mm-hmm.
You're right. It's uh the haptic the physical aspect of it is really tricky. Comfortingly numb is a good example. Well if you do lead, you have to get a super clean sound. Now that's both when you're playing fast, you you want it to be super precise, but when you play slow, when you have one note and you're holding it and you're bending it, it better be really clean. And for that it's I guess you have to really place the finger in the right place, plus there's the well there's the
So it doesn't hurt. And then the positioning of the string on the curvature of of the finger, where does it fall Like? how much do you bend the finger?
Yeah 'cause you're lifting it with part of a flesh and of course you have to decide depends how low C_D_ you are. Do you wanna be like the perfect the proper musician or do you wanna do a Hendrix uh so the thumb over the top way over the top yes, and so like you if you have a fretboard here I think the more like classical guitarists the very proper perfect a perpendicular alignment of the the fingertips of the fretboard
versus like Hendrix's like fuck it you nerds I'm gonna I'm gonna do it with the messiness is part of the magic of course like B_B_ King is also kind of messy looking in terms of his positioning of the fingers but his tone is incredibly clean. So like that teaches you that maybe any position can converge towards a super clean tone you just have to figure it out. I think a lot of it has to do
with how they wear their guitars. If you're wearing your guitar low, if you're Hendrix and you're wearing your guitar if you're wearing it lower lower then you so you can't get your fingers on top of it like that and the thumb acts as as a way to mute the lower strings from ringing if you're playing through a loud amplifier. So there's so many other micro-adjustments when you're playing leads 'cause you have to kind of mute the other strings that are so they don't ring out if you're
like playing the first note and comfortably numb at the solo at the end and you're at the ninth fret of the G_ string and you bend that, if you bend that G_ string and you accidentally hit the B_ string under it, you don't want that ringing. So you have to kind of angle your fin index finger so it to mute to mute that. So all these micro-adjustments that you don't even think about, I mean you're not thinking about that Lex when you're playing it, you've done it so many times that these things are just part of your of your brain. That's why this
such a great brain developer for kids to learn instruments.
Yeah of course you have to solve that puzzle. Must be really frustrating in the beginning. Like holding a cord.
Yes. Like all of 'em.
It hurts too, right? You use your acoustic guitar.
I don't wanna discourage anyone, you know. It's it's actually pretty easy to learn, basic stuff.
Right, but the the the pain is temporary I guess is the point of driving. Uh so so what else? So the physical component, play a few chords, where does the journey continue if you're learning guitar?
Well, then it's like if you play electric guitar, then you get into single note playing and stuff like that. That's where it gets to me where it gets really fun. You know, you have single note playing that w with riffs if you think of back in black, right, that has a r a riff embedded in the m in the actual melody. Or many songs that have riffs the, Hendrix stuff that has chordal riffs and you're moving up the neck and and uh involving all the fingers and things like that. So there's
really depends on what you wanna what styles you wanna play.
So you're thinking about song learning. So different components of song learning. So riffs in songs, lead in songs.
And then you have finger picking. If you have Stairway to Heaven, songs like that, how about wanting to learn that? That involves finger picking because the you have to isolate certain notes of the chord and play two at together, you know, and multiple times.
There's a few crossroads you're gonna get to select things. Uh so I guess you're speaking to the fact there's the r if you're righty there's a right hand, you can use your fingers or you can use a pick.
Correct.
And it's a choice you make.
And sometimes you use both. 'Cause in Stairway to Heaven you're using the fingers at the beginning. Or fingers and pick. Hybrid they call it hybrid picking. And then later on you're using the pick to flat pick the picking patterns.
On the music theory front, do you recommend people learn scales and chords and like the theory of it?
Uh pr later on I would say I wouldn't say necessarily right right off the bat. I think I think learning songs is the p is the first thing that you should do 'cause that you wanna keep people motivated.
So you get them to like fall in love with music and playing.
Yes.
Alright. And that takes a f couple months, three months?
Depends on how motivated they are.
So you recommend practicing what, every day?
Every day. My son Dylan, when he l started learning the guitar a couple years ago, I said it's better to practice ten minutes a day seven, days a week than to practice one day w for an hour, which is roughly the same amount of time.
Yeah. But it usually turns into something longer. But o otherwise like if you're busy life, you know, taking a day off, that day turns into a week and then a week turns into a month and all of a sudden you haven't touched the instrument for months.
Which is why I'd leave my guitar on a stand all the time so that if I walk by it I'm like uh okay, I'll just pick it up for a second and then that second turns into ten minutes and an hour, two hours.
Alright, we gotta talk about this Dylan video. So this might be one of the earliest that's the first one. That's the first video on the channel.
It was it was bu actually before the channel 'cause this actually blew up on Facebook and then I put it on YouTube after.
Uh so if it's okay.
Yeah.
Okay Dylan, we're gonna do the hardest ear training test of all time. Are you ready?
Right.
Oh.
that's I made this for my friend Shane's wife who wanted to see 'cause Shane I was a g uh uh friend that I was producing and he was there and Dylan had come down the day in the day and I said oh check this out and I played this stuff. He's like that's amazing can you make a video so I can show my wife? And I was on the way to a school board meeting 'cause I was on the school board at Dylan's school and I said hey Dylan come downstairs I wanna make this video take one minute just need to do this thing for my friend Shane.
And he's like I don't want to. And I said come on so take one minute I don't want to so I said to my wife I'm like need would you tell Dylan to come downstairs I wanna do this video take one minute. She's like it Dylan go downstairs and he had m he has a mouthful of candy there 'cause he was eating candy so if you look at him he's he's he's literally has a mouthful of candy while he's doing this.
And we should say on Facebook uh it weren't quite viral.
Yeah like at I don't know eighty million views something like it had like two hundred and fifty thousand comments something like that. Insane.
How old is Dylan here?
He's eight.
Eight years old. Can you actually give some more back story about like how you discover that Dylan has perfect pitch?
So when Dylan was about two, he I was doing a FaceTime with my brother John and and I was I was like check this out John, and I played the stone in love, Neil Shone's solo from Journey and and I was like check this out and Dylan would sing along and and my son my brother John was like wow Dylan can sing all the notes and I was like yeah and then I played Black Dog Zeppelin and Dylan would sing that and I was like Dylan's got a good ear and then John and I were like well we have good ears too so this is maybe we could have done that
we were that age. So a couple more years goes by Well. he was about three and a half. And I'm in the car, I was like Dylan, sing the Star Wars theme, and he sings it, and I'm like that's in the right key. And I checked, I'd play it on my phone, and I was like oh my gosh. Then I asked him play sing the Superman theme 'cause we'd been listening to John Williams' soundtracks the week before. And he sings that, and that was in the right key. And I asked him another song. So I turned the car around, I go back to the studio, I go to the piano, I hit the note B_
And Dylan says Star Wars. Star Wars starts on a big B_ flat major chord, but it's the note B_ flat is the main one that you hear. And then I played the note G_ and he goes Superman, and that's the first note in the trumpet part of the of the Superman theme. And then I realised that he had for perfect pitch, and then in five minutes I taught him the name of the twelve notes, which he already knew, but he just didn't know the names.
Oh, so you just associate the the names to the thing he know What. do you think is this in his mind 'cause it's not just individual notes, he can like hear everything. What is that?
fluency if you think of it like that. So let's let's listen to some of this. Turn around. Here we go. As fast as you can. We're gonna start with single notes, then we're gonna do some intervals then chords. Okay, here we go.
Hey, this is your B_ flat, C_, U_, A_ one.
Okay, good. Two notes at once. Here we go. Great, how about this? Great, what about this?
E_ flat, A_ flat. C_, B_ flat.
The th the part of this when I play these qu next chords are that's really I think why the video went so viral, the next part of this where I play these super complex poly chords.
Okay, I'm gonna do some poly chords for you. These are really gonna be hard. You ready? What's this?
See how it's opening that opening thing.
Okay, sing a B_ flat.
Mm.
Very good. What's this chord?
Mm. Mm-hmm. Uh
A_ B_ flat, oh A_ B_ F_ A_ G_ A_, maybe.
Great, sing an F_ sharp.
Excellent. What's this chord?
A_ nine over F_ B_ F_ major.
Great. What's this chord?
D_ had nine over F_ major.
D_ had nine over F_ major. So I had to look at my hand to make sure that that's what it was 'cause they're all in inversions. So I think the reason that this went so viral is that the more that someone knew about music, the more that they shared the video. Because these poly chords so the people that were the best musicians were li were would looked at it and was like oh my god, you know C_ augmented over D_ flat augmented. Um.
And the the second chord was A_ flat major over A_ major, but they're both in inversion, right. So it was like A_ A_ first inversion A_ flat major chord, first inversion A_ major chord. And then uh A_ minor over D_ flat major and then E_ add nine over F_ major. And for an eight Euro I mean for anyone, plus they're all close voiced, they're all just right next to each other. It's not like, you know, where you can hear them clear. It's all in the mid-range of the piano. So you have to really listen and and you have to di he
to dissect each one, like what are the notes being played there and w and what is like what's the theory 'cause he's actually using music theory to dissect them.
It must be in his brain, those components of the chords all sound different, like very clearly different. It's truly incredible, the human mind is incredible, and so you're you're saying like some part of that is the things you hear in the first few months of life.
I did a thing where I I played what I call high information music. High information music would be Bach, well-tempered clavier, fugues yeah, any anything Bach. And I would play the well-tempered clavier and I would play I have a uh friend who Turkish pianist who's one of the greatest improvisers I've ever heard, it's named Eiden Essen. And I would play Eiden's improvisations for Dylan. It had very sophisticated harmony and linear things in it.
and Keith Jarrett and um ma mainly jazz classical and modern classical music. And then then we would play listen to rock music once he was born. I'm talking on my wife's stomach before Dylan was born starting at fifteen weeks for thirty minutes a night. And then when Dylan was born I would sit with him for an hour every morning and listen to the music and I would look at him in order for this uh for them to hear these phonemes
and develop this language or get the the language a s acquisition has to involve the social brain. So when kids look at you, you're when a w a baby is looking at you, they're looking at your mouth and they're getting social cues from from that. And this is also h another component of saying uh this is where this word stops or starts and stops. These are how this the phonemes are separated from one another. These are how they're connected. So I believe
all kids are born with perfect pitch, and then around nine months they begin to lose it. If you don't engage their social brain making, these pitches know I never played pitches for Dylan and said this is a C_, this is a B_ flat, this is a G_, I just played complex high information music for him and ing and played with him.
And that applies maybe even more generally to high information language. And it starts before they're born. I think I I I saw some some of the these incredible scientists that work on the neuroscience and neurobiology psychology of language in early life. I think a big part is y in the mother's stomach you're listening to the mother speak. So like that's that's how on the
side you're, picking up the language already. And you're picking up the music musical language, so native music fluency you, could call it.
Uh what is bebop jazz and and uh bea people like Joe Pass and in your own life, your dad was somehow listening to that kind of incredibly complex and sophisticated music.
But wasn't a musician, which was very weird. I s we never my I have six siblings and we could never figure out why dad liked really sophisticated jazz.
We used to take it for granted at that time.
Yeah, just take it for granted. And my dad passed away in two thousand and four and we never really talked about that, but he and I used to listen to music together all the time. He'd put we'd put on a record, I'd sit on one side of the room, he'd sit on the other, and not say a word, listen through the whole side A_, I'd go flip it over, listen to side B_, never say a word, and then get up and go do stuff. And we did that all the time.
And so the first time you impressed your dad was with the Joe Pass song, right? And by the way, we'll have to go to this song 'cause uh people must have forgot 'cause uh re people just think you're uh um like a good communicator or something. They they don't realise how good you are at guitar, how good you are at actually a lot of instruments, but guitar especially and there's this video, the greatest guitar solo period.
Uh can you give me some context for this particular intricate complicated solo? Who's Joe Pass?
Joe Pass was a guitarist. He lived from nineteen twenty nine to nineteen ninety four. And he was one of the greatest bebop players and solo guitar player. So he made a record that this is off of called Virtuoso in nineteen seventy three that my dad gave me for Christmas when I was in tenth grade. And he said, and this is not like my dad. My dad worked for the railroad. He was very you know, few words spoken. Born in nineteen nineteen. He said if you ever learned to play guitar
like this, you've accomplished something with your life. And I was like what? So this le record state was unopened until about March after Christmas, and one day I was like okay, I'll open it up and I put it on, I start listening to it. And uh I was like whoa, this is kinda cool. And so I said, I think I can figure out some of this stuff. So I figured out this thing.
Listen to a little bit here.
If you go back to that brother brother brother Gino Vanelli thing with Carlos Rios playing, that stuff is incredibly hard. This I'm starting I don't know any of these chords. So I start out I don't even know what that chord is, but I figured it out I I just and it's weird. I mean look at that weird bar.
So you were just finding um like playing around putting your fingers under various positions.
Right, trying every combination of fingers. I'd never played that chord, it's a weird looking chord. And but I kept I moved my fingers around till I heard towards sound like oh, that's it, definitely. And I was looked at my hand and was like what is that? I had no idea what it was.
No.
No, I did not. No, I didn't know anything about intervals. I didn't know anything about music theory anything. This is all just you just like playing around with different shapes. That's right. I mean look at that weird bar there. But then you get into these things.
So that stuff there, I could figure out
And then this.
That stuff I could figure out And. then these things here
Those are just inversions of an
But I didn't know that.
Mm-hmm.
I had heard Joe play that on the record. This the last song out there. I listened to a bunch of times and I started to play it. So you just replay over and over and over and over, and you're like trying to replicate it.
Yes, and I'm memorizing every different chord shape, all chord shapes that I had never played before.
Would you recommend people do something like that on a c really complicated song?
Yeah, but there's so many YouTube videos that you can go and just learn it without having to
Yes, yeah, I would recommend.
I feel like the struggle the struggle is where it's at.
This is true for education in general. People like there's all these educators that try to make learning easier.
And more fun and all that kind of stuff. Great, wonderful. But part of the thing is the struggle.
Absolutely.
But yeah, let's uh
So you're hearing there's
you're nuts.
I heard licks like that all over this. So I knew that that was
And then
these licks here
He plays a lot of ideas like that. That's basically a C_ nine chord in the top notes of it.
So all these are just in versions of of the same chord. So if I could play that, then it's just figuring out the single notes, okay. So
Okay, so if you just take this first part here, when he goes
So this this intro part you make it sound so simple when you break it down. And m and by the way, Joe Paz incredible guitar player. Like this is obvious.
And he improvised all this. But you know, the first
was the individual note. Look at that.
Oh, that's hard.
Maybe it's playing like that. That sounds more more realistic.
The amount of uh different genres that you're able to replicate is incredible.
This is just taking the needle, moving it there, then going back a little Oh there, and then by the end the record was so scratched. It was uh um but it was worth it. When I played it for my dad, he couldn't believe I mean he didn't say that's amazing. He was just like, mm pretty good.
So what was the role of bebop jazz in the history of music? It seems like it was influential in your life. Uh another guy you had an incredible interview with uh Flee. People should go listen to that one. It's a great conversation. One of the things that surprised me is just how many musical genres influence Flee. And the guy showed up in a Miles Davis T-shirt. And b and b mm-hmm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Can you explain to me why would many of the folks you've interviewed uh and in general out there in the r in the world of jazz all rose lead to Miles Davis? Why he's such an influential figure?
because he was the greatest innovator in the history of jazz. He was at the forefront of all these different styles of jazz. I mean he started as a bebop player and then he you you had records like the birth birth of cool and modal jazz and um hard bop and records like bitches brew where he started to d b I guess you would call fusion. You start to get these records You. had two main groups of Miles Davis. You had the Miles Davis fifties
quintet and the Miles Davis sixties quintet. Now Miles made records with many people, but the fifties quintet had John Coltrane in it, had I mean it had different piano players, could be Winton, Kelly, but Paul Chambers in the bass, Philly, Joe Jones in the drums. Um and that particular group was uh made just incredibly important records. And then he had his s s sixties group which was uh Herbie Hancock in the piano, Ron Carter in the bass, Tony Williams in the
drums and Wayne Shorter on the saxophone. And they made all these incredibly important records.
I forget who said it uh in uh interview with you but they talked about like uh Miles Davis um his music feeling like I think uh I think toes hanging over the cliff or something like this meaning like there's always a risk there's a danger that you're willing to m make to fuck it all up live and that feeling is what creates the f the aliveness of the music Like. can you speak to that?
just the the creating in the music the feeling like you're on the edge like you're challenging the possibilities of what can happen and uh it all can go to shit and because of that it feels alive.
Well, when I interviewed Ron Carter that played in in uh Miles's s sixties quintet, I asked Ron 'cause Ron did s records, he played bass on th two th twenty two hundred recorded famous records. And I said did you guys ever rehearse with Miles? No. Never. I said so you what what we do he goes we'd just show up at the studio and he'd have the charts put 'em on the stand and and we would he'd just roll. And I said would you listen to it after
And I said well what about your what about the the live records that you did at when you'd record at clubs and things like that He? goes we never knew that we were recording. He goes maybe I'd see it uh a microphone, a different kind of microphone in my bass amp. He goes then months later the a record would come out and I'd see it and I was on it and I would take it down to the union and say I played on this record so you c get paid for it. But he said we didn't even know we were recording. So Miles was always about you know don't
think about it, just just play.
That's crazy. That was on purpose. That was not on purpose, not to not to do the rehearsals, not n not none of that.
Yeah, he wanted people to just feel it, play it Thought. is the enemy of flow, as Vinny Calleuda told me.
Thought is the enemy of flow. How do you make sense that Flee, the basis for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, is influenced by bebop jazz.
So his stepfather was a jazz bass player and his uh when his parents got divorced his he was born in Australia and then they moved to to New York. Then his parents got divorced and his mom married his stepfather who was a jazz jazz musicians. And they then they used to have jam sessions at their place. And Flea loved it. It was kind of like my upgrant bringing with my dad playing jazz all the
time. And one d once it gets inside you, it's just there. And uh and so he is heavily influenced by jazz musicians.
Yeah, his impression was just hilarious. I mean he's a character, his whole physical way of being is a character. And his impression of just upright bass is just fun to watch, his whole
His intensity, when he picked up his bass during the interview, it he's an intense guy and f funny and um you know really um emotional and um and he picks up his bass and there's a fierceness that you immediately feel. And he starts he talks about how he pr practices and then when he starts doing slapping stuff, he gets he's so into it and and I'm just sitting there going whoa. Wow.
routine with you. And one of the things is he's like I have to practice the slapping. No, there's differences in the structure of the different bands. But usually like the the bassist has a v vibe to them. I dunno if we can put words to exactly what that is. It's a kind of energy that drives the band.
one of the only instruments that when you play a bad note everybody notices. I started on the bass as a kid. Yeah. Yeah, but my first instrument was the cello in third grade and then I switched to the bass in sixth grade and my I majored my undergrad degree was in classical bass. So I I always think of myself as a bass player first, and I always think the bass is the most important instrument
strong words because as much as I love to play the guitar and I love to play the guitar more than anything I think, but the bass really defines what the quality of the chord is 'cause you can put the root in there, you can put the third of the chord in the bass, you can put the fifth in there, you can play a lot of notes and whatever you play in the bass kind of defines what kind of chord it is. So the bass player has a lot of power.
I have to go back to our the beginning of our conversation. What what do you think are some of the great solos of all time? Can we can we put a few in the consideration? You have a great list on uh top twenty rock guitar solos of all time.
Yes, I put comfortably numb as my favourite, as my top one. On that day. Right. Now, the day later I would have said it's the second solo. But I did the first solo because because nobody talks about that solo. And that solo is equally great. And when David Gilmour when I played it for him and we were talked about it in my interview with him, it was just to watch his face when he listened to it was
incredible. I mean I'm thinking to myself, it's like I'm sitting with David Gilmour and he's listening to comfortably numb and he's hearing it, he's played it a million times live. But how many times has he gone back and listened to it on the record? Probably not for a long time. And then he's hearing it and he's like ooh.
Miles never looked back. He never wanted to hear the old stuff. He always moved on.
There was this funny moment um where you where you made a video w why David Gilmour will never be on the channel. And then you ended up of course interviewing him twice. He's one of the greatest guitar players of all time. What do you think is at the core of his genius?
He has just an incredible melodic sense. He knows how phrases should be put together. There's a flow to his ideas that I think is just incredible. It's the same with Hendrix. This flow how one idea leads to the next. How there's space between them. It's just like speaking.
That's what I read about uh Miles Davis is he was very good at understanding tempo and the value of silence. Uh and I think I think David Gilmour doesn't always play fast. But he does a lot with less. And uh some of that is also on the more technical side probably, the tone of the I mean he's one of the most uniquely recognisable tones in all of music.
What do you understand about what it takes to shape the tone that is David Gilmour?
has a very sophisticated set-up for his tone. And and that was one of the things when I went to his studio and I said to him so David is there anything I'm not supposed to see here I? mean he never sits down and shows people his gear and he laughed about it. But there I am sitting there right next to all these pedals that and I and I asked his tech fellow I said did these are the same ones he used on the records? He's like yeah it's it's tech has been with them for like fifty years. And I mean the exact ones?
Yes. It's just hard to it's hard to imagine that those things still of course though they he's just kept it. Yeah, this is his his uh Binson echo that he played through and this is this you know th these are all the same effects pedals and the wait is this the same high-watt amp Yeah? is this the same th yes. Yeah, you get some new stuff but uh but they keep all their own gear and that's uh I mean he's did so he does sell his guitars for charity, but like he has a black
that is a it's a signature version. It's like it is that copy of his old one. So to him it's it sounds exactly the same, plays the same.
Well of course they converge towards that kind of hardware, but there's so many tiny details over the years. You see the final result of it, but there's a there's a journey there of of exploring. And of course he's not I guess he's not doing any soft like no emulation no, emm
do emulation actually. He does he has this thing this is I asked him in the first interview about this. There's a little rack thing that I had heard that he used, but I asked him for sure. It's called the Zoom ninety thirty. I put out a short where he talks about it. I said so that that Zoom ninety thi is that a real thing 'cause I've read about it. He's like yeah. And he talks about how when he's sitting there recording on his own and he's he runs Pro Tools himself and and so he'll be sitting there, there's no one there
help 'em and he's like I'll just plug into this thing and then I'll play a solo with this model or it's like a kind of nineties modelling early modelling thing and he'll play a solo and then after a while you hear the solo and it's like well I'm not gonna replay that, that sounds great, you get used to the sound of it and that's what it is. So people always talk to him oh well he couldn't have used that, he's recording through an amp and 'cause it sounds great and uh and then you say yeah yeah so that's what I use and then I have I have the video of it.
right there and it says it's presets, D_G_ one and D_G_ two and you know whatever.
What's your process for preparing for interviews like that You've? done a few legendary people.
I never prepare for interviews.
Because I ask people things that I'm interested in knowing.
So just letting your curiosity just pull it pull you forward.
Mm-hmm.
If they don't remember the exact specifics they that r that brings it to life to them again and they can they can kind of piece together some aspects about it and they can really talk he can talk about the phrasing and the you know the kind of melodic direction of things like that.
No.
You just know the song and you just are looking to jog their memory and maybe your own curiosity of like how did you do this or how did what did this sound or that you make it look easy but you have to have a depth of knowledge. You're saying you don't prepare.
I have an incredibly good memory. That's that's what it is. It's that I can remember when records came out, who produced them, where they recorded them, who was the engineer, what the s what songs are on it. And not only that but the with people I'm interviewing know that I can play all the parts of all the instruments 'cause I've done breakdowns of their songs which is why I get the interviews with them in the first place really.
But the actual like the skill of the interview, the thing you're not saying, the preparation, is the you w young listening to bebop. It's the it's the background now, it's the soul carrying with you being able to radiate the love of the soul of music.
Mm-hmm.
brother John came along, and he is a massive David Gilmour fan. That's his biggest influence as a guitar player. And so he said you're interviewing David Gilmour? Oh, I'm on I'm coming. And I was like alright, come on, come on down. So so my brother John's standing about five feet away, and John is a sales guy, but he great guitar player. I said John's like I was like this is John this is David, this is my brother John. David great to meet you buddy. And you know John's like it's so he's a sales guy. And and uh so during the interview I I saw
was like hey John, what was I gonna ask David oh, ask me about the Gilmore effect. Oh yeah, that's right and, and the Gilmore effect is my thing that I say in the v comments session when people say anytime anybody plays anything technical, oh yeah, that's great but, I much prefer David Gilmore. And uh so I always called it the Gilmore effect. Anytime I have like Invey, Malmsteen, anybody that played that has chops that I interview, that the the negative comments are always well, I prefer David Gilmore.
Yeah. And I s I said that I s I told David that he's like well, they maybe they should keep their uh opinions to themselves Yeah. a lot of these folks have really wonderful personalities with a with a trusted person to be able to reveal that personality. So comfortably know 'em at the top on that day. What else is up there?
Stare we to heaven? Hey Joe.
Well in that list, your top Hendrix soloist, hey Joe.
it's the first guitar solo I ever learned. So I had to put it on there. So I don't I don't necessarily do these by I do those in in kind of how th how important they are to me and and my development. So there there is always a biographical component to these lists. Number three was Kid Charlemagne, a Steely dance solo, Larry Carlton. Amazing solo, extremely difficult to figure out.
Mm-hmm.
probably there's two solos on the list that are just about are very that one I can play, uh but there's a few solos that are very hard to play. Stone in Love by Journey by Neil Sean is very hard to play, some licks. Um the um there's a sol there's a solo by guitarist Carlos Rios that people don't know. It's a brother to brother Gino Vanelli song, but it's v it's very hard to play and figure out and um that
people don't know the solo. So I put it on my list 'cause I knew that a lot of people are gonna watch it and they're gonna know what the solo is.
For me the sentimental one, my my first solo is Mister Crowley, Randy Rhodes. I like the musicality Mister Crowley, that there is a melodic component to it. You're playing really fast, but there's uh there's a melody to it. And also there's like a legendary nature to the r the the the brief time we had to we had Randy Rhodes. It's it's probably one of the greatest guitarists ever.
56 to 82 I think.
Terrible. Um he was um um absolute brilliant guitarist, had his own style.
We should say he's the guitarist for Ozzy Osmore in the band.
Yeah. And uh that Mister Crowley solo is a is a great solo great, solo. And um he's incredibly influential as a guitar player um to for metal guitar players and um I love Randy Rhodes.
Uh another guy. So one of my favourites is uh Mark Knopfler.
Yes. And I did have Mark Knopfler on my list. So on the swing. Now I had it high in the list and I'll tell you why. I would have had it had it lower 'cause it's one of the early ones 'cause I wanted people to be like okay, oh this is a serious list. So Rick's gonna talk about serious stuff. So um and Rick's gonna play along with all these things.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
So I wanted to kind of state that at the beginning of the video. I mean I made the video in one day to do twenty solos. I think I played nineteen of 'em, but the Hart solo that I had on there, Nancy Wilson I uh I played the video of. And I tried to get a couple of my friends to play the um Ice Cream Man Van Halen solo. So I called Dweasel Zappa, and I was like Dweasel can, you play the Ice Cream Man solo? I'm making a video about it. He's like oh I'd have to practice that. And I called my friend Phil X who's, m amazing guitar player, and
And he's like, no, I'd have to practice that. It's like, come on man, can't let me play Ice Cream Man. The opening lick of Ice Cream Man that he plays is very hard to play 'cause it's an incredibly long stretch and it hurt my fingers to do and Eddie would turn his guitar up like this to pl to play and plus it's a tricky it just it's a tricky rhythm and and it's such a big stretch. It's like, man, I can't that hurts my hand.
I just love that that's the Van Halen solo you have.
The top twenty. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's so many Van Halen, my God, it could be there I can pick
twenty five different Van Halen solos.
But to me I mean there really is nobody like Mark Knopfler. I mean there's there's unique guitarist. There's something about his tone. Speaking of Gilmour, there's just the tone, the care, the timing of the notes, his improvisation like the live performances of Salt 'n The Swing that's been actually goin like somewhat viral around uh a rec the recently his his b uh pretty old live
of um Salton's The Swing. For me Brothers, in Arms, these kind of soulful mournful type of solos he does really really well. Also the interesting instrumentation of uh Romeo and Juliet. Just so so many is i i truly one of the greats.
to Money for Nothing is is one of the greatest almost impossible to re-create that because of the sound is so unique and his it's just improvised. It's so cool.
Yeah. There's certain songs like um Europa by Santana. Santana can have that tone too, that Mark Knopfler makes me really just how clean it is. I think he beats B_B_ King in my book in terms of the cleanness of just pure beauty of a single note. Like a power of a single note. I don't know anybody who beats Mark Knopfler.
thing about being able to recognise somebody from a note, you know. When I hear Brian May, I can immediately recognise as Brian May. It's incredibly melodic the tone that he has, Gilmore, Hendrix, uh everyone that we're talking about, Van Halen, it's just they have that one note. It's oh I know who that is. And that's that's why we're talking about him.
That's a great I'm gonna make that video tomorrow. Lex, you s the day after tomorrow you'll see it. Can you say can you recognise these players by one note? Yeah. I think it's th I think we're being a little too aggressive with that. I think you need like two or three or four or five notes.
was gonna play uh songs in reverse, okay. See if you can recognise these songs in reverse. And I had my two assistants come in and say do you know what song that is? They're like oh that's Adele. Uh like what? And then they're like oh that's that's Nirvana. Instantly they could recognise like well that's not worth ma I said yeah it's so obvious. You hear the tone of the voice backwards, forwards, it doesn't matter. You know what it is.
So it's about the tone. How could you possibly know the from a single note? It's t uh I guess Van Halen you can.
One note of of B_B_ King's vibrato you could know.
I'm gonna uh what I'll do is I would separate the guitars. I'll u I I can actually separate the tracks and I'll just play one note.
You think you can from a the single vibrato you can know is B_B_ King?
Well we'll see.
Put it on record I'm. sceptical.
I'm gonna do I'll do twent twenty of them. Can you recognise these guitarists from a single note?
Could you recognize D_V_R_ Yvonne Abs? versus Eric Clapton? Yeah. Alright. You might be right. You might be right. Quick thirty second thank you to our sponsors. Check them out in the description. It really is the best way to support this podcast. Go to lexfreeman.com/sponsors. We've got uplift desk for my favourite office desks, better help for mental health, element for electrolytes, fin for customer
for S_A_I_ agents, Shopify for selling stuff online, and Proplexity for curiosity driven knowledge exploration Choose. wisely my friends. And now back to my conversation with Rick Beano.
What do you think is the best Eric Clapton song? One of the things we haven't mentioned so far is the importance of lyrics and maybe meaning of the song and what it represents. So in that sense, cheers in heaven.
Well the story behind that is is uh heartbreaking.
And then I personally really love the sound of Wonderful Tonight.
It's a great song. That's one of my favourite Clapton songs.
And I as I was like listening to it, just doing the whole personal journey introspection knowing that I'm gonna talk to Rick Beato, I was listening to just a bunch of songs and I l I learned as a bear thing that I didn't know the the the stories behind the music, but I I learned that Eric Clapton was married for ten for a decade to the same woman that George Harrison was married to and that this woman
was the muse, the inspiration for for like so many of the legendary songs on rock, including uh Wonderful Tonight, including Layla, and including George Harrison's something. Legendary song also. The same woman. Is she the greatest muse in rock history? This is great Uh. so in your interviews of musicians and
I think the thing you're ultimately fascinated by is their whole the process, the the the recording, the production, the songwriting, the different elements of the process. So uh are there examples of different things that stand out to you from the all the interviews you've done? And all uh by the way, all the b recording and production you've done yourself. So on the recording front, on the production front, on the songwriting process front, just things that uh
into memory.
when I've interviewed the guys that are the producers, like Rick Rubin, Daniel Anwar, Brendan O'Brien, Butch Vigg, the thing about producers, as opposed to people that are musicians, if you're in a musician, even if you're David Gilmour, you're you do a record then you tour and then you do another record, maybe years go by, but producers are working on multiple records. Y you know, sometimes at a time Rick Rubin could be working on multiple records and and
variety of things that they do, you can talk to I mean I can talk to Rick about the Chili Peppers and I can talk to him about Johnny Cash, I can talk to him about Tom Petty and all these records that I love and there's just so many interesting stories that I mean these interviews could go on for for days with with Rick and the variety of records that he worked on and um and there's so much knowledge to be gained
for me at least, and I think that that the craft of production and recording engineering is something that is not well documented. Um especially since there's no there's so few studios nowadays where there used to be a mentorship thing where you go and you work as an assistant engineer and you work your way up. I interviewed a guy named Ken Scott that uh worked with the Beatles. I interviewed him at Abbey Road Studios just two months ago and
started as a tape-op when he was sixteen. He started on the uh Hard Day's Night record with the Beatles. And he worked his way up and he said the first time he ever recorded an orchestra was he recorded I Am The Walrus, the orchestra part. He set up the mics and I asked him, I said so where was the band? Standing right behind me, the Beatles right behind him. The guy I'm interviewing at Abbey Road recorded I Am The Walrus there. I mean he recorded many Beatles songs. And uh
And he was eighteen years old and the b I mean I just can't I can't even fathom that. We they have a little cafe in the basement of Abbey Road and I said did the Beatles come in here? He goes oh yeah they come in here and get coffee and I remember when they got two microwaves that uh like the first microwave was in nineteen sixty five and they were amazed by them and uh it's hard to imagine that I'm talking to people that worked on these historic records. But you know they all start with a blank tape or an empty hard drive.
And then you've eventually filled them up with this music that you can't you can never imagine it not existing like Stairway to Heaven or whatever it is.
Yeah. It's funny like looking back even probably for them just to realise they've created that magic is hard to believe 'Cause. you look at a blank thing and the magic comes out and you don't even you don't even understand you don't even understand probably a lot of these artists don't understand where that came from. They're channeling some deeper thing.
This was if we talked about it on camera or not, but we talked about Bohemian Rhapsody. At the very end there was a thing where he was depressing his whammy bar a little bit and it sounds like the piano is out of tune I. never noticed it before he'd mentioned this to me and he said it always bothered him and the f there's always something about these songs that bothers people. Even these songs you f right there's always little things and they
they sit and they hear it and they're like oh man I wish I'd bent up a little higher on that or whatever.
I mean that that there's certain moments in songs
they're just unlike anything else and Bohemian Rhapsody when Freddie Mercury is sometimes wish I've never been born at all and then guitar comes in I mean there's just nothing like that. That was that I don't even know. I mean that that whole thing and you've done videos on it, it's incredibly complicated composition it's it's crazy that a popular song popular rock song could be this g operatic so complicated.
The other thing akin to that moment is uh Phil Collins with uh In the Air Tonight the, drum bridge. Yeah. Yeah. And what is that? I killed the I don't I don't understand how you can create that. What is that? Why is that so magical? Why is that so singular inside a particular song and in rock history period? Like these moments I don't kn musically I don't understand how you
create them 'cause it might be m bigger than musical, it might be cultural, all b bunch of different elements. And pl plus it's him filled with like I've seen live performance where he has like a headset and does does sh something he's like a telemarketer or something like this whole vibe and look to him. He's n doesn't look like a rock star. But he is.
a eardrum to it, everybody eardrums to it. And it is a hook and those are hard to create. Those are those moments are really hard to create and usually they're done by accident.
Yes, it's hard if you chase it, you're not gonna get it. Yeah. And your conversation was staying. He said something about um how modern music is simpler, uh more minimalistic and the bridge is gone, I think he said. And he he said he thought that the bridge is therapy. Yes, it's like a a chance for you to reflect I guess on the verse before the chorus goes on.
It changed my view of the bridge I suppose, the therapeutic nature of it, at least lyrically. Um you think he's onto something, the value of the bridge?
The br bridge is a place I think where you can kind of change the frame of reference of a song. Lennon used to he would have some kind of biting lyrics like um
we can work it out. So McCartney writes the you know, try to see it my way. Do I have to keep on going 'til I can't go on. And then but the bridge is very Lennon. Life is very short and there's no time for fussing and fighting my friend. I've always thought that it's a crime. So I'll ask you once again I. mean it's very you know very Lennon-esque. This is that was really a kind of uh uh c real collaboration between the two of those.
Yeah.
Beatles are the epitome of that. Such like each individual beatle is uh a great talent in their own right. How were the beatles able to create some of the greatest songs of all time, all before they turned thirty years old?
I have never been able to figure that out. But I have a theory that because P_A_ because P_A_ systems were so bad back then and the Beatles people screamed so loudly that the Beatles thought okay we don't we don't need we can't tour anymore 'cause we can't even hear ourselves. So we're just gonna be a studio band. And maybe becau because of we have all these great late Beatles records, they're from nineteen sixty six on, just
because they had bad P_A_ systems and they had no monitors, you know they're in Shea Stadium, people are screaming so loudly they can't hear themselves, they're like okay forget this we can't do or we'll just make studio records. So that's what they did and in that one year like from August six nineteen sixty five they put out help, then in December third they put out rubber sole of sixty five, then then August fifth they put out revolver. So
three hundred and sixty five days they put out three fourteen I think fourteen song records. So they wrote and recorded three incredibly important records. So they were in the studio, it's like working out. They're b practicing their craft every day, writing songs, trying to outdo the other ones, and so you had the the perfect thing of of four supremely talented musicians, song writers, singers, and then
the best producer you could possibly have, George Martin, and and it was just a perfect storm. I think that uh when I would talk to friends that would just play in local clubs and they'd play four hour sets five nights a week and they never lost their voices because they're always working those muscles. And same with the Beatles, they were always in the studio singing every single day doing takes and.
But you also have this theory that uh you know that the greatest productivity that musicians have is before they turn thirty. The br the greatest sort of creative genius that c can come out of the human mind musically is before the age of thirty.
I think is the same in mathematics as well. You have this fluid intelligence versus crystallized intelligence. Fluid intelligence up until you're about you know in your late twenties, thirty years old and then crystallized so you're using the crystallizes you're l using your life experience to to write things so you'll find that that composers Bach, Beethoven, Mozart wrote their most important works at the end of their lives Beethoven, the late string quartets, the ninth symphony, things like
So they have a whole lifetime of experience that lead up to this and there's not they're not improvising, but things for improvising, writing pop songs and that I think when your mind is really most active and your brain processing speed is at its pinnacle that this is my theory that people can uh come up with those kind of ideas. Same with improvising. I think that most jazz improvisers not all, but
do their best improvising before age thirty.
Creating something new. Truly novel. That that requires a youth.
Just a theory though, but it seems to apply. What do you think about uh the the twenty seven club? A bunch of the music grades died at twenty seven Hendrix, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Janice Joplin, Amy Winehouse. Kurt Cobain. Of course. Uh a big part of music history is linked to drug history. I mean L_S_D_, Coke, heroin, weed. Smoking.
Think about this a lot If. you go back and you watch videos, the Beatles, any of their movies, they're smoking all the time. The get back documentary, they're smoking constantly. Go watch any of the M_T_V_ unplugs, Nirvana. Kurt Cobain is smoking every second that he's not playing, he's smoking. Every singer smoked, every musician smoked. Nowadays I ask my son Dylan, Dylan does anybody smoke at his high school? He's like smoke, nobody smokes. He's he's think they was an absurd question.
And that was part of culture.
Yeah, it was for everybody. I mean that was that was a big transformation over the past twenty years that just everybody stopped smoking. But I don't think smoking has the kind of hard negative effect that we're talking about. I mean I almost would rather have them smoke than some of the other hard drugs. Maybe smoke it distracts them from the hard I mean heroin and coke. I mean those those things really and alcohol unfortunately can be easily abused, I think. It seems
like it's a m the the life of a musician,
this dopamine thing of getting on stage and bea being adored by tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, the high of that, and then the come down after, is really hard life for just even near biologically of like how you deal with that. You have to be able to control the roller coaster of your mind and of course drugs will be a part of that.
And you think everything is allowed and everything is possible. And then there's also culture depending on who you hang out with that certain kinds of categories of drugs are good for your creativity.
Mm-hmm.
And so naturally start to abuse those drugs. I don't know. I think uh I think th I think it's really interesting the role that drugs have played in the in the history of music. They have certainly been extremely destructive, but they have also certainly been productive uh muses inspirations for some of these folks Oh. absolutely Now. would we want to you
advocate people doing things like that to boost their creativity? Well I wouldn't, but just like smoking, which I think improved people's voices, uh I mean uh really the raspiness of it, this is the reason that the that the that so many of these uh virtually every famous singer, no matter what genre music, jazz, soul, rock, they all smoked.
King Cole, Miles Davis too? Miles sme everybody smoked. Miles didn't well, Miles w was a heroin addict too. I mean so many jazz musicians.
Well Miles had a sound to him. You you're right. I mean smoking must must play a gigantic role to that, adding some complexity to the voice. Yeah, some richness to the voice.
Lot of heavy smokers, those singers. Frank Sinatra, heavy smoker. McCartney was a heavy smoker. Lennon, all those guys smoked.
Yeah, it's hard to know a chicken or the egg, but I certainly wouldn't recommend doing drugs as a way to get better at music.
No no no. But you know, it does seem to go hand in hand. And some of it has to do with the period, with the time period, with the with the place. 'Cause sometimes it's part of the culture. The drug is like you're saying smoking. If you're smoking now, that's gonna be a very different experience than smoking ten years ago, twenty years ago, fifty years ago. It's a different different vibe. So sometimes the drug is a deep integrated part of the culture versus an
chemical substance. The sixties right there, I don't know they, were on everything in the sixties. I mean it has to account for something Lex, you know. Uh on the songwriting front you mentioned uh a story about Elton John recording. So he's one of the legendary songwriters. But yeah you've met 'em and you know something about the process of his um
that I was working with the band that I was producing and he was in I was in studio B_ he was in studio A_ and this band that I was working with they were called Jump Little Children and so he had his assistant come in and ask hey is this are you guys Jump Little Children yeah yeah and then all of a sudden I couldn't see out into the live room Elton walked into the thing and we were getting ready to track and I'm I'm pressing the button yeah where are where are you guys what's up I thought we're gonna start this and no one's responding I can hear talking it's like what's going on where are they then all of a sudden
come back in the studio and they were stunned. I said where were you guys? Elton John just walked into our session and he said he's a big fan he said to come over when we're done and and hang out in studio A_ so so we did and he was there with Bernie Toppin and they were working on a song and he'd we talked we there for for an hour and he was talking about recording two records a year and then they'd go on tour and they'd write and record the whole record in two weeks. So Bernie would give him lyrics Elton would go out and spend
fifteen minutes writing all the melody. He'd look at his lyrics and he was doing that that day. Bernie was there and they had a lyric sheet up on the piano and Elton would go on and they just re okay just record this and Elton would sit there and and play and come up with the song in fifteen minutes or so. There's a great version of I think Tiny Dancer where Elton is coming up with it on it's on YouTube and he's just coming up with the music right there and then the band okay here's how it goes and they record it right
Then you move back to the next slide. It's really incredible.
It's it's a very it happens very quickly. It sounds long, but it sort of it it sort of starts off
it. Seems just for the band.
That's my pretty eye. You're married.
Okay.
It's really amazing that you just
He's looking at it as just the lyrics.
Yeah, and it's one of the v he's one of the very few people that has the lyrics first and writes the music to it, which to me is far more difficult. Ninety nine percent of songwriters write the music first, and then they put the melody and lyrics to the finished backing track.
And maybe they write like lyrics, they write like uh nonsense words kind of thing, and then they figure out from there. Yeah, that's I mean I don't know what skill that is exactly, but that's incredible. I mean in that process he makes it his own.
Yes.
Okay, uh you had an amazing interview with uh Kirk Hammett. I'm a huge Metallica fan. Uh there is a lot of interesting stuff that came out of that from that conversation. Uh one is the distinction between heavy metal and hard rock, which is very interesting. Of course Metallica went through their own evolution. They had many periods. I mean they'd been around forty years over forty years, yeah. Crazy.
The down picking, which is interesting, which is creating that really distinct sound.
James and Kirk's the the the down the down picking. I used to be able to do that. I just can't do that anymore. It hurts my thumb to to do it. I think honestly I I thought a lot about it. It's like why does it why is it so painful? Why is it so hard? It's from swiping with your thumb on phones. And I think it affects that basal joint there. And I'm s it no I'm serious And. I think that that's actually right 'cause I'm thinking like why does that hurt so much to do that? All the down strokes and stuff. It's gotta be something that's like yeah it's from from
swiping to the phone.
The other thing that came through is um that he's a improviser at heart. And that I think clashes with this kind of rigid structure that metal is. So there's a real soulful melodic aspect to him. And he gave a lot of props to uh James Hadfield for just being a great composer, being a great musician and writer of riffs of rhythm.
The improvisation part of it you don't think of 'cause they have they 'cause you have the finished songs that you listen to. But those songs are born out of improvisations, of jams, of little fragments of ideas, and then they craft them into these masterpieces.
This is weird that I didn't know that Hendrix was using different gauges, strings.
Yeah, he was the one that talked about that, wasn't he? Yeah, that was really interesting. See, these are the things that I like to learn from uh from these interviews with these people. And they're like, what? I why have I never heard of that?
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Hmm.
But it was a perfect song.
Like one surprise me is uh Hans Zimmer said God only knows by the Peach Boys.
I'm gonna ask that to people, just to see what they now people are prepared if I ask that.
But it's like they're willing to go out on a limb and say it. Like if you ask me, I don't even know. I guess you'd just say it whatever, right. Like what would I even say, what's a perfect song? Yeah, I would go uh see I feel the pressure becau because the problem is the reality is it changes day by day like, minute by minute.
I
would probably I'm sorry, but I would have to go Mark Knothler. And I would probably go is it is it really cheesy to say the obvious thing is I would go Salton's a Swing. Even though like I'm tempted to say Europa, but then like
Salton's a Swing hits on so many levels 'cause it's got a great melody, great lyrics and then multiple great guitar solos. And it has such a unique sound to it. The other thing is that it sounds very different from other dire straits songs. I mean this is like early dire straits strat tone, and then you think of like Money for Nothin' as a Les Paul and it's a totally different kind of vibe than him playing on on Salton's a Swing. But that song's amazing.
it's about music, yes. So it's like there's a there's a meta aspect to it. But the then there's also like we're talking about this guitar stuff, but Leonard Cohen, Hallelujah, and Leonard Cohen in general, like these songwriters they go super simple on guitar. And they're it's just uh what's that called, singer-songwriter type. Uh I told you off my uh p one of my maybe the music guests, that's a
guests is Tom Waits. I've wanted to talk to Tom Waits for a very long time and I've gone through different periods of you've met me at a point in my life where I've given up on it on it a little bit and I was telling him okay. Yeah. Yeah. Um.
Waits won't be on your podcast. Exactly. This is this is my this is my moment. Come come here. Let's do it. I wanna see it.
such a a fan of like this apple-like artistry on the on the musical front which Tom Weiss has, but I'm a I'm a sucker for great lyrics. Lyrics to me is such a big part of great songs. And and he's another example, he has a song called uh Martha. It's about a love story that didn't work out and it's an older man calling the woman that he was in love with and basically reminiscing about like ti you know thinking, about
like what what would have happened if it worked out, that kind of thing.
And then, you know, I loved that song for a long time and, you know uh uh at some point I found out that he loved that when he was in his early twenties. And you realise similar with the Beatles, like the s these guys somehow were able to capture the human condition so masterfully. And there are kids. This I don't get it. I don't understand it.
speak for Tom Waits, but in the Beatles case they went to Hamburg, they spent time on their own, they played cover gigs that were eight hours long, and they li lived they lived life. It's not like not like kids today. Uh you're on a porch. Uh you also had uh an amazing interview with Billy Corgan, a special pumpkins. Uh he is definitively one of my favourite musicians.
Billy. You asked him an interesting question about how he creates uh this melancholy feeling that permeates a lot of his songs. And he jokingly said that uh the secret is all about the seventh and then and the ninth. Um so like musically chord-wise, what do you think about that? You think he's on to something?
He's talking a little music theory there. Seventh and ninth over the chord that he's playing. So if you're playing a C_ chord, he's singing a B_ would be the seventh, D_ would be the ninth. And he does use a lot of those notes. But almost all these people that were talking no, all these people that were talking about used these notes, and this is why they're songs. I and when I interviewed Sting, I called them surprise tones, and Sting's like y I like the way you use the word surprise.
notes that are outside the chord that are dissonant with the chords that they're playing. And and that creates emotion. Dissonance equals emotion. And that's w that's what I like. I want music to be to depress me.
Yeah, what is that? I don't know. They th th but melancholy and I think you articulated in interviews that it's not e actually that depressing. There's something about that melancholy feeling that is somehow the other side of the coin of f happiness. Is it kind of longing? Yes. Well there's a hopefulness to it, that aloneness that you feel. I mean that's actually like one of the intimate connections you have with music is when you're alone. There's I think there's a social way of listening to music when maybe a concert and so on.
But there's this there's nothing like you're alone in a car driving, listening to like whatever it is, Bruce Springsteen. Uh well I think Louis C.K. has a bit about that. It was a Bruce Springsteen, but he's sometimes has to pull over to the side of the road, just weep or something or something like this. It's it's just an there's some there's something about that. Sometimes a song just connects with you, and I don't know. It mel nothing like a melancholy song could do that. It's b you think about like
maybe things you regret or how life could have worked out. And sometimes it's not even about like it's it's not even real. It's just connects something to the in the soul, the the uneasiness that we all feel, maybe the loneliness we all feel that underpins so much of the human condition, and it just connects with that. I don't know what that is.
there's a Kurt Cobain lyric. It was on the in utero record from the song Francis Farmer. The chorus part is I miss the comfort of being sad. And I was like yes, I miss the comfort of being sad. I was like yeah, that's it right there.
In terms of love songs, I f somehow I find powerful that's kind of desperation. So like I I've always connected to Pearl Jam's Black.
Oh. Amazing.
uh that line is a a friend of mine was going through a break-up. So I was listening and he he's the one that introduced me to Pearl Jam during that that whole period uh when p Pearl Jam was huge uh with ten is is that line is uh s someday
Someday you you'll have a beautiful life. You know someday you'll be a star in somebody else's sky. Why why why can't it be can it be mine. Oh my God that
Yeah.
blows me away. That's an amazing line. The delivery is incredible on it too.
Eddie Vetter one of the great front-men of all time. And that whole period that whole moment in history uh of Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vetter that captured that was the nineties. That was one side of the nineties that just this singular moment in history. Um who who do you think are the great front-men in uh history of music?
Freddie Mercury Robert, Plant.
Freddie Mercury number one probably. Steven Tyler. Jim Morrison. Yeah. Roger Daltry. Um
Well we have to say I have to say we have to say James Hetfield. James Hetfield I. mean there's nothing I have I mean I have to talk to you about this. I have I mean this is the greatest I think the greatest concert of all time. This is uh their historic performance in Moscow in um September of ninety one. This is shortly before the Soviet Union collapsed. Plus we should mention A_C_D_C_ and Pantera were there too. And about one point
six million people were there. Now by the way, there's like some kind of reporting that there was a half a million people, five hundred thousand people, that's somewhere I've seen statements like that. That's a ridiculously inaccurate statement. So it's a free concert. So any official counts don't count. It's uh it's it's definitely over a million. It's it's very likely to be one point five, one point six million people. And this moment in history that I think they
It's like whenever great music the, metallicals firing on all cylinders at the very top of their game, and they meet this moment in history and this place in history, there was a b a defining part of the twentieth century collapsing, and you have these people who are um for a moment through music are able to escape the fear the, anger they feel the, all of it. There's also a political, social, cultural moment meeting the, musical moment.
And the the set list I was just I was I listened to this several times over the past few days, just taking myself back into that moment in time. Listen to this set list. Enter Sandman, creeping death, harvester of sorrow, fate to black, sad but true, master of puppets, seek and destroy, for whom the bell tolls, one, and whiplash. Look at that. That's that that just that's my kind of set That's. my kind of set right
there. I don't know if you could take off anything that could beat that.
I think that the guys in the band would say that too. That was I mean they were really at their at their peak. The black album had just come out then and that must have been so so exciting.
I mean Woodstock was big. There's there's certain moments in time when they really really meet the moment. Are you a fan of uh live live like big
I used to be, but at this point I can't uh you know I'd much rather see people play in small clubs and or go to the I'd like to listen to the studio go, to the studio even.
almost entirely agree with you. I just think that there's these historic moments. But you don't know which are g gonna be which. But you make it in the concert free. It's just all of it to get plus Pantera and A_C_D_C_. The other which actually is a legitimate thing you mentioned is uh as one of the greatest concerts of all time is Beethoven's uh world premiere of the ninth symphony.
saw this movie called The Mortal Beloved, this excellent movie with Gary Hohmann, which is a really is a masterful uh celebration of Beethoven in an interesting kind of way through the perspective of a love letter that he's written. But then I realised like this early is many many just couple decades ago now that, you know, he went deaf before he even started writing the ninth symphony, which is widely considered to be one of the greatest compositions of all time, the greatest symphonies of all time. He
what Deaf couldn't hear anything before he even started writing it. And so there's that famous story of him in that world premiere of having to be turned around because he can't hear people applauding, so he has to s uh be turned around to see that people are actually clapping. I mean there's just this whole tragic element plus the the meaning of the symphony uh that ends in this beautiful uh ode to joy. The symphony itself is a kind
um it starts with the chaos and conflict and ends with this celebration of peace and brotherly unity and a co I guess a call for that, a reaching for that for that peace. And it's a b there's a tragic element to it again connected to history which is it was post Napoleonic Wars and before the American Civil War so like you you're in this in this
this respite from from war, calling for peace, not knowing that uh truly horrific wars are coming. So you have the the American Civil War and you have the of course the two world wars coming. So this all of it together. And the fact that he's conducting death and he wrote this whole thing death, I was reading a lot about his process and he just edits and edits and edits and edits. So the fact that he had to edit in his head
is just insane.
I mean Beethoven was sick all the time too. I mean there a lot of people were sick all the time. It was very common. What would motivate you
to write
music, this beautiful music that you can never actually hear except for in your head, right? Like why the amount of time it takes to write to write a thirty five minute, forty minute piece, all the parts, you gotta hear all the orchestration in your head, you're editing, you're doing all these things. Where do you get the motivation when you can't hear the actual finished work wanting to b and people would say
he's hears hears in his head. But what kind of enjoyment is it You? wanna hear the orcas I mean it's really profound that he that uh that he was inspired to do this. There's a thing called the Helierstadt Testament that he wrote. It was a letter to his brothers in from eighteen O_ two. I think they found it in his desk after Beethoven died and he felt a sense of shame and humiliation because of his hearing loss and he said that he was afflicted with
this thing where him of all people that someone standing next to him could hear a flute that he could not hear or s a shepherd singing in the field that and he could not hear this and and w of all the people why him were hearing played such an important part. Another person that ha would ha had to have had perfect pitch 'cause you could never do this if you didn't have perfect pitch, which I think all these great composers for the most part Brahms
didn't from what I know, but all the rest of 'em for sure had perfect pitch. So they could hear these things in their head and that's how they composed. I mean you love sound and music. What do you think it was like gradually losing your your hearing for Beethoven? It must have been terrible. I mean I just
terrible. I mean I've heard things where he had to s would have a stick in his mouth and and put it on the sound board of the piano and you could feel the brib vibrations in his skull and things like that.
Yeah, desperately trying to th Yeah. I just th but also there's what is what is that that he's able to write?
Like one of the greatest symphonies ever, while deaf. So there's there's something about that we mentioned darkness, but torment that he's going through and ultimately ode to joy, like not a cynical thing, but a call for the positive.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. That's that's uh I I th I have devoted many many hours thinking about that.
And plus Napoleon broke his heart because he was a supporter of Napoleon because Napoleon was supposed to represent the French Revolution, this this hopeful future of no more kings, no more monarchs, no more authoritarian regimes and Napoleon ended up becoming a century king uh becoming an authoritarian and Beethoven um sort of f f famously was critical of that. Nevertheless m I think maintained a fascination with Napoleon throughout his life.
sort of a kind of more sophisticated complex view of human nature and human civilization. So becoming more cynical, like seeing more clearly that the world disappoints you, the dreams get shattered and through that is able to still do this call for a hopeful future. Alright so 'kay so Beethoven, one of the greats for sure, like basically everybody I d know how to play
the first movement of Moana Sinata. But I always avoided the third movement 'cause I was like I'll never be good enough. Never. Never. But I need to have one of these days. Maybe. You know it'd be great if Tom Waist writes me an email that says I only talk to people that can play the third movement. That's uh that'd be that'd be a dream come true. Be like for this. That's my dragon or whatever you do. You have to have a prince and rescue the princess. My
Dragon is the third movement of Moana Sinata. Okay. Uh you often highlight the importance of Bach. In fact there's so many of your guests.
Every famous songwriter is influenced by Bach. It they are the greatest composer of all time. The greatest musician of all time.
Even Sting and uh Dominic Miller said they go to Bach even for like practice.
every day. People talk about Bach was not known other than in his p places he lived. Eisenach, he was born in Leipzig. He spent many years. Uh but Bach was known to great musicians. It was difficult to find manuscripts, but there was a premier of the Saint Matthew Passion that Mendelssohn had done in seventeen in eighteen twenty nine. It was on March eleventh, I believe. He had a manuscript
uh his father and mother collected manuscripts and he got a manuscript of this piece and he I think he was twenty years old and and they had a performance of it in Berlin and Beethoven Mozart they studied the well-tempered clavier the two books of the well-tempered clavier but um Bach wrote profoundly beautiful music and some of the most complex
Punnel music that I don't think anyone has ever done like that.
Extremely bright guy, had twenty kids, ten of 'em only ten survived 'til adulthood, lost both his parents when he was nine within nine months of each other, went to live with an older brother.
And extremely productive.
Yes, I saw. I yeah, I think uh from all the music teachers I've ever had I I I understood the importance of studying Bach.
He didn't write master of puppets, but he wrote some great powerful music. I I I I tried to um educate the aforementioned music teachers of the brilliance of the master of the puppets. Well sometimes, a good riff is greater than any any musical composition, so.
I I agree. I go back and I play master of puppets every time I'm trying out a new amplifier. That's my go-to.
Go-to. So that like so the the the stereotypical like guitar store th when you come in, you're playing master of puppets.
Master of pups I I will play I have to play some heavy riff and so usually it will default to some Metallica or something like that. Or I'll play Alice in Chains or I do usually s like a lot of times I'll go and I'll do drop D_ something or d play tool. I usually would do something do do some drop tuning thing and s it's got always gotta be some some type of metal that I'll test to see if the if the bottom end's tight on the amp and stuff, so yes.
little bit you made a bunch of videos about it.
There's a there's a moment in time it still goes on but there's a moment where it's really people are freaking out about the use of A_I_ in music. Uh so there's these I would say incredible apps well like, Suno, U_D_O_ eleven, labs music is also great. They can generate basically text to song full, song from a text prompt.
But based on how good it is and so you start to immediately imagine how this is going to transform music and you're going to replace musicians and all that kind of stuff. Uh i it is legitimately nerve wracking because these are early versions so you don't know where it goes. But i in your intuition now you've been thinking about this you, made a bunch of videos now like being able to reflect okay, everybody chill calm, down.
So if you write us a prompt in Suno and it spits out a song, which I've did I've done made bunch of videos on this. I made up a fake artist Eli Mercer in this video. Then I did a thing for C_B_S_ news. I made up this fake artist Sadie Winters and came up with this song walking away. Well the compu the program came up with it.
There is some creativity in a process. So in this particular thing the process is you generate an image.
I did it in chat G_P_T_ the image and then I went to then I went to Claude and I wrote the lyrics 'cause Claude's way better at lyrics than Suno is. Suno's bad at lyrics, at least right now. So I re so I did I created the lyrics in Claude and then I imported the lyrics into Suno and I had great results with the songs that I came up that it came up with. I always have to qualify that.
G gonna be the ones that are gonna benefit from A_I_ Well. the people that are already great songwriters because you have to reco be able to recognize when it spits us something good versus when it spits us something that's not that good. And every other song I I I've probably created a hundred and thirty song ideas out of which there's three good ones.
there's a thing that's happening where people's ear very quickly is is becoming attuned to A_I_ slop. And that's actually quite fascinating like for example um one of the things there's this viral clip going around of an A_I_ base like a soul jazz remix of songs like Fifty Cent Many Men, and I think it is super impressive and it's a different pipeline actually, it's a tricky pipeline how to pull that off and I think a lot of the creativity in that even that kind of
is in the pipeline that oh of how you actually do that because there's actually a lot of manual stuff in that pipeline uh but I think ironically it's very cool at first but when you listen to it at for a while you understand that this is A_I_ slot yes, for a sole remix it it actually lacks soul but maybe think of like when I listen to solar blues I think I really want in that
case to know I don't want A_I_ B_B_ King. I want the real B_B_ King. And and I if I d if I know if any A_I_ is involved in the B_B_ King process, I'm tuning out. And I don't think I'm being curmungingly old dude in that. I think we humans want authenticity.
So when when A_I_ when I s first started making these A_I_ videos, it started back in twenty twenty three. I made my first one.
And
I would take my phone,
come up in the kitchen, I play a song and that my my youngest and Dylan, my youngest Layla and I have three kids and my oldest Dylan, as soon as I play why you listen to A_I_ and I was like oh my God instantly, I was like how do you know oh it has this ringing sound in the thing. So it took me probably about four or five days to figure out okay what are they hearing that I'm not hearing. So I did it I separated all the parts and what they're hearing was the artifacts that are in the vocal
that sent that were uh that made incomplete it just couldn't do the ambiences correctly right, 'cause it's trained on a lot of these A_I_ programs are trained on very low bit bit rate uh M_P_ threes right, so they feed all this stuff in there so they're getting really inferior information on the tr in the training process, whereas now when they make these deals with the major labels they'll get the multi-tracks and they'll get high quality wave files to train fr from
And whoever opts in, they get the solo vocal tracks, you know, if Ed Sheeran wants to do it or Drake or whoever wants to give their voice to it, let it do its thing and then get their royalties from it. I'm not saying that any any of them are doing it, I'm just giving an example. But every time that I would do it I could be down the hall and I would play something on my phone just to see if they'll like why you listen to A_I_ Oh. they could instantly tell then eventually started getting better. And then and then it'd be like is this A_I_ I'd be in the
car with Layla coming back from Taekwondo practice and she's like is this A_I_ why does it sound like A_I_ it sounds like it could be A_I_ and I'd be like yeah it's A_I_ she's like oh it's getting better. And then I did this song for um it was an M_P_R_ interview I created a song with a fake artist and the song was called Neon Ghost and I played it for Layla in the car she's like can you separate the tracks I said yeah I have 'em separated back home okay I wanna go down here so we go down to the studio
And I play it for her and she'd listen to the soloed vocal and she said, wow, this is really realistic. This is very hard to tell, even with a soloed vocal.
room for creativity right now for h humans is lyrics. It seems like the lyrics that are being generated they, lack s soul somehow and that's I don't know the words correctly. I mean they can be incredibly sophisticated but, there's so something the edge is not there. Some kind of edge that you we want in our lyrics, some kind of surprise but not cringe or not cliche or c some
something truly novel in the lyrics. But that if that's the case, it's kind of sad that um that that's where the creativity is to come from, but not from the music. Because then if we can create v very realistic music that sounds really damn good, where's the role of the musician there?
I think the role of the musician is that in in actually
if they use A_I_ to assist them in coming up with ideas like as a creation tool then the musician like some of this stuff is just not high quality sonically high quality. So the musician goes in and redoes stuff and changes things and adds parts and then they actually do music production and maybe they re-sing the parts and they change the stuff and then th then it's just basically like an idea generator. And I think that that's a great use of A_I_ is for that.
But but see, if you do that does, it make you sad that you don't necessarily need to learn instruments?
So b basically you can I mean you could think of it as a different kind of instrument, but you can write lyrics, you can hum the melody, you could just hum parts you, know, and then and then do A_B_ kind of thing, this kind of rhythm, this kind of and stitch them together and never actually have your fingers on a guitar or or fingers on a drumstick.
me it's just boring. And I when I use it it's less it's like uh but I I used it for about a month or so just 'cause I was making videos and I was trying to see how it's advancing. Every every three or four months I'll I'll w I'll sit down and I'll see whatever new versions they have and I'll write some songs write some songs. I'll prompt some songs and see what they come up with and see if they're improving on the things, but ultimately I don't find it interesting to to use.
I hear you.
You're a bit old school, I'm so my I'm trying to think about the future and I think it's still even in the future also going to be boring. I think there's something fundamentally boring about it and I'm gonna be trying to figure it out for so for example I use it a lot for more and more and more for programming, so for building stuff. And there it's not about the the final output is not the code, the output is what the code creates.
not it doesn't matter if it's boring or not, it's useful. But when the final output is the thing that A_I_ creates, which would be in in music, then there's something about us that just like we know we there is something boring about it. Yes, we want to celebrate and see the thing that's hard to create, and if A_I_ can just text the song, generate a top ten hit, we we'll c quickly lose value for that, I think. And so we'll want
raw like raw whatever whatever shape that raw takes I wanna say raw talent but that raw talent of any kind and pr perhaps it it would make me a little bit sad but that's also awesome perhaps the new kind of raw talent that civilization is asking for is how to make uh great TikToks.
Maybe that's what raw talent looks like.
It makes me a little bit sad because I'm a huge fan of long form Uh. but that that also creating TikToks and sh is is also talent.
Absolutely um when I see anything that's A_I_ generated I instantly recognize it any video I'm like it's boring boring boring and uh my kids do the same thing they just have no interest in engaging with it. As soon as they recognize it and they can spot it a mile away and they're just like boring boring boring boring boring and then they kind of dis then they they don't even wanna engage with the social media platforms which is which is a danger uh which I think they need to crack down on the A_I_ slop YouTube's done a pretty good job on on it.
But um it's hard to it's hard to stay on this it's get it gets flooded with so much of this stuff it's so easy to create and put up there and to just be in the um in the whack-a-mole thing where you're just trying to get rid of it all is is is uh.
It's fundamentally like it's fundamentally boring. I think boring is a really good and it's and it's annoying to have to uh flip through the A_I_ slop. But I think actually as a civilization it's just inspiring for authenticity 'cause you wanna be real ru and being raw which I you know one of the things I like about podcasts is people just shooting shit and just being themselves in in the long form versus overproduced 'Cause. I think A_I_ is making people realize that A_I_ is good at being overproduced.
Right.
So there'll be more let's get that covered. Yeah. Even artists 'cause you're saying like yeah they'll use it as tools. Part of me thinks like not really. Like I I think I thi I think they'll quickly this kind of process of generating a bunch of different options uh and choosing the one you like the most, I think is a really frustrating process for artists. And it I I think it I think A_I_ will will definitely be used extremely effectively as a very
uh f fine-grained tool um in the image domain, it's editing images, but not like macro editing, but very specific kind of editing that phot photoshop is increasingly integrated in. Uh I mentioned to you off-line, so there's a whole um uh isotope R_X_ group of software that does a lot of the denoising, the all all the de removing the wind, all the they they integrate machine learning extremely
effectively for working with audio in different kinds of ways. There's a bunch of different oth other programs that do that. Maybe for like B_ roll footage and uh same thing on the audio, if you just need a little audio to create a feeling of a scene, yeah, it might be used there in that kind of way. But truly original stuff uh
Somebody's playing and and we have two dialogue two people speaking in labs. But it's but there's so much bleed coming from the person playing that you can't hear what we're saying. And then we'll split out the voice for that section. The two voices separate them and then take the music and separate that stuff. And so it's really helpful for things like that.
We got uplift desk for my favourite office desks, better help for mental health, element for electrolytes, fin for customer service A_I_ agents, Shopify for selling stuff online and, perplexity for curiosity driven knowledge exploration. Choose wisely my friends. And now back to my conversation with Rick Beato.
So you have this video breaking down, so being a carpenter is a song man-child, and you use that as an example of building up people's intuition about the the music business and how the music production for these popular songs is being done these days. Who's doing the songwriting? How is it being done? Uh and all that kind of s uh I I was wondering if you could speak to that.
In that particular song, uh Jack Antonoff, who is one of the writers, Amy Allen Sabrina, carpenter, said in some awards thing that there's an old guy on YouTube that says that Sabrina had very little to do with the song. And so he said in this clip Me. being the old guy that well Sabrina really was the she's amazing and she's the one that wrote everything uh and the song is like so my response is like well why are you guys even included on the songwriting then?
So one of the things you highlight is a lot of people are are included on the list of uh songwriters.
Yeah. Ten people, eleven people, I mean you know Like. why are the song why a song of the year have songs that are interpolation, meaning that they have melodies from other songs in their interpolation. They used to call it stealing. And then um you have songs that are use samples for the whole thing, like the doji song that's out right now. And I said look, she took a gochii song and basically took off his melody, and she'd created her own melody over it.
Like well, it's I mean it saves time for you don't have to actually create a track, you just can sing over someone else's song that was already successful.
Yeah, you pointing that out, the song "X_I_D_" broke my brain. It yeah, this feels unfair, it feels it's a good song, but it wa it was also a good song before and it was before that it was also a good song.
Why is that considered to be in the top songs of the year? It's like come on you, can't find another song that that's not based on that? That's ridiculous. And and doji has some really good songs on a record.
That that that might be just a criticism of the machinery of the business that drives them. It's not necessarily like a lot of these folks are really good musicians. First of all, I think a lot of them are also good, like the actual songs that make it to the top are good. I'm I'm a big fan of Bruno Mars. He's a great songwriter and he's a great musician all around. You know, this is Michael Jackson and uh re-incarnated and he's incredible, right?
Uh you mentioned Billie Eilish and her brother write a lot of the songs. Yeah, super talented.
I mean Taylor Swift is unlike anything. I mean that's a historic figure in music. She's a fundamentally, at least originally, a singer-songwriter. So that's uh I mean that I mean uh I'm sorry, but that that is uh like of the kind of music that Rick Beato uh gives props to. She's the b she carries the flame forward.
She works on her own songs, absolutely, and she but she never has more than two co-writers on things.
Let me take a quick bathroom break. Okay. I have to ask you about this complexity that you're facing on a basically daily basis. I think uh it's a challenge a lot of YouTube folks experience, but you're just so viscerally experiencing it because a lot of what you do on your channel is celebrate music broadly. And so as part of that process, you have to sometimes show clips of music. And I think all of that falls under fair use quite obviously. And so you get all these YouTube
uh copyright claims. And for folks who don't know if you get three three of those it's a s so though each one of those can be a strike on the channel and can take down your channel. And you you get some insane amount. You said you got like uh I I think I had a similar thing on my Rick Rubin episode like th th th thirties I think he said thirteen, yeah after thirteen. So what can you just speak to this whole thing you've, been in a constant battle W_M_G_, U_M_G_, all the
Well all the all the three letter name record labels right, The. the music business people. So what what's the story there?
Well, this has been going on since the beginning of my channel, and I've made videos periodically when I first started, it was just instant blocks. So you'd never knew back in I started it'll be ten years in June. So when I'd play music in a video, v YouTubers were not playing music in videos because they didn't because of the content I_D_ things and the takedowns and stuff. So I would play music and I'd just see what happens. And then you get a content I_D_ claim re or you realise that
were quote unquote blockers and I came up with that term that they would block your video take down your video and I I realised at first it was like anything Guns N' Roses which is still the case Guns. N' Roses, A_C_D_C_, I mean many bands Fleetwood Mac, um Led Zeppelin and then and then something happened. The the there was that guy on the skateboard on TikTok that had the ocean spray thing and and he was listening to
Dreams by Fleetwood Mac. And that blew up and became a number one song again. And the labels then realized I mean I'd made many videos about about why this is wrong and it should be fair use and everything. Well because of that the label was like ooh maybe we should rethink this. And then they just started demonetizing videos.
And demonetize means they get all the money that you make.
Yeah.
had approached me a couple of years ago and uh and it's not cheap to do.
Uh you you're gonna do like a public interview with them?
I'm doing interview with them, yes. I talked to him today about it actually. Yeah. So he said you should fight these 'cause every single one of them is fair use. And he went through my my um entire cattle. I have twenty one hundred videos. And he's fought four thousand content I_D_ claims and won every single one of them.
Four thousand. I mean that's a l I mean when I do top twenty guitar solos there's twenty content I_D_ claims, you know. It's and it's either it can be either from the sound recording if I use that or if I just play it it can be from the publisher.
That's amazing. So is there I mean that's m it's still it's still a lawyer still, work. Does that is there a hopeful thing you can say about the future of
Yeah fight, these content I_D_ claims. If it's fair use if you're not just playing the song and listening to it and 'cause a lot of stuff that are reaction videos or whatever that are not where they play the whole song I mean I'm using these things and I'm talking a lot of the times it's in interviews or it's in I'm breaking down a solo and there's a you know.
Yeah.
Yeah even, reaction videos yes, absolutely.
Those are more borderline. But I don't know. I love those videos. Like when a person is just sitting there and listening to it and they're like you know like a like a voice teacher is listening to a a vocal performance and like yeah they're, the breakdowns, yeah.
Yeah.
go out use A_I_ and go and um any time they detect anything they, always go to the biggest channels first to get the most views make, sense and stuff and and they would claim everything that they could and historically YouTubers never would fight back. They were like oh this is easy money. YouTubers never g fight back and at these things because they're afraid to have their channels taken down. So
So I mean I mean it's important to you.
me years though Lex. I didn't I've been doing this so I'd so I've been doing it for one year now and I'm nine year I'm ten years into my channel. So it took me that long.
I mean hopefully it uh there's a ripple effect also. It's not just your situation. Hopefully you don't have to deal with this for much longer. Um how does Spotify change music? S sometimes we highlight the fact that they change the nature of music and that it's um the scarcity is not there. But also a lot of the it's like every m kind of music is available and it's so fast and it's so easy it's easy to explore.
It's a commodity. It's like turning on a water faucet.
Do you think there's just some good to I mean there's a lot of good to that, right? Have you did you go through that whole pro I st I still remember
where I had to basically throw away the albums and never did that.
Well after you after you dou upload 'em into your computer?
yeah, so there's that two step process. One, there's like the hard albums C_D_s. I mean, okay. And then and then you upload 'em into your computer when you save them. And then you uh how do you put it Allegedly. a friend of yours pirates some extra songs and then put some on the computer. So you ha but you have your stash on the computer, you're like this is my
finally selected stash of greatness. Uh sometimes organised by album sometimes not. And the big moment for me that was really difficult to do really difficult to do is throw away that stash.
big and switch to Spotify, switch to streaming and basically rebuild the stash of playlists and all this kind of stuff. And it it was hard-breaking 'cause so much love and effort went into that. Both the C_D_ the s the stashing of the C_D_ and the stashing of the M_P_ threes and the computer. And then in Spotify it just seems just effortless. But it helped me discover all kinds of artists I'd never would have discovered otherwise. And Pandora
I use a lot Pandora, is more um uh prioritizing on the discovery part versus organization part, and that was really wonderful.
So one of the things I I I'll start with the positive that I like about Spotify is that they show view count they show play counts. Whether they're real or not, that's another question, but but they show how many plays songs have, and that's how the charts are based.
Does that give you signal that something is listened to a billion times? Does that mean something to you?
Yeah, that means that that it's a popular song. Well, that's a massive hit. That's very few songs that have a billion billion plays. Now the downside of Spotify is the way that they pay their artists. Now they've lumped in podcasts with that that are getting a cut of the s the streaming with the with the music. Um and you know the search and discovery. I mean there's there's a there's benefits of algorithms and there's negative things of
algorithms. Al algorithms happen to kind of lot many times pigeonhole people into s listening to the same genre of music all the time and not expanding their m you know the um the discovery of of of new music where that you might hear on the radio it back in the day where program directors would play things that they liked right, And. you might hear so what is that oh, that's a new sound garden record or so you know like whoa I like
I'm gonna go about check that out. Then you know something that you might not have heard or something odd.
Like one one thing I really love doing on uh Spotify is you can you can have radio. Meaning like you have uh a few it's similar to Pandora like you can
Okay. This is gonna reveal a little too much about myself, but usually when I go work out, I'll listen to something like Rage Against the Machine Radio. I'm sorry, I need to I need motivation. Classical music, I dunno. Um but yeah, it's pretty good 'cause it recommends a bunch of other stuff I w I wouldn't even know s some of it I know obviously, but s uh akin to the similar to the rage against the machini type thing, it recommends a bunch of artists and it's like oh we holy shit, that's
awesome. So I don't know that, that discovery works really well. So this is some of it is a technology thing. Um but that experience is fun fundamentally more vibrant than I had previously with my stash that I would just keep a stash and I would listen to the same record over and over and over and over. But yeah, this what's lost is the the I'm sure you love you love this, but listening through the Led Zeppelin records just driving in a
car, listening to the whole thing all the way through. Yeah, that's lost.
So I have my old iTunes libraries from two thousand five that I've listed that I
that I have saved the the C_D_s that I uploaded into my computer. Any time I do that I play songs on my um when I'm doing an interview I always play WAV files, I put 'em in. And it's funny that when I interview a mixer I m interviewed this mixing engineer Andy Wallace. And people comment wow that the song sounded amazing and he or well not only are they great mixes that he did but I'm using WAV files.
in there. And people notice their and these are w WAV files from from you know original encoding, not not remastered things that Spotify keeps doing and adding a bunch more top end and things like that that these are the these are actually the the original WAV files from off the C_D_ that I ripped twenty years ago.
What's the audio interface, what are the mics?
So I use Pro Tools for the most part, but I also use Logic uh and Ableton I've. got all I've got all those. I'm only on a Mac Only. on a Mac. Although we have multiple P_C_s 'cause my kids use P_C_s. Well they do it for gaming. They like to game. I but like in terms of editing I hate ho how good Mac is.
So good.
And just integrating the the hardware and the software just work well together. Both on the video and
honestly, I wouldn't be talking to you right now because I got a G_ three that's the only good thing that a major label did for me is when when my band was on U_M_G_ and they bought a um they bought me a G_ three and a and an S_M_ seven and Pro Tools digio won the first pro-sumer Pro Tools thing and I learned how to use Pro Tools and that allowed me to learn how to edit video and become a record producer. So I gotta give it give it
to max for that.
So Pro Tools I mean that's still the st the standard.
That's that's kinda the industry standard, yeah.
I gotta ask you 'cause I know I've v never used Pro Tools I've. used again I'm a caveman. I've used uh Reaper, I've used Studio One that's, recently I've used that and for the most time I've used Ableton Live. I feel like I'm using one percent of the power of the tool. Like Ableton Live makes me feel like I'm literally just pressing the record button.
Ableton's amazing it, really is. Yeah.
it I mean it's designed for people they're doing like all kinds of meaty stuff and like l looping and the the the what is it the push buttons with the with the beats and the is this uh I mean I saw I saw 'em really out of touch. But there is just the power is incredible. Also inc it's I think it's it's not just for recording, it's also for live performances. So this is why studio one has been a little bit nicer for me because it's simpler,
made for uh recording more so.
Any D_A_W_ that you get used to, Lex, that's using it, yeah. And and you have to become a master at the things. If you wanna be a recording engineer or producer, you you you become an expert. A lot of the, you know, Thinnius and Billie Eilish, I think that they use logic. That's their D_A_W_ that they like to use. And logic, you know, a lot of pros use logic. You know, I I I fire up logic every couple days and I use it for things. I've I have it on my laptop here and I I have Projals and logic on my laptop. I
both. I use Pro Tools mostly though.
But Pro Tools, that's what you feel like at home.
I'm an I'm an expert in Pro Tools.
Are you using any uh emulation any, AMP-SIMS or it's all real AMPs?
I use AMP-SIMS on my laptop here when I travel and things like that. I use um Neural D_S_P_ which I just did a video at their headquarters in Helsinki. And they're um the C_E_O_ dog Castro is a is a friend of mine. I actually talked to him today as a matter of fact. And I have a Kemper AMP-SIM, you know, a modeler. I have an Axe FX. I've got a Helix. I pretty much have all these things. But for me I can
I have a hundred amps in my studio. So and I have mic set up all the time on tablets and stuff. I have a hundred amplifiers, real amplifiers. Yeah. I have a hundred, yeah. About a hundred, maybe ninety five.
Get to that level.
Collecting and being I'll be sixty four in uh in April. So
So you just don't let go.
I don't let go, no.
Why would you get to a hundred? Like is it is it tone difference?
Yes. So everything it does one thing really well. And so it'd be like okay so I have this Marshall G_C_M_ eight hundred that's modded that that does this one thing. It's got great mids and it's good for this kind of a tune. So I will pull that out. Then it's like no I need more of like a scooped metal tune t sound that's more like Metallica or Dream Theater or something. So oh I'm gonna pull out my my uh Mesa Mesa boogie. Or I need a uh I need something that's
me that's more like Brian May or like The Edge. I'm gonna pull out my Vox A_C_ thirty. So everything and and that's that's why I have so many amps. Because they all do w every amp I have does one thing really well. If it doesn't do well do it well I get rid of it. And I've and I'm down to a hundred.
Down to a hundred. So there's only a hundred. Uh but it
I can get by with probably seventy five.
Come on. But you then you're really throwing the risk of not having just the right amp. But you're using emulation. So it's it that's that's great. I mean on that but there there's the other side of it which is the guitar.
I told you off-line, I think having multiple guitars is cheating, but whatever. N nobody agrees with me on this. I only have like one I I do have some side pieces um, but m one main the greatest guitar the strat yeah, American strat. I said I would never do this, but I was in a guitar store I, lived next to a guitar store in Cambridge, and one day I would always stop by, I don't know why, I just just s look at the guitars like and I don't n really know why exactly, just
be in the aura of these great instruments. And I s they g they brought in this American strat that had these different shades of it was like a silver and I just I've never had this feeling. They talk about love at first sight. I just fell in love with a guitar. Can you just speak to the kind of guitars you have and you love
pretty much have mainly uh old-school guitars, right. So I have
Gibson's. I have Fenders. I have P_R_S_ guitars. And then I have I have two Gibson acoustics. I have a a nineteen fifty seven country and western that I've had for probably thirty some odd years. It's a great guitar. And I have a J_ forty five Gibson. And I have a Martin D_ twenty eight. So I only have three nice acoustics. And I have a Guild twelve string. And I have a Guild um Nashville tuned guitars. The low strings are up d
the octave. So the E_A_ and D_ and G_ are up the octave. That's Nashville tuning. Sixth string though. Like basically what David Gilmore plays uncomfortably numb in my video. He plays a Nashville tune but with one m variation the low E_ is up two octaves. So um he he demonstrates actually the uh and this is how he wrote comfortably numb. The c the chorus part of it was with this particular guitar that he's playing in the video.
What can you say about like the different uh feels that the guitars the the acoustics have? Like wha how do you know which one to put pull out?
It depends on the kind of part that I'm playing. If I want something with really tight mid-range with not that doesn't have a lot of low b low bass, this particular old Gibson I have the fifty seven, I will pull that out. It's got very balanced strings and uh li you know mid-range doesn't have a lot it doesn't have a booming bottom and booming low E_ string or anything or A_ string. So it depends on what what kind of sound I'm looking for if I'm
Feel?
Yeah.
my guitars play equally well. I have them all set up to where they play well. Um I have a signature Gibson guitar that I've had for five years now.
Want me say Gibson Gibson, Les Paul?
Gibson it's a double cut Les Paul special yeah, with P_ ninety pickups.
I don't know what double cut me is but, it sounds like a
cut cut to um yeah, as opposed to Les Paul that has one cut. So it's a Les Paul special that that has two. I have it over there my, signature guitar. Yeah. Yeah. When you play this you're gonna be like oh my God this, is buttery.
I d I use AMP SIMS too so, I just got the new John Mayer neural D_S_P_ plug-in today that I have not tried out. He did a modelling of all his amplifiers that the that neural D_S_P_ did and um it sounds great John, played it sounds, just like his AMPs.
I've been uh fortunate enough to have dinner with him up two times. And uh I thought of being an incredible musician. He's also conversational, he just
I've known John since he was he he lived in Atlanta but, when he got signed and I knew John from way back then. Right, in the early two thousands.
I think he doesn't get enough credit. Like he's one of the greatest living guitarists in the world.
Absolutely.
And a celebrator, if that's a word, of great guitar player. By way of advice, you started uh your YouTube channel in your mid-fifties and found incredible success. Y you've had uh essentially multiple careers. Um is there some wisdom you can extract from that?
So my my theory is that
somebody's gotta be successful so, why can't it be you? That was that was
That's that was my when I started my channel, I mean I didn't start it to it started by accident with the Dylan video and um and really so many people reached out to me. I started it six months after that viral video. So many people wrote to me, can you teach me this, pro-musicians, well-known ones that you would who you'd know, can you teach me this I? can't teach you what Dylan did but, I can
I can teach you relative pitch develop, your ear that way. But then uh that I had conservatories writing to me about this stuff from all over the world. How did you teach Dylan this? 'Cause we made about four different videos and they got more and more sophisticated. And um so I thought okay, I'll make some YouTube videos and explain this stuff. This is that's really why I started. So I didn't have to keep I couldn't answer the emails. There's so many of 'em. So I just started making videos on how to train your ear and music theory.
And that's really how I started my channel. And and my wife was like what are you doing I? say I'm making YouTube videos. Why? So I don't have to keep telling people how I did this stuff. And then all of a sudden, you know, few I had four thousand subscribers the first month, another four thousand, then hit a hundred thousand after a year, and then six months later two hundred thousand, and three months later three hundred thousand. And so
I think there w one thing that should be said that in modern culture for young people, a lot of them will see YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and they kinda wanna be famous. They wanna get the clicks and the views and so on, and that's the thing they chase and they optimise. I think the thing that you're leaving unstated perhaps is that you spend many years pursuing the mastery of a craft. And there's s a lot of value
To getting good at something. Absolutely. Off-line. You can actually reveal your journey online, but the thing you're chasing is not uh fame. It's getting good at s something. And I think actually what happens is even if the g thing you get good at
is not the thing that you become famous for, if that's the thing you're uh that ends up happening,
it's still like getting good at one thing kind of somehow relates to getting good at another thing somehow, that'll lead you to get better at getting better at the next thing at the next thing and the next thing. But if you're just chasing fame and trying to figure out how do I do the viral thing or so on, it just seems to you might actually get there, but it'll be unfulfilling and not long lasting.
my theory of my channel's always been make videos on things I'm interested in and at first I thought oh, nobody's gonna watch an old white-haired guy on YouTube. That was kind of my thing. Well, that was not correct. Um
And then it's like we'll just make videos on stuff I'm interested in. Just so happens that other people are interested in the same things I'm interested in and keep learning. And I when I produce bands, I never let them take my picture ever. I ne never let them record me in the studio. There's virtually no pictures of any band I ever produced. So from nineteen ninety nine to twenty fifteen when I December twenty fifteen when that Dylan video came out, no one took my picture. There were no pictures of me on the internet.
you're fully behind the camera kind of guy, I mean like no.
is is like you spend a lot of years you're teaching music, like really exploring music, trying a music career of like trying to create, trying to produce, trying to be a musician and all these not just trying, like being getting extremely good at it. I just I think in modern culture there's a sense you wanna s skip that part. I wanna be famous. I wanna you know this and it that is a thing that's not
going to be m in most cases effective uh as a primary thing to chase.
So w I have an undergrad and classical base. I have a master's from doing the conservatory and jazz guitar. Then I taught college for I taught jazz studies for five years from eighty seven to ninety two. Then I got a publishing deal my, first publishing deal in nineteen ninety two with polygram publishing. And then I became a producer when I was thirty seven no, having no idea how to engineer, I taught myself engineering.
And then YouTube, I taught myself how to edit videos.
And then you taught yourself how to interview.
And I taught myself an interview. I'd never done an interview before and, that was like an interview or what?
You haven't just done that. You've taught yourself not how to do u just YouTube, but YouTube Shorts. Different t totally different thing Totally. different skill. And then not just YouTube, but like how to be like a there's a 'cause y you're both a YouTuber and and like a musician who posts stuff on YouTube. YouTuber means like you're thinking about stuff like thumbnails and
which I make my own thumbnails. I've always made my own thumbnails.
By the way before I forget, I think I I speak for the entirety of the internet thanking you for how you introduce your videos and how you close them. 'Cause you this is a big part of YouTube where people have a thirty minute introduction to to a five minute video. You just go straight in. That's really wonderful. That's I mean uh and on all fronts I mean I I suppose that has to do with the production skill that you have of understanding cutting cutting the fat Yep. Yeah. cutting cutting the fluff cutting the
it. I'll just get straight to the core of the thing. I've heard you talk about maintaining friendships for a long time. You said never waste a friendship. Can you elaborate on that?
Yeah, that's one of my things is that I really value the time I've spent with people friendships, and keeping in touch with people. I talk to each one of my siblings multiple times a week. I talk to my sisters probably every night, my two sisters. Um I I have friends from college, I get friends from growing up, I have friends from you know both colleges I went to, I have friends from all different eras in my life that I keep in touch with and visit whenever I
And you must have met some incredible humans and incredibly weird and interesting humans throughout your life. So it's worth it, the effort, to to connect and reconnect.
I mean it's at pretty much everything in life N. nothing means uh anything more than the friendships that you make and your and your family.
Yeah, what's the point of this whole thing right, What's? the role of music in uh in the human experience?
Well hopefully to enlighten people and to create the soundtrack of their life. It is right, Yeah. Music music does something. I I'll get sometimes when I'm alone I'll listen listen to a song and there's nothing quite like a song that makes me truly feel like feel alive in whatever that is sadness or hope or excitement or um
when I'm working out, listening to Ray G. Guess the Machine like protest.
Or as I was listening to the Metallica, the I was really listening to the set that they played in in Moscow just hyped. Like truly hyped. That was like pacing listening to it.
And there's nothing like that.
I've never found anything.
And I don't know what that is in the human psyche that's that. But I'm so glad we found it. We humans created instruments.
They can vibrate strings and together create harmonies and melodies and and uh ones that reverberate their generations. And they carry that.
It's one of the greatest things that humans ever did, creating music.
And all of that led up to you some guy being listened to by millions of people on the internet. This is all a simulation Rick. And I've been a fan of yours for a long time like I told you this is crazy to meet you uh.
Thank you for everything you do for the world for celebrating music, for helping us discover and rediscover some of the incredible musicians and songs that have been created over the over the decade over the centuries Um. thank you for being who you are and thank you for talking to me.
Thanks I appreciate it.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Rick Beato. To support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback and so on. And now let me leave you with some words from Friedrich Nietzsche as I often do.
Without music life would be a mistake.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Bye. Bye. Bye.