Transcript of #492 – Rick Beato: Greatest Guitarists of All Time, History & Future of Music

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. And now, a quick few-second mention of each sponsor; check them out in the description or at lexfridman.com/sponsors.

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 listening to guitar solos, some epic guitar solos. What's an early guitar solo that you remember you connected to spiritually, 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 that it's like, "Oh, it's this pentatonic scale, E minor pentatonic scale." 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. You just—if you could figure out the notes, you noticed that there was a little pattern to it.

Hashtag parenting.

That's amazing. When I look back on it now, my mom's been gone for 10 years now. When I look back on it, it's like, "My God, my parents were so cool."

We should mention 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 really cool chord fragments, 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 part of that?

You know, I make lists.

You do. If you somehow don't know who Rick Beato is, go on YouTube right now and watch your excellent interviews with musicians. Watch your breakdown analysis of different songs. And watch your top 20 lists where you're very opinionated, sometimes very openly critical about certain kinds of songs. It's fun. Opinions are fun.

But they do change, Lex, from day to day.

Yeah, exactly.

But anytime I do a list, if I do 20, I like to do 20 because that gives me some leeway to throw in. I have to throw in something that is so weird that people, you know, something that a lot of people won't know just to have it on there so I can at least introduce a, you know, I'll put somebody like Alan Holzworth, who's a famous fusion guitar player. I'll throw in one of his solos or something, or just some oddball solo in there, just so that people, as they're listening down the list, will get exposed to something they would not necessarily get exposed to.

Yeah, a lot of variety. But Hendrix, did you show up here today, Rick, trying to tell me that Hendrix is not up there? I just am getting that vibe right now.

No, I'm not. But I don't want to say greatest, you know, you can say, "Well, there are people that inspired Jimi Hendrix, Charlie Christian, older guitar players." Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt were the first two really big, and probably—and Andres Segovia were three of the giants of the 20th century as far as guitar influences for most of the players that were to follow.

So here, going to Perplexity, Django Reinhardt was, of course, a jazz guitarist and composer, active mainly in France, and is widely regarded as one of the greatest guitarists in jazz history.

So Django was—well, there's a huge movement right now, gypsy jazz movement, as they call it, that is kind of built around the style of music that he played back in the early 20th century. One of the things about Django is that he was in a fire, and he had two of his third and fourth fingers, so his ring finger and pinky, were essentially melted together. He had no use of them, although he could use them while he was chording, but a lot of these incredibly fast lines, he's just playing with two fingers.

That—what is that? So that's gypsy jazz.

That's gypsy jazz, yeah.

Him, Stefan Grappelli, was a violinist that played with him a lot.

How much of this is improvisation?

Everything he's doing there is improvised.

Feels so free.

Yeah. And fun, like swing. And then that leads to, you said, pre-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 was Bebop?

Well, after the big bands were happening in the, you know, from the 20s through the 40s, small people would go out and play in small groups that they would tour with. And Charlie Parker, who's really kind of one of the main figures of early Bebop, really developed the language of it. Usually, the music that they're playing over are standard chord progressions that they would use as vehicles to improvise over. A lot of them were AABA form.

Chromatic notes are just notes next to each other on the same board.

Next to each other, yeah. I like to think of it as connecting notes.

Connecting. You're putting in more notes than are supposed to be there and so creating some interesting texture.

Yeah, so that is one of the most difficult styles to master, because all these things are a language. Blues playing, they're all just languages, right? Just like you'd learn any type of language. 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.

We're going to return to Joe Pass. We got to go to Dylan. You mentioned Dylan. I guess it's in part one of the origin stories of 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, maybe you can speak to what perfect pitch means.

It's ability to identify any note without a reference tone. So you can play—it doesn't matter how quickly they are that 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 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 identify the relative nature from one pitch to another.

And of course, intervals make up scales and intervals make up chords. And so that if you develop, to any degree, relative pitch, you can understand, you can hear the music better.

Yes.

So what does it take, since we're taking a tangent on tangent, what does it take to train your ear? What's a TL;DR 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.

What's an early journey like? We'll give people a preview of what they should—like, what does that look like? 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 it will teach you gradually over time how to recognize all the intervals.

So you listen to a melodic interval or a harmonic interval. 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 a week, two weeks, a month, two months, five years?

I think you do it pretty quickly. Within, you know, if you practice within a couple of months, you can really make a lot of progress on it if you practice daily.

What benefit does it have to you as a musician in general?

Well, it's great if you want to hear a chord progression, if you're trying to figure out a song, and you can say, "Oh, that's going from the six minor chord to the four major to the five major to the 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, because 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 music theory in terms of education, the education journey?

They have to be taught together because these terms are really music theory, right? Those intervals, major second, minor second, major third, minor third, perfect fourth. So as you're doing that, and then once you learn the intervals, the 12 intervals in an octave, then you learn them 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.

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.

Yeah.

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 how they can start in playing guitar, maybe even playing piano, maybe playing other instruments, although guitar, of course, is the greatest instrument of all time.

Absolutely.

What are the early steps of that journey? What do you recommend people do in general?

Well, if you're a beginner, getting a good beginner guitar course and learning, first of all, the open chords in first position. A 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 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 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 is 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 adjustments.

Forever, yeah.

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 midair, strike the string that your finger's on to play the note. And these are all fine adjustments that you're doing.

I'm just a hobbyist, recreational player, but wow, you're taking me all the way back. You're right. It's the haptic, the physical aspect of it is really tricky. Comfortably numb is a good example. But if you do lead, you have to get a super clean sound. Now, that's both when you're playing fast, 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, I guess you have to really place the finger in the right place.

You have to have enough of flesh on it to actually raise the string and pitch. Otherwise, it.

Yeah, because you're lifting it with part of a flesh. And of course, you have to decide, depends how OCD you are, do you want to be like the perfect, the proper musician, or do you want to do a Hendrix, so the thumb over the top?

Way over the top, yes.

And so like, if you have a fretboard here, I think the more like classical guitarists, the very proper, perfect perpendicular alignment of the fingertips to the fretboard versus like Hendrix is like, "Fuck it, you nerds. I'm going to do it." 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.

Yes, super 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 wear your guitar low, if you're Hendrix and you're wearing your guitar, if you're wearing it lower, then you can't get your fingers on top of it like that. And the thumb acts 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, because you have to kind of mute the other strings so they don't ring out.

Yeah, of course you have to solve that puzzle. It must be really frustrating in the beginning, like holding a chord.

Yes.

Like all of them. And it hurts too, right? If you're doing acoustic guitar.

Not for that long though, for like a week.

A couple, yeah.

Couple weeks. I don't want to discourage anyone, you know? It's actually pretty easy to learn basic stuff.

Right, but the pain is temporary, I guess, is the point I'm trying to make.

It is.

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 with riffs, if you think of Back in Black, right, that has a riff embedded 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 involving all the fingers and things like that. So it really depends on what you want to, what styles you want to 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 you have to isolate certain notes of the chord and play two together, you know, and multiple times.

There's a few crossroads where you get to select things. So I guess you're speaking to the fact that 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. Because 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?

Later on, I would say, I wouldn't say necessarily right off the bat. I think learning songs is the first thing that you should do because you want to keep people motivated.

So you get them to like fall in love with music and playing.

Yes.

All right. And that takes a couple months, three months?

Depends on how motivated they are.

So you recommend practicing what, every day?

Every day. My son Dylan, when he started learning the guitar a couple years ago, I said, "It's better to practice 10 minutes a day, seven days a week, than to practice one day for an hour," which is roughly the same amount of time.

Yeah, but it usually turns into something longer. But 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 leave my guitar on a stand all the time, so that if I walk by it, I'm like, "Okay, I'll just pick it up for a second." And then that second turns into 10 minutes and an hour, two hours.

All right, we got to 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 actually before the channel, because this actually blew up on Facebook, and then I put it on YouTube after.

So if it's okay.

Yeah.

Okay, Dylan, we're going to do the hardest ear training test of all time. Are you ready?

Ready.

Oh. Now, just a quick backstory on this. I made this for my friend Shane's wife who wanted to see, because Shane was a friend that I was producing, and he was there, and Dylan had come down 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, because I was on the school board at Dylan's school. And I said, "Hey, Dylan, come downstairs.

And we should say on Facebook, it went quite viral.

Yeah, like got, I don't know, 80 million views, something like it had like 250,000 comments, something like that. Insane.

How old is Dylan here?

He's eight.

Eight years old.

Yeah.

Can you actually give some more backstory about like how you discovered that Dylan has perfect pitch?

So when Dylan was about two, I was doing a FaceTime with my brother John, and I was like, "Check this out, John." And I played the Stone in Love, Neal Shone's solo from Journey. And I was like, "Check this out." And Dylan would sing along, and 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 it's like, Dylan's got a good ear. And then John and I were like, "Well, we have good ears too." So maybe we could have done that when we were that age.

Oh, so he just associated the names to the thing he knew. What do you think is in his mind? Because it's not just individual notes. He can like hear everything.

Yeah.

What is that?

He doesn't see colors. He just says every note sounds completely different.

Wow. Like you said, maybe it's a language thing.

Yeah.

There really is a, he just learned the language.

Yeah, the language. It's like perfect, it's like native music fluency, if you think of it like that.

So let's listen to some of this.

Turn around. Here we go. As fast as you can. We're going to start with single notes, and we're going to do some intervals, then chords. Okay, here we go.

A. B flat. C. D. A flat.

Okay, good. Two notes at once. Here we go.

C flat.

Great. How about this?

B flat, A.

Great. What about this?

E flat, A flat.

This is incredible.

C, B flat.

And then how about this?

E flat.

What is it?

E, E flat.

Correct. Oh.

He's annoyed. He is annoyed.

Yeah.

The part of this, when I play these next chords, 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 going to do some poly chords for you. These are really going to be hard. You ready? What's this?

C augmented over D flat augmented.

Okay, sing a B flat. Very good. What's this chord?

A flat major over A major.

Great. Sing an F sharp. Excellent. What's this chord?

A minor over D flat major.

Great. What's this chord?

E add nine over F major.

E add nine over F major. So I had to look at my hand to make sure that that's what it was, because 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 would look at it and was like, "Oh my God, you know, it's C augmented over D flat augmented." And the second chord was A flat major over A major, but they were both in inversion, right?

Yeah, yeah.

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 he has to dissect each one. Like what are the notes being played there? And what is, like what's the theory? Because 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.

Yes.

It's truly incredible. The human mind is incredible. And so 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 played what I call high information music. High information music would be Bach, well-tempered clavier, fugues, anything Bach. And I would play the well-tempered clavier, and I would play, I have a friend, Turkish pianist who's one of the greatest improvisers I've ever heard, his name's Aydin Esin. And I would play Aydin's improvisations for Dylan. It had very sophisticated harmony and linear things in it.

And that applies maybe even more generally to high information language.

Yes.

And it starts before they're born. I think I saw some of these incredible scientists that work on the neuroscience and neurobiology, the psychology of language in early life. I think a big part is in the mother's stomach, you're listening to the mother speak.

Yes, that's right.

So like that's how on the language side, you're picking up the language already.

That's right. And you're picking up the musical language. So native music fluency, you could call it.

So if the mother's sitting back and listening to Bach and some bebop jazz, you have a pretty good chance.

Much better chance.

Okay. All right. So that, as we unwind our way back, Joe Pass and bebop, you were funny enough talking about what is bebop jazz and 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 have six siblings, and we could never figure out why dad liked really sophisticated jazz.

We just took it for granted at that time.

Yeah, we just took it for granted. And my dad passed away in 2004, and we never really talked about that, but he and I used to listen to music together all the time. 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?

Yeah.

And by the way, we have to go to this song, because people must have forgot, because people just think you're like a good communicator or something. They don't realize how good you are at guitar, how good you are actually a lot of instruments, but guitar especially. And there's this video, the greatest guitar solo period. Can you give me some context for this particular intricate, complicated solo?

Joe Pass was a guitarist. He lived from 1929 to 1994. And he was one of the greatest bebop players and solo guitar players. So he made a record that this is off of called Virtuoso in 1973 that my dad gave me for Christmas when I was in 10th 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 1919. He said, if you ever learn to play guitar like this, you've accomplished something with your life.

Is it by ear mostly?

Yeah, just by ear. I didn't know any of the chords or anything.

If we can listen to a little bit here.

If you go back to that brother-to-brother Gino Vinelli thing with Carlos Rios playing, that stuff is incredibly hard. This, I'm starting, I don't know any of these chords. I start out, I don't even know what that chord is, but I figured it out. I just, and it's weird. I mean, look at that weird bar.

So you were just finding, like playing around, putting your fingers on the various positions.

Right, but trying every combination of fingers. I'd never played that chord. It's a weird looking chord.

Yeah.

And, but I kept, I moved my fingers around till I heard to where it sounded like, oh, that's it, definitely. And I just looked at my hand, I was like, what is that? I had no idea what it was.

So you were connected to the, you were really connected to the music.

Yeah.

And so that's why you can hear, it's not necessarily, you didn't have perfect pitch.

No.

And not even relative pitch.

No, I did not.

Yeah.

No, I didn't know anything about intervals. I didn't know anything about music theory, anything. This is all just.

He was just like playing around with different shapes. That's amazing.

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. I had heard Joe play that on the record.

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 really complicated song?

Yeah, but there's so many YouTube videos that you can go and just learn it without having to. Yes, 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.

I'm sorry, hearing there's.

Hearing 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 C9 chord in the top notes of it. So all these are just inversions of the same chord. So if I could play that, then it's just figuring out the single notes, okay? So.

You make it sound so simple when you break it down. And by the way, Joe Pass, incredible guitar player. Like this is obvious.

And he improvised all this.

He could have played it like this.

But you know, the first. Was the individual notes.

Oh, that's hard. Maybe it's playing like that. That sounds more realistic.

The amount of different genres that you're able to replicate is just 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, 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, hmm, pretty good.

So what was the role of bebop jazz in the history of music? It seems like it was influential in your life. Another guy, you had an incredible interview with Flea. 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 influenced Flea. And the guy showed up in a Miles Davis t-shirt.

Miles Davis played with Charlie Parker when he was 18 years old. And Charlie Parker was really his mentor.

Can you explain to me why with many of the folks you've interviewed, and in general out there, in the world of jazz, all roads 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 had records like The Birth of Cool and Modal Jazz and Hard Bop and records like Bitches Brew, where he started to, 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 50s quintet and the Miles Davis 60s quintet.

I forget who said it in an interview with you, but they talked about like Miles Davis, his music feeling like, 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 make to fuck it all up live. And that feeling is what creates the aliveness of the music. Like can you speak to that, just the creating in the music, the feeling like you're on the edge, like you're challenging the possibilities of what can happen and it all can go to shit.

Well, when I interviewed Ron Carter that played in Miles's 60s quintet, I asked Ron, because Ron did records, he played bass on 2,200 recordings, famous records. And I said, did you guys ever rehearse with Miles? No, never. I said, so what we do, he goes, we just show up at the studio and he'd have the charts, put them on the stand and we would just roll. And I said, would you listen to it after? No.

That's crazy. That was on purpose. That was done on purpose, not to do the rehearsals, none of that.

Yeah, he wanted people to just feel it, play it. Thought is the enemy of flow, as Vinny Caluta told me.

Thought is the enemy of flow. How do you make sense that Flea, the bassist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, is influenced by bebop jazz?

So his stepfather was a jazz bass player. And when his parents got divorced, he was born in Australia and then they moved to New York. Then his parents got divorced and his mom married his stepfather, who was a jazz musician. And then they used to have jam sessions at their place. And Flea loved it. It was kind of like my upbringing with my dad playing jazz all the time.

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, he's an intense guy and funny and, you know, really emotional. And he picks up his bass and there's a fierceness that you immediately feel. And he starts, he talks about how he practices and then when he starts doing the slapping stuff, he gets, it's so into it. And I'm just sitting there going, whoa. Wow.

Yeah, he talked about his practicing routine with you. And one of the things he's like, I have to practice the slapping.

Yeah.

No, there's differences in the structure of the different bands, but usually like the bassist has a vibe to them. I don't know if we can put words to exactly what that is. There's a kind of energy that drives the band.

To me, the bass is one of the only instruments that when you play a bad note, everybody notices. I started on the bass as a kid.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah.

But you also play drums, you also play.

Yeah, but my first instrument was the cello in third grade. And then I switched to the bass in sixth grade. And I majored, my undergrad degree is in classical bass. So I always think of myself as a bass player first. And I always think the bass is the most important instrument because.

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. Because 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 the beginning of our conversation. What do you think are some of the great solos of all time? Can we put a few in the consideration? You have a great list on top 20 rock guitar solos of all time.

Yeah, so I put Comfortably Numb as my favorite, is my top one.

On that day, right?

On that day.

Yeah.

Right. Now, the day later, I would have said it's the second solo.

Okay.

But I did the first solo because nobody talks about that solo. And that solo is equally great. And when David Gilmore, when I played it for him and we 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 Gilmore 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?

Maybe you just don't look back. When you do great things, you don't look back.

Miles never looked back. He never wanted to hear the old stuff. He always moved on.

There was this funny moment where you made a video why David Gilmore 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 why I read about Miles Davis, he was very good at understanding tempo and the value of silence.

Yes.

And I think David Gilmore doesn't always play fast, but he does a lot with less.

Yes.

And some of that is also on the more technical side, probably the tone of the, I mean, he's one of the most uniquely recognizable tones in all of music.

Yes.

What do you understand about what it takes to shape the tone that is David Gilmore?

He has a very sophisticated setup for his tone. 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 asked his tech, Phil, I said, these are the same ones he used on the records? He's like, yeah, his tech has been with him for like 50 years. And I mean, the exact ones, yes.

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 journey there of exploring. And of course, he's not, I guess he's not doing any soft, like no emulation, no amp.

He does do emulation actually. He does, he has this thing. And 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 9030. I put out a short where he talks about it. I said, so that Zoom 9030, is that a real thing? Because 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 runs Pro Tools himself. And so he'll be sitting there, there's no one there to help him.

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 you forward.

Yes. And I can think of a hundred questions to ask David Gilmore. And, but I always ask my questions based on what they say to me.

Yeah.

So, but I do make a playlist of songs that I want to talk about. So that kind of guides me is that, because I want to make sure that I, there's specific things that I need to play so that you can jog his memory. Because anytime you play something that somebody recorded even 50 years ago, they'll remember. If they don't remember the exact specifics, that brings it to life to them again.

So there's a lot of tiny details that go into a particular song, whether it's in the production or how it's played, how it's composed, all that kind of stuff. And you don't know what those are ahead of time.

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 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.

Exactly.

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 songs are on it. And not only that, but the people I'm interviewing know that I can play all the parts of all the instruments because 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 young listening to bebop.

That's right.

It's the background knowledge, it's the soul carrying with you, being able to radiate the love of the soul of music.

I will say this, Lex, is that the other thing is that most of these people have a really good sense of humor. When I was, when the first time I interviewed David in New York, my brother John came along and he is a massive David Gilmore fan. That's his biggest influence as a guitar player. And so he said, you're interviewing David Gilmore? I'm coming. I was like, all right, come on, come on down. So my brother John's standing about five feet away. And John is a sales guy, but he's a great guitar player. So John's like, I was like, this is John, this is David, this is my brother John.

Yeah, a lot of these folks have really wonderful personalities. With a trusted person to be able to reveal that personality. So Comfortably Numb at the top on that day. What else is up there?

Stairway to Heaven. Hey Joe.

Well, in that list, your top Hendrix solo was Hey Joe.

It's the first guitar solo I ever learned. So I had to put it on there. So I don't necessarily do these by, I do those in kind of how important they are to me and my development. So there's always a biographical component to these lists. Number three was Kid Charlamagne of Steely Dan Solo, Larry Carlton, amazing solo, extremely difficult to figure out. Probably there's two solos on the list that are just about, are very, that one I can play.

For me, the sentimental one, my first solo is Mr. Crowley, Randy Rhodes. I like the musicality of Mr. Crowley, that there is a melodic component to it. You're playing really fast, but there's a melody to it. And also there's like a legendary nature to the brief time we had Randy Rhodes. This is probably one of the greatest guitarists ever.

56 to 82, I think. Terrible. He was an absolute brilliant guitarist, had his own style.

We should say he's the guitarist for Ozzy Osbourne and the band.

Yeah. And that Mr. Crowley solo is a great solo, great solo. And he's incredibly influential as a guitar player too, for metal guitar players. And I love Randy Rhodes.

Another guy, so one of my favorites is Mark Knopfler.

Yes. And I did have Mark Knopfler on my list.

So on the swing. That's right. You did have him.

Now I had it high on the list and I'll tell you why. I would have had it lower because it's one of the early ones. Because I wanted people to be like, okay, oh, this is a serious list. So Rick's going to talk about serious stuff. And Rick's going to play along with all these things. So I wanted to kind of state that at the beginning of the video.

I just love that that's the Van Halen solo you have.

See, I have to do some.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

There's so many Van Halen. My God, it could be, I could pick 25 different Van Halen solos.

But to me, I mean, there really is nobody like Mark Knopfler. I mean, there's this unique guitarist. There's something about his tone. Speaking of Gilmore, there's just the tone, the care, the timing of the notes, his improvisation, like the live performances of Salt in the Swing that's been actually going somewhat viral around recently, his pretty old live performance of Salt in the Swing.

Now, obviously the intro to Money for Nothing is one of the greatest, almost impossible to recreate that because of the sound is so unique and his, it's just improvised. It's so cool.

Yeah. There's certain songs like Europa by Santana. Santana can have that tone too.

Yeah.

That Mark Knopfler makes me really, just how clean it is. I think he beats B.B. King in my book on 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.

Well, that thing about being able to recognize somebody from a note.

Yeah.

You know?

Yeah.

When I hear Brian May, I can immediately recognize it's Brian May. It's incredibly melodic, the tone that he has. Gilmore, Hendrix, everyone that we're talking about, Van Halen, it's just, they have that one note. It's like, oh, I know who that is. And that's why we're talking about him.

That'd be funny. That'd be a good video.

B.B. King, you hear one note.

As a test of like how quickly can you recognize just a solo star's playing.

That's a great, I'm going to make that video tomorrow.

Lex, you'll see.

The day after tomorrow, you'll see it.

I would love to see that.

Can you recognize these players by one note?

By one note.

Yeah.

I think it's, I think we're being a little too aggressive with that. I think you need like two or three or four or five notes.

No, no, no. I guarantee you. So I was going to do a video last week where I was going to play songs in reverse. Okay? See if you can recognize these songs in reverse. And I had my two assistants come in. It's like, do you know what song that is? They're like, oh, that's Adele. Like, what? Then they're like, oh, that's Nirvana. Instantly they could recognize like, well, that's not worth making. It's like, yeah, it's so obvious. You hear the tone of the voice backwards, forwards, it doesn't matter. You know what it is.

Oh, interesting. Okay. So it's about the tone.

Yeah.

How could you possibly know from a single note? It's, I guess Van Halen, you can.

One note of B.B. King's vibrato, you could know. What I'll do is I would separate the guitars. I can actually separate the tracks and I'll just play one note.

You think from a single vibrato, you can know it's B.B. King?

Yes. Well, we'll see.

Put it on record. I'm skeptical.

I'm going to do, I'll do 20 of them. Can you recognize these guitarists from a single note?

Could you recognize Steve Ray Vaughan versus Eric Clapton?

Yeah.

Choose wisely, my friends. And now back to my conversation with Rick Beato. 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, Tears in Heaven.

Well, the story behind that is heartbreaking.

And then I personally really love the sound of Wonderful Tonight.

That's a great song. That's one of my favorite Clapton songs.

And I, as I was like listening to it, just doing a whole personal journey, introspection, knowing that I'm going to talk to Rick Beato, listening to just a bunch of songs. And I learned, as a bear saying, that I didn't know the stories behind the music, but I learned that Eric Clapton was married for a decade to the same woman that George Harrison was married to. And that this woman was the muse, the inspiration for like so many of the legendary songs of rock, including Wonderful Tonight, including Layla, and including George Harrison's Something.

Yeah.

Legendary song also. The same woman. Is she the greatest muse in rock history?

Probably, yes.

This is great. So in your interviews of musicians and producers, I think the thing you're ultimately fascinated by is their whole, the process, the recording, the production, the songwriting, the different elements of the process. So are there examples of different things that stand out to you from all the interviews you've done? And by the way, all the recording and production you've done yourself. So on the recording front, on the production front, on the songwriting process front, just things that pop into memory.

When I've interviewed the guys that are the producers, like Rick Rubin, Daniel Anwar, Brendan O'Brien, Butch Vig. The thing about producers as opposed to people that are musicians, if you're in a musician, even if you're David Gilmore, you do a record and then you tour and then you do another record, maybe years go by. But producers are working on multiple records, you know, sometimes at a time, like Rick Rubin could be working on multiple records. And the 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.

Yeah. It's funny, like looking back, even probably for them, just to realize they've created that magic is hard to believe.

Yeah.

Because you're looking at a blank thing and then magic comes out and you don't even, you don't even understand. You don't understand, probably a lot of these artists don't understand where that came from. They're channeling some deeper thing.

When I interviewed Brian May, he told me, I can't remember if this was, if we talked about it on camera or not, but we talked about Bohemian Rhapsody. And 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 mentioned this to me. And he said it always bothered him. And there's always something about these songs that bothers people. Even these songs.

These little things, yeah, yeah.

Right. There's always little things and they sit and they hear it and they're like, oh, man, I wish I'd been up a little higher on that or whatever.

I mean, there's certain moments in songs that are 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.

Yeah.

That was, I don't even know. I mean, that whole thing, you've done videos on it. It's an incredibly complicated composition. It's crazy that a popular song, popular rock song could be this operatic, so complicated. The other thing akin to that moment is Phil Collins with In the Air Tonight, the drum bridge.

Yeah.

What is that? I can'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 know, musically, I don't understand how you create them. Because it might be bigger than musical. It might be cultural, all a bunch of different elements. And plus it's him filled with, like I've seen live performing, he has like a headset. He does something, he's like a telemarketer or something.

Those are hooks when you think about it, right? It's like, it's as much of a hook as any, as the chorus of the song or any song. That drum thing is something that people wait for and they air drum to it. Everybody air drums to it. And it is a hook. And those are hard to create. Those moments are really hard to create. And usually they're done by accident.

Yeah. So it's hard. If you chase it, you're not going to get it.

Yeah.

In your conversation with Sting, he said something about how modern music is simpler, more minimalistic, and the bridge is gone, I think he said. And he said he thought that the bridge is therapy.

Yes.

It's like a chance for you to reflect, I guess, on the verse.

Right.

Before the chorus comes in.

Right.

It changed my view of the bridge, I suppose, the therapeutic nature of it, at least lyrically. You think he's onto something? The value of the bridge?

The bridge is a place, I think, where you can kind of change the frame of reference of a song.

You could probably do anything, I guess.

Lennon used to, he would have some kind of biting lyrics, like we can work it out. So McCartney writes the, you know, try to see it my way. Do I have to keep on going until 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 a real collaboration between the two of those.

This is where different parts of the band can clash in interesting ways. I mean, the Beatles are the epitome of that. Such like each individual Beatle is a great talent in their own right.

Yes.

How were the Beatles able to create some of the greatest songs of all time, all before they turned 30 years old?

I have never been able to figure that out, but I have a theory that because.

I have a theory.

Because PA systems were so bad back then and the Beatles, people screamed so loudly that the Beatles thought, okay, we don't need, we can't tour anymore because we can't even hear ourselves. So we're just going to be a studio band. And maybe because of, we have all these great late Beatles records are from 1966 on, just because they had bad PA systems and they had no monitors. You know, they're in Shay Stadium, people are screaming so loudly, they can't hear themselves.

But you also have this theory that, you know, that the greatest productivity that musicians have is before they turn 30. The greatest sort of creative genius that can come out of the human mind musically is before the age of 30.

I think it's 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 20s, 30 years old, and then crystallized. So you're using the crystallizes, you're using your life experience to write things. So you'll find 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 that.

Creating something new.

Yes.

Truly novel that requires a youth.

That's just a theory though, but it seems to apply.

What do you think about the 27 Club? A bunch of the music greats died at 27. Hendrix, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Amy Winehouse.

Kurt Cobain.

Kurt Cobain, of course. A big part of music history is linked to drug history. LSD, coke, heroin, weed.

Smoking.

Smoking.

I 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 MTV Unplugged, Nirvana. Kurt Cobain is smoking every second that he's not playing, he's smoking. Every singer smoked, every musician smoked. Nowadays, I asked my son Dylan, Dylan, does anybody smoke at his high school? He's like, smoke? Nobody smokes. It was an absurd question.

It was for everybody. I mean, that was a big transformation over the past 20 years and 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 smoking distracts them from the hard. I mean, heroin and coke, I mean, those things really, and alcohol, unfortunately, can be easily abused. I think it seems like it's the life of a musician, this dopamine thing of getting on stage and 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 neurobiologically of like how do you deal with that?

Oh, absolutely. Now, would we want to, you know, advocate people doing things like that to boost their creativity?

No.

Well, I wouldn't, but just like smoking, which I think improved people's voices. I mean, really, the raspiness of it, this is the reason that so many of these, virtually every famous singer, no matter what genre of music, jazz, soul, rock, they all smoked. Nat King Cole.

Yeah. Miles Davis too.

Miles smoked. Everybody smoked. Miles didn't, well, Miles was a heroin addict too. I mean, so many jazz musicians.

But Miles had a sound to him. You're right. I mean, smoking must play a gigantic role to that, adding some complexity to the voice.

Yes.

Yeah. Some richness to the voice.

Nat King Cole, he smoked, I think, four packs a day. He died of lung cancer. A 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.

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 place. Because sometimes it's part of the culture. The druggies, like you're saying, smoking. If you're smoking now, that's going to be a very different experience than smoking 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 50 years ago. It's a different vibe. So sometimes the drug is a deep integrated part of the culture versus an actual chemical substance. The '60s, right there, I don't know, they were on everything in the '60s.

Yeah. I mean, it has to account for something, Lex. You know.

On the songwriting front, you mentioned a story about Elton John recording. So he's one of the legendary songwriters. But yeah, you've met him and you know something about the process of his.

Yeah, because he was recording in a studio in Atlanta 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 pressing the button. "Yo, where are you guys? What's up? I thought we were going to start this." And no one's responding. I can hear talking.

Yeah.

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. They move on to the next song. I mean, it's really incredible.

Yeah.

That's it. Yeah.

There's one here that I sort of done the other day with Tiny Dancer, which is about Bernie's girlfriend. I just sort of ran it through and put two verses together, then a mid-light, then a chorus, and then back to the reverse sort of thing. It's a very, it happens very quickly. It sounds long, but it sort of, it sort of starts off. Blue jean baby, L.A. lady seems dressed for the band.

Okay. I mean, it's really amazing that he just.

He's looking at it, it's just the lyrics.

Yeah. And it's one of the, 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. 99% 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 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. You had an amazing interview with Kirk Hammett. I'm a huge Metallica fan.

Same here.

There's a lot of interesting stuff that came out of that, from that conversation. 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've been around 40 years.

Over 40 years. Yeah. Crazy.

The other thing is the downpicking, which was interesting, which is creating that really distinct sound.

James and Kirk's the downpicking. I used to be able to do that. I just can't do that anymore. It hurts my thumb to do it. I think, honestly, 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 just like, no, I'm serious. I think that that's actually right. Because I'm thinking like, why does that hurt so much to do that? All the downstrokes and stuff. It's like, got to be something. It's like, yeah, it's from swiping with a phone.

The other thing that came through is that he's an 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 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 because they, because 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.

Also, you mentioned that this is weird that I didn't know that Hendrix used different gauges, strings.

Yeah. He was the one that talked about that, wasn't he?

Yeah.

Yeah. That was really interesting. See, these are the things that I like to learn from these interviews with these people. I was like, what? I've never heard of that.

It's like one of the ways you can find uniqueness of sound is by trying different things that are not, I mean, I guess Zappel was really good at this, right?

Yeah.

Completely breaking out of what you're supposed to do, the ways you're supposed to do them and doing it completely differently. You often ask musicians what their perfect song is. First of all, that's an interesting question.

What is a perfect song?

Like one surprised me is Hans Zimmer said, "God only knows by the Peach Boys."

I was surprised by that too. But I thought it was like, yeah, okay, that's a perfect song for sure. The first interview I ever did was with Peter Frampton in 2018. And I asked him in that interview, what's a perfect song? And he said, "Whiter Shade of Pale." And I was like, ooh, that's a great song. And then I thought, I'm going to 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.

Yeah.

Like if you ask me, I don't even know. I guess you just say it, whatever, right? Like what would I even say? What's a perfect song? Yeah, I would go, see, I feel the pressure.

Right?

Because the problem is, the reality is it changes day by day, like minute by minute. I, yeah, I would probably, I'm sorry, but I would have to go Mark Knopfler. And I would probably go, is it really cheesy to say the obvious thing? I would go Sultans of Swing. Even though like I'm tempted to say Europa, but then like.

Sultans of Swing hits on so many levels because 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, that's like early Dire Straits strat tone. And then you think of like Money for Nothing is a Les Paul and it's a totally different kind of vibe than him playing on Sultans of Swing. But that song's amazing.

Plus it's about music.

Yes.

So it's like there's a meta aspect to it. But then there's also like, we're talking about this guitar stuff, but Leonard Cohen, hallelujah. I mean, Leonard Cohen in general, like these songwriters that go super simple on guitar. And there is just, what's that called? Singer-songwriter type. I told you off mic, one of my, maybe the music guest that's a dream guest is Tom Waits. I've wanted to talk to Tom Waits for a very long time.

That's when it's going to happen, Lex. Once you give up on it, it's going to happen.

Yeah. Yeah.

By Tom Waits won't be on your podcast.

Exactly. Exactly. This is my moment.

Tom, come here. Let's do it. I want to see it.

I'm such a fan of like the Zappel-like artistry on the musical front, which Tom Waits has, but I'm a sucker for great lyrics. Lyrics to me is such a big part of great songs. And he's another example. He has a song called 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, you know, thinking about like what would have happened if it worked out, that kind of thing.

Yes.

I don't get it. I don't understand it.

I can't 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 lived.

Yeah, they've lived.

They lived life.

Yeah.

It's not like kids today.

Now you're on a porch. You also had an amazing interview with Billy Corgan.

Yes.

Let's mention Pumpkins. He is definitively one of my favorite musicians.

I love Billy.

You asked him an interesting question about how he creates this melancholy feeling that permeates a lot of his songs. And he jokingly said that the secret is all about the seventh and the ninth. So like musically, chord-wise, what do you think about that? You think he's onto something?

He's talking a little music theory there.

Yeah, yeah.

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 we're talking, no, all these people that we're talking about use these notes and this is why their songs, and when I interviewed Sting, I called them surprise tones. And Sting's like, I like the way he uses the word surprise. Notes that are outside the chord that are dissonant with the chords that they're playing, but then that creates emotion.

Yeah, what is that? I don't know. But melancholy, and I think you articulated in that interview, it's not actually that depressing. There's something about that melancholy feeling that is somehow the other side of the coin of 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 at a concert and so on, but there's this, there's nothing like you're alone in the car driving, listening to like whatever it is, Bruce Springsteen. I think Louis CK has a bit about that. Was it Bruce Springsteen? But he sometimes has to pull over to the side of the road and just weep or something like this.

There's a Kirk Cobain lyric. It was on the in-uterine 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 in being sad. I was like, yeah, that's it right there.

In terms of love songs, somehow I find powerful, that kind of desperation. So like I've always connected with Pearl Jam's "Black."

Oh, amazing.

That line, there's a friend of mine was going through a breakup. So I was listening and he's the one that introduced me to Pearl Jam during that whole period when Pearl Jam was huge, with 10. Is that line is someday.

Someday 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't it be mine? Oh my God, that blows me away. That's an amazing line.

Why, yeah.

The delivery is incredible on it too.

Eddie Vedder to one of the great frontmen of all time.

Yes.

And that whole period, that whole moment in history of Kirk Cobain and Eddie Vedder that captured, that was the '90s. That was one side of the '90s that just, this singular moment in history. Who do you think are the great frontmen in the history of music?

Freddie Mercury, Robert Plant.

Freddie Mercury number one probably.

Steven Tyler.

Jim Morrison.

Jim Morrison.

Yeah.

Roger Daltrey.

Well, we have to say, I have to say, we have to say James Hadfield.

James Hadfield.

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 their historic performance in Moscow in September of '91. This is shortly before the Soviet Union collapsed. Plus we should mention AC/DC and Pantera were there too. And about 1.6 million people were there. Now, by the way, there's like some kind of reporting that it was a half a million people, 500,000 people, that's somewhere I've seen statements like that.

That's just, that's my kind of set.

Get the fuck out of here. This is amazing.

That's my kind of set right there.

I don't know if you could think of 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 peak. The Black album had just come out then. And that must have been so, so exciting.

I mean, Woodstock was big. There's certain moments in time when they really, really meet the moment. Are you a fan of live, live like big?

I used to be, but at this point, I can't, you know, I'd much rather see people play in small clubs and, or go to the, I'd like to listen in the studio. Go to the studio even.

I generally almost entirely agree with you. I just think that there's these historic moments, but you don't know which are going to be which. But you're making the concert free. It's just all of it to get plus Pantera and AC/DC. The other, which actually is a legitimate thing you mentioned is as one of the greatest concerts of all time, is Beethoven's world premiere of the Ninth Symphony. You know, I didn't really know the personal side of Beethoven until I saw this movie called Immortal Beloved.

I mean, Beethoven was sick all the time too. I mean, there are a lot of people who 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 35 minute, 40 minute piece, all the parts, you got to hear all the orchestration in your head, you're editing, you're doing all these things.

I mean, you love sound and music. What do you think it was like gradually losing your hearing for Beethoven?

It must have been terrible. I mean, just terrible. I mean, I've heard things where he would have a stick in his mouth and put it on the soundboard of the piano and you could feel the vibrations in his skull and things like that.

Desperately trying to.

Yeah. I just.

But also there's, what is that that he's able to write like one of the greatest symphonies ever while deaf. So 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.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's, I've 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 hopeful future of no more kings, no more monarchs, no more authoritarian regimes. And Napoleon ended up becoming essentially king, becoming an authoritarian. And Beethoven sort of famously was critical of that. Nevertheless, I think maintained a fascination with Napoleon throughout his life, but sort of a kind of more sophisticated, complex view of human nature and human civilization.

Never say never.

One of these days, maybe, you know, it'd be great if Tom Waits writes me an email that says, I only talk to people that can play the third movement.

Play the third movement.

That'd be a dream come true.

There you go.

Be like, for this.

That's motivation.

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 Moonlight Sonata. Okay. You often highlight the importance of Bach. In fact, there's so many of your guests.

Every famous songwriter is influenced by Bach. They are the greatest composer of all time, the greatest musician of all time.

Even Sting and Dominic Miller said they go to Bach even for like practice.

Every day.

People talk about Bach was not known other than in his places he lived. Eisenach he was born in Leipzig. He spent many years. But Bach was known to great musicians. It was difficult to find manuscripts, but there was a premiere of the Saint Matthew Passion that Mendelssohn had done in 1829. It was on March 11th, I believe. He had a manuscript because his father and mother collected manuscripts and he got a manuscript of this piece.

Yes.

I think from all the music teachers I've ever had, I understood the importance of studying Bach.

He didn't write Master of Puppets, but he wrote some great, powerful music.

Well put. Well put. I tried to educate the aforementioned music teachers of the brilliance of the Master of the Puppets. Sometimes a good riff is greater than any musical composition.

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.

That's your go-to. So like the stereotypical like guitar store, when you come in, you're playing Master of Puppets.

I'll play Master of Puppets. 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, like a lot of times I'll go and I'll do drop D something or play Tool. I usually would do something, do some drop tuning thing. And it's always got to be some type of metal that I'll test to see if the bottom ends tight on the amp and stuff. So yes.

All right. We have to talk about this a little bit. You made a bunch of videos about it. There was 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 AI in music. So there's these, I would say incredible apps like Suno, UDO, 11 Labs Music is also great. They can generate basically text to song, full song from a text prompt. And a lot of people start freaking out just based on how good it is.

So if you write a prompt in Suno and it spits out a song, which I've done, made a bunch of videos in this. I made up a fake artist, Eli Mercer in this video. Then I did a thing for CBS News. I made up this fake artist, Sadie Winters, and came up with this song, Walking Away. Well, the computer, 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 ChatGPT, the image. Then I went to Claude and I wrote the lyrics because Claude's way better at lyrics than Suno is. Suno's bad at lyrics, at least right now. So 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. But I started thinking about this. People freak out about this. Oh, this is bad. This is bad. And then I thought, I was like, no, who are going to be the ones that are going to benefit from AI?

And there's a thing that's happening where people's ear very quickly is becoming attuned to AI slop.

Yes.

And that's actually quite fascinating. Like for example, one of the things, there's this viral clip going around of an AI-based, like a soul jazz remix of songs like 50 Cent, Many Men. And I think it is super impressive. And that's a different pipeline, actually. It's a tricky pipeline to how to pull that off. And I think a lot of the creativity in that, even that kind of remixing is in the pipeline of how you actually do that, because there's actually a lot of manual stuff in that pipeline.

Yes.

For a soul remix, it actually lacks soul. But it made me think of like when I listen to soul or blues, I think I really want in that case to know, I don't want to AI BB King. I want the real BB King. And if I know if any AI is involved in the BB King process, I'm tuning out.

Yes.

And I don't think I'm being curmudgeonly old dude in that. I think we humans want authenticity.

So when I first started making these AI videos, it started back in 2023, I made my first one. And I would take my phone, come up in the kitchen, I'd play a song. And my youngest and Dylan, my youngest Leila, and I have three kids, and my oldest Dylan, as soon as I play it, why are you listening to AI? 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, okay, what are they hearing that I'm not hearing?

I think the room for creativity right now for humans is lyrics. It seems like the lyrics that are being generated, they lack soul somehow. I don't know the words correctly.

Yeah.

I mean, they can be incredibly sophisticated, but there's something, the edge is not there. Some kind of edge that we want in our lyrics, some kind of surprise, but not cringe or not cliché. Something truly novel in the lyrics. But if that's the case, it's kind of sad that that's where the creativity has to come from, but not from the music.

I think the role of the musician is that in actually, if they use AI to assist them in coming up with ideas, like as a creation tool, then the musician, like some of the 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 it's just basically like an idea generator. And I think that that's a great use of AI is for that.

But see, if you do that, does it make you sad that you don't necessarily need to learn instruments? So basically you can, I mean, you can think of it as a different kind of instrument, but you can write lyrics, you can hum the melody, you can just hum parts.

Yeah.

You know, 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 fingers on a drumstick.

That's why I'm not going to use AI, Lex, is for that reason, because to me, it's just boring. And when I use it, it's like, eh. I used it for about a month or so just because I was making videos and I was trying to see how it's advancing. Every three or four months, 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 use.

I hear you. You're a bit old school.

I'm old school. Yeah.

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've been trying to figure it out. 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 final output is not the code. The output is what the code creates. And there it's extremely useful, not, it doesn't matter if it's boring or not, it's useful. But when the final output is the thing that AI creates, which it would be in music, then there's something about us that just, like we know, there is something boring about it.

Yes.

We want to celebrate and see the thing that's hard to create. And if AI can just text the song, generate a top 10 hit, we'll quickly lose value for that, I think. And so we'll want raw, like raw, whatever shape that raw takes. I want to say raw talent, but that raw talent of any kind. And perhaps 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 great TikToks.

It is a talent. Absolutely. When I see anything that's AI generated, I instantly recognize any video, I'm like, boring, boring, boring. And 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 just, then they don't even want to engage with the social media platforms, which is a danger, which I think they need to crack down on the AI slop. YouTube's done a pretty good job on it, but it's hard to stay on this.

Yeah, it's fundamentally like, it's fundamentally boring. I think boring is a really good.

Yes, boring.

And it's annoying to have to flip through the AI slop.

Yeah.

But I think actually as a civilization, it's just inspiring for authenticity because you want to be real 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 the long form versus overproduced. Because I think AI is making people realize that AI is good at being overproduced.

Right.

So there'll be more.

Let's get that covered.

Yeah. Even artists, because you're saying like, yeah, they'll use it as tools. Part of me thinks like, not really. I think they'll quickly, this kind of process of generating a bunch of different options and choosing the one you like the most, I think is a really frustrating process for artists. And I think AI will definitely be used extremely effectively as a very fine-grained tool in the image domain.

Yes.

For working with audio in different kinds of ways. There's a bunch of different other programs that do that. Maybe for like B-roll footage and 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.

I've saved videos where I'm doing speaking over music, for example, in an interview. Somebody's playing and we have two dialogue, two people speaking in lavs, 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.

So you have this video breaking down Sabrina Carpenter's song "Manchild," and you use that as an example of building up people's intuition about 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? And all that kind of stuff. I was wondering if you could speak to that.

In that particular song, 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.

You being the old guy.

Me being the old guy that, well, Sabrina really was the, she's amazing and she's the one that wrote everything in the song. 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 included on the list of songwriters.

Yeah. 10 people, 11 people. I mean, you know, like why are the song, why does 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 you have songs that are used samples for the whole thing, like the Doce song that's out right now. And I said, look, she took a Gauthier song and basically took off his melody and she created her own melody over it. It's like, well, it's, I mean, it saves time for, you don't have to actually create a track.

Yeah, you pointing that out, the song "Anxiety" broke my brain.

I mean, it's so absurd.

Yeah, it just feels unfair. It feels, it's a good song, but it was also a good song before, and it was, before that, it was also a good song.

Right, 2011 or the Louis Monfa in 1967. So 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's not based on that? That's ridiculous.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And Doce has some really good songs on her record.

Yeah, but why are these the ones that are coming to the top, right? This is interesting. 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 a big fan of Bruno Mars. He's a great songwriter and he's a great musician all around.

Absolutely.

You know, this is Michael Jackson reincarnated.

Super, super talented guy.

Incredible, right?

Yes.

You mentioned Billie Eilish and her brother write a lot of the songs.

So good. Yeah. Super talented.

I mean, Taylor Swift is unlike anything. I mean, that's a historic figure in music. But she's a fundamentally, at least originally, a singer-songwriter.

Yes.

So that's a, I mean, that, I mean, I'm sorry, but that is a, like of the kind of music that Rick Beato gives props to. She's the, 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.

Can we take a quick bathroom break?

Yeah.

Okay. I have to ask you about this complexity that you're facing on a basically daily basis. I think 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 in 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 copyright claims.

Yeah.

13. So what, can you just speak to this whole thing? You've been in a constant battle, WMG, UMG, all the.

All the three-letter name record labels, right?

The music business people. So 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 never knew back in, I started, it'll be 10 years in June. So when I play music in a video, YouTubers were not playing music in videos because they didn't, because of the content ID things and the takedowns and stuff. So I would play music and I'd just see what happens. And then you get a content ID claim or you realize that people were, quote unquote, "blockers," and I came up with that term that they would block your video, take down your video.

Demonetize means they get all the money.

They get all the money. In a one-hour video, if you use 20 seconds of a clip, they get all the money. Okay? So I hired a lawyer finally after the Rick Rubin video because I thought it was ridiculous. I go over to Tuscany, I interview Rick at his house, and I hired a lawyer to fight this, who I'm going to have on my channel. I don't want to say who it is, but he's another YouTuber. And he had approached me a couple of years ago, and it's not cheap to do.

Oh, you're going to do like a public interview with him?

I'm going to do an interview with him, yes. I'll talk to him today about it, actually.

I can't wait.

Yeah.

That would be great.

So he said, you should fight these because every single one of them is fair use. And he went through my entire catalog. I have 2,100 videos. And he's fought 4,000 content ID claims and won every single one of them. 4,000. That's a lot. I mean, when I do top 20 guitar solos, there's 20 content ID claims, you know? 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.

Yeah.

So is there, I mean, that's, it's still, you still a lawyer, still work. Does that, is there a hopeful thing you can say about the future of.

Yeah, fight these content ID claims. If it's fair use, if you're not just playing the song and listening to it and, because 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.

Yeah. See, that's an obvious one, but even reaction videos, right?

Yeah. Even reaction videos. Yes. Absolutely.

Those are more borderline.

Yeah.

But I don't know. I love those videos.

Absolutely.

Like when a person is just sitting there and listening to it and they're like, you know, like a voice teacher is listening to a vocal performance.

Yeah, but those are breakdowns.

Yeah, those are breakdowns. Yeah.

I think that the content ID stuff that was happening with these major labels, they would hire third parties that would go out, use AI and go and anytime they detect anything, they always go to the biggest channels first to get the most views. It makes sense and stuff. 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 fight back at these things because they're afraid to have their channels taken down.

Yep. So Rick Beato said, hold my beer.

There you go.

So I mean, it's important.

It took me years though, Lex. I didn't, I've been doing this, so I've been doing it for one year now and I'm nine years, 10 years into my channel. So it took me that long.

I mean, hopefully it, there's a ripple effect also. It's not just your situation. Hopefully you don't have to deal with this for much longer.

Right.

How has Spotify changed music? Sometimes we highlight the fact that they change the nature of music and that it's, the scarcity is not there. But also a lot of it, it's like every kind of music is available and so fast and so easy. It's easy to explore.

It's a commodity. It's like turning on a water faucet.

Do you think there's some good to, I mean.

There's a lot of good to that, right? Have you, did you go through that whole, I still remember where I had to basically throw away the albums.

I never did that.

When, after you uploaded them into your computer?

Yeah. So there's that two-step process. One, there's like the hard albums, CDs for me.

CDs, yeah.

And then you upload them into your computer.

Yep.

And you save them. And then you, how do you put it? Allegedly a friend of yours pirates some extra songs.

Yep.

And then puts them on the computer. But you have your stash on the computer. You're like, this is my finely selected stash of greatness. Sometimes organized by album, sometimes not. And then the big moment for me that was really difficult to do, really difficult to do is throw away that stash and switch to Spotify. Switch to streaming and basically rebuild the stash of playlists and all this kind of stuff. And it was heartbreaking because so much love and effort went into that.

So one of the things 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 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, it means 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 that are getting a cut of the streaming with the music. And, you know, the search and discovery, I mean, there's a, there's benefits of algorithms and there's negative things of algorithms.

Like one thing I really love doing on Spotify is you can have radio.

Yeah.

Meaning like you have a few, it's similar to Pandora, like you can, okay, this is going to 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.

What else would you listen to?

I need motivation. Classical music, I don't know. But yeah, it's pretty good because it recommends a bunch of other stuff I wouldn't even know. Some of it I know obviously, but akin to the, similar to the Rage Against the Machine type thing, it recommends a bunch of artists and it's like, oh, holy shit, that's awesome. So I don't know, that discovery works really well. So some of it is a technology thing. But that experience is fundamentally more vibrant than I had previously with my stash.

So I have my old iTunes libraries from 2005 that I have saved, the CDs that I uploaded into my computer.

Yeah.

Anytime I do, I play songs on my, when I'm doing an interview, I always play WAV files. I put them in. And it's funny that when I interview a mixer, I interviewed this mixing engineer, Andy Wallace. And people comment, wow, that song sounded amazing. I think, well, not only are they great mixes that he did, but I'm using WAV files in there and people notice that, and these are WAV files from, you know, original encoding, not remastered things that Spotify keeps doing and adding a bunch more top end and things like that.

What's your current, and people are really curious about that. So what's your current stack? What are the tools you use? What's your DAW? What's the audio interface? What are the mics?

So I use Pro Tools for the most part, but I also use Logic and Ableton. I've got all those.

So you're mostly on a Mac?

I'm only on a Mac.

Only on a Mac.

Only on a Mac.

I'm only the opposite.

Although we have multiple PCs because my kids use PCs.

Yeah, just throw a bell.

They do it for gaming. They like to game.

That's true. But like in terms of editing, I hate how good Mac is.

So good.

It's just integrating, the hardware and the software just work well together.

If I didn't have a Mac, honestly, I wouldn't be talking to you right now because I got a G3 that, so the only good thing that a major label did for me is when my band was on UMG and they bought a, they bought me a G3 and an SM7 and Pro Tools DigiO won, the first Pro Soomer 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 got to give it to Max for that.

So Pro Tools, I mean, that's still the standard.

That's kind of the industry standard, yeah.

I got to ask you because I know I've never used Pro Tools. I've used, again, I'm a caveman. I've used 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 1% 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.

It is.

Yeah.

But I feel like that, I mean, it's designed for people that are doing like all kinds of MIDI stuff and like looping and the, what is it? The push buttons with the beats and the, I mean, I sound really out of touch, but it's just, the power is incredible. Also, I think it's not just for recording, it's also for live performances.

Yes.

So this is why Studio One has been a little bit nicer for me because it's simpler made for recording more so.

Any DAW that you get used to, Lex, that's.

Just use anything.

Using it, yeah. And you have to become a master at the things. If you want to be a recording engineer or producer, you become an expert. A lot of the, you know, Finneas and Billie Eilish, I think that they use Logic. That's their DAW that they like to use. And Logic, you know, a lot of pros use Logic. You know, I fire up Logic every couple of days and I use it for things. I have it on my laptop here and I have Pro Tools and Logic on my laptop. I use both. I use Pro Tools mostly though.

But Pro Tools, that's where you feel like at home.

I'm an expert in Pro Tools.

Are you using any emulation, any Amp Sims or it's all real Amps?

No, I use Amp Sims. On my laptop here, when I travel and things like that, I use Neural DSP, which I just did a video at their headquarters in Helsinki. And the CEO, Doug Castro, 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 AxeFX. 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.

Real?

Yeah.

Wait, sorry, a hundred?

I have a hundred, yeah. About a hundred, maybe 95.

How does one go, get to that level?

Collecting and being, I'll be 64 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 tone difference?

Yes.

So you know the tone difference.

Everything does one thing really well. And so it'd be like, okay, so I have this Marshall JCM-800 that's modded 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 sound that's more like Metallica or Dream Theater or something. So, oh, I'm going to pull out my Mesa Boogie. Or I need something that's chimy, that's more like Brian May or like The Edge.

Down to a hundred. It's only a hundred.

Yeah. I can get by with probably 75.

Come on. But then you're really running the risk of not having just the right amp. But you're using emulation, so that's great. I mean, on that, but there's the other side of it, which is the guitar. I told you offline, I think having multiple guitars is cheating, but whatever. Nobody agrees with me on this. I only have like one, I do have some side pieces, but one main.

The greatest track?

What do you play?

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 look at the guitars. I don't really know why exactly, just to be in the aura of these great instruments. And 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.

I pretty much have mainly old school guitars, right? So I have Gibsons, I have Fenders, I have PRS guitars, and then I have, I have two Gibson acoustics. I have a 1957 Country and Western that I've had for probably 30 some odd years. It's a great guitar. And I have a J45 Gibson and I have a Martin D28. So I only have three nice acoustics.

What can you say about like the different feels that the guitars, the acoustics have? Like how do you know which one to pull out?

It depends on the kind of part that I'm playing. If I want something with really tight mid-range, that doesn't have a lot of low bass, this particular old Gibson that I have, the 57, I will pull that out. It's got very balanced strings and mid-range doesn't have a lot, it doesn't have a booming bottom end, booming low E string or anything or A string. So it depends on what kind of sound I'm looking for.

It's more about sound versus feel?

Yeah. All my guitars play equally well. I have them all set up to where they play well. I have a signature Gibson guitar that I've had for five years now.

When you say Gibson, Gibson Les Paul?

Gibson, it's a double cut Les Paul special, yeah. With P90 pickups.

I don't know what double cut means, but it sounds impressive.

That means two cut, two.

Oh.

Yeah. As opposed to a Les Paul that has one cut. So it's a Les Paul special that has two. I have it over there. My signature guitar. Yeah.

That's the, all right, nice.

Yeah. When you play this, you're going to be like, oh my God, this is butter.

Now I'm, again, I said it's cheating. I don't.

And what amp do you play through? Do you play through an Amp SIM or do you have, what do you have? Like a.

This is going to be a, yeah, yeah. I use Bias FX. I'm sorry.

Lex, I use Amp SIMs too. So. I just got the new John Mayer Neural DSP plugin today that I have not tried out. He did a modeling of all his amplifiers that Neural DSP did. And it sounds great. John played it. It sounds just like his amps.

Yeah, John is incredible.

John's great.

I've been fortunate enough to have dinner with him two times. And outside of being an incredible musician, he's also conversationally just.

Yes. I've known John since he lived in Atlanta, but when he got signed. And I knew John from way back then, probably in the early 2000s.

I think he doesn't get enough credit. Like he's one of the greatest living guitarists.

He's a fantastic guitar player. Absolutely.

And a celebrator, if that's a word, of great guitar playing.

Absolutely.

By way of advice, you started your YouTube channel in your mid-50s and found incredible success. You've had essentially multiple careers. Is there some wisdom you can extract from that?

So my theory is that somebody's got to be successful, so why can't it be you? That was, that was, that was my, when I started my channel, I mean, I didn't start it to, it started by accident with the Dillon video. 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 think that 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 kind of want to be famous. They want to get the clicks and the views and so on. And that's the thing they chase and optimize. I think the thing that you're leaving unstated, perhaps, is that you spent many years pursuing the mastery of a craft. And there's a lot of value to getting good at something.

Absolutely.

Offline. You can actually reveal your journey online, but the thing you're chasing is not fame. It's getting good at something. And I think actually what happens is even if the thing you get good at is not the thing that you become famous for, if that's the thing that ends up happening, it's still like getting good at one thing kind of somehow relates to getting good at another thing. Somehow they'll lead you to get better at getting better at the next thing, at the next thing, and the next thing.

My theory of my channel has always been make videos on things I'm interested in. And at first I thought, oh, nobody's going to watch an old white-haired guy on YouTube. That was kind of my thing. Well, that was not correct. And then it's like, we'll just make videos on stuff I'm interested in. It 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.

You're a fully behind-the-camera kind of guy meaning like, no.

No. No pictures. No pictures with people. Hey, can we take a picture? I said, no, no pictures with people.

And now you're like, you're the talent. You're the face. No, I mean, but again, the thing you're leaving unstated there is like you spent a lot of years 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 want to skip that part.

So I have an undergrad in classical bass. I have a master's from New England Conservatory in jazz guitar. Then I taught college for, I taught jazz studies for five years from '87 to '92. Then I got a publishing deal, my first publishing deal in 1992 with Polygram Publishing. And then I became a producer when I was 37, 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. I never was like an interviewer, what?

You haven't just done that. You've taught yourself not how to do just YouTube, but YouTube Shorts.

Yes. Different, totally different thing. Totally different skill.

And then not just YouTube, but like how to be like a, there's a, because you're both a YouTuber 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 speak for the entirety of the internet, thanking you for how you introduce your videos and how you close them. Because you, this is a big part of YouTube where people have a 30-minute introduction to a five-minute video. You just go straight in. That's really wonderful. It's, I mean, and on all fronts. I mean, I suppose it has to do with the production skill that you have of understanding, cutting the fat.

To make a song.

Yep. Yeah. Cutting, cutting the fluff, cutting the bullshit. 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. 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 can.

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 connect and reconnect.

I mean, it's pretty much everything in life. Nothing means anything more than the friendships that you make in your family.

Yeah. What's the point of this whole thing?

That's right.

What's the role of music in the human experience?

Well, hopefully to enlighten people and to create the soundtrack of their life.

It is, right?

Yeah.

Music does something. I'll get, sometimes when I'm alone, I'll 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 when I'm working out, listening to Rage Against the Machine, like protest. Or as I was listening to the Metallica, I was really listening to the set that they played in Moscow, just hyped, like truly hyped.

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 that can vibrate strings and together create harmonies and melodies and ones that reverberate through 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.

Same, Lex.

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 decade, over the centuries. Thank you for being who you are and thank you for talking today.

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.