Rick Beato traces his musical obsession to Jimi Hendrix’s "Hey Joe" solo at 14, learned by ear despite lacking formal theory, and contrasts Hendrix’s improvisational freedom with bebop’s technical precision—shaped by Miles Davis’s revolutionary live quintets. He highlights David Gilmore’s unmatched tone (Hi-Watt amp, Binson echo) and Mark Knopfler’s soulful vibrato, while critiquing AI’s soulless replication (e.g., Suno, 11 Labs) and the industry’s over-reliance on interpolation. Beato’s journey—from teaching jazz to producing albums at 37—underscores that mastery, not virality, defines fulfillment, and music’s timeless emotional power remains irreplaceable. [Automatically generated summary]
The following is a conversation with Rick Beatto, 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.
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
To support it, 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, dear friends, here's Rick Beatto.
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?
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 song.
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.
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 Andre 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.
unidentified
and it's amazing that what is that So that's gypsy jazz.
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.
And Charlie Parker created this language of improvisation that was far more sophisticated than the swing players of the big band era.
You know, think of people like Benny Goodman of that era.
They would have really fast tempo songs, angular lines, chromaticism, things like that, chromatic notes.
It's like, 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.
My dad was not a musician, but for some reason, he liked incredibly sophisticated music that was very technical.
And I just heard it and just was like, oh, yeah, okay, cool.
And not realizing that it was developing my ear because I really, bebop is one of the hardest to improvise in that style, in that language of bebop.
It's very difficult to do.
And hearing it as a kid is one of the things that I think enables you, just like languages, enables you to learn it as opposed to somebody that's never been exposed to it and tries to learn it as a teenager.
I think it's very similar to learning languages, which kind of is like my theory on perfect pitch, that every child is born with perfect pitch and they start to lose the ability around nine months when people become culturally bound listeners when babies do.
They start out as citizens of the world.
You know, they can, they have the phone, the neural pathways to hear the sounds, the phonemes of all 6,500 languages spoken on earth.
But then around nine months, they begin to lose that ability and they, when they become these culturally bound listeners, there's a great YouTube video with this woman, Patricia Kuhl.
She's a language researcher.
And I watched this, The Linguistic Genius of Babies.
I saw this in 2010, this lecture that she did, like a TED Talk.
And she talks about this, that kids, they did an experiment.
They exposed kids to Mandarin three times a week for 25-minute sessions, just a person speaking Mandarin to these babies.
And they were able to recognize the sounds, the phonemes of that language even later on.
And when I realized that my son Dylan had perfect pitch, I thought, why does Dylan have perfect pitch?
But no one in my family had ever had perfect pitch.
And I thought, well, it must be because of the things I exposed to him prenatally and then in the first nine months of his life, because that's the only way I could explain it.
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 they can, a person with perfect pitch can hear a note and immediately identify it or a collection of notes.
Well, my course, it will play you an interval and then you identify it by clicking on whether it's a major third or minor third or major sixth or minor sixth or perfect fifth or tritone, whatever it is.
And it will teach you gradually over time how to recognize all the intervals.
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, it's going from the six minor chord to the four major to the five major to one major.
And you can just identify it immediately.
And then you figure out what the first chord is, then you know what the rest of the chords are 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.
So as you're doing that, and then you, 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.
Well, you're basically learning music theory at the same time with that because learning music theory is just the name of things in music.
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.
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.
You take it for granted, like you've been playing guitar for, I don't know how many years, forever, right?
And you don't even think about stuff like that when you're playing a guitar solo.
Every little thing that you do, if you're playing your comfortably numb guitar solo, you have to out of mid-air strike the string that your finger's on to play the note.
And these are all fine adjustments that you're doing.
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 so, like, if you have a fretboard here, I think the more like classical guitarists, they're 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.
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, 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 that are so they don't ring out.
If you're playing the first note and comfortably numb and the solo at the end and you're at the ninth fret of the G string and you bend that, if you bend that G string and you accidentally hit the B string under it, you don't want that ringing.
So you have to kind of angle your index finger so it to mute to mute that.
So all these micro adjustments that you don't even think about.
I mean, you're not thinking about that Lex when you're playing it.
You've done it so many times that these things are just part of your brain.
That's why this is such a great brain developer for kids to learn instruments.
Well, then it's like if you play electric guitar, then you get into single note playing and stuff like that.
That's where it gets to me where it gets really fun.
You know, you have single note playing that 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, there's 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 and songs, lead and songs, and then you have finger picking.
Uh, so I guess you're speaking to the fact there's a if you're righty, there's a right hand that 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.
So, you get them to like fall in love with music and playing all right, and that takes a couple months, three months depends on how motivated they're 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.
But otherwise, like if you're a 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 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 polychords.
So the people that were the best musicians would looked at it.
I was like, oh my God, you know, is C augmented over D flat augmented?
And the second chord was A flat major over A major, but they were both in inversion, right?
So it was like first inversion, A flat major chord, first inversion, A major chord.
And then A minor over D flat major, and then E add nine over F major.
And for an eight year old, I mean, for anyone, plus they're all close voiced.
They're all just right next to each other.
It's not like, you know, where you can hear them clear.
It's all in the mid-range of the piano.
So you have to really listen and he has to dissect each one.
Like, what are the notes being played there?
And, and what is like, what's the theory?
Because he's actually using music theory to dissect them.
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.
It's named Aydin Essen.
And I would play Ayden's improvisations for Dylan.
It had very sophisticated harmony and linear things in it.
And Keith Jarrett and mainly jazz, classical, and modern classical music.
And then we would listen to rock music once he was born.
I'm talking on my wife's stomach before Dylan was born, starting at 15 weeks for 30 minutes a night.
And then when Dylan was born, I would sit with him for an hour every morning and listen to music and I would look at him.
In order for this, for them to hear these phonemes, apparently, and develop this language or get the language acquisition has to involve the social brain.
So when kids look at you, when a baby's looking at you, they're looking at your mouth and they're getting social cues from that.
And this is also another component of saying, this is where this word stops or starts and stops.
These are how the phonemes are separated from one another.
These are how they're connected.
So I believe that all kids are born with perfect pitch.
And then around nine months, they begin to lose it.
If you don't engage their social brain, making these pitches known.
I never played pitches for Dylan.
I said, this is a C, this is a B flat, this is a G.
I just played complex high-information music for him and played with them.
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.
that sounds more 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.
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 you had records like the birth of cool and modal jazz and hard bop and records like Bitch's 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.
Now, Miles made records with many people, but the 50s quintet had John Cole train in it.
I mean, it had different piano players, Wynton Kelly, but Paul Chambers and the bass, Philly Joe Jones and the drums.
And that particular group made just incredibly important records.
And then he had his 60s group, which was Herbie Hancock on the piano, Ron Carter on the bass, Tony Williams and the drums, and Wayne Shorter on the saxophone.
And they made all these incredibly important records.
I forget who said it in the 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.
Can you speak to that?
Just 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 recording, famous records.
And I said, did you guys ever rehearse with Miles?
No, never.
I said, so what would you do?
He goes, we'd just show up at the studio and he'd have the charts, put him on the stand and we would just roll.
And I said, would you listen to it after?
No.
And I said, well, what about your, what about the live records that you did when you'd record at clubs and things like that?
He goes, we never knew that we were recording.
He goes, maybe I'd see a microphone, a different kind of microphone in my bass amp.
He goes, then months later, a record would come out and I'd see and I was on it and I would take it down to the union and say, I played on this record.
So he paid for it.
But he said, we didn't even know we were recording.
So Miles was always about, you know, don't think about it.
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 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.
Now, the day later, I would have said it's the second solo.
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?
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 to 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, they that brings it to life to them again.
And they can, they can kind of piece together some aspects about it and they can really talk.
He can talk about the phrasing and the, you know, the kind of melodic direction of things like that.
So there's a lot of tiny details that go into a particular song, whether it's on 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 what this sound or that you make it look easy, but you have to have a depth of knowledge.
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.
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, 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.
David, great to meet you, buddy.
And, you know, Don's like, so he's a sales guy.
And so during the interview, I was like, hey, John, what was I going to ask David?
Oh, ask him about the Gilmore effect.
Oh, yeah, that's right.
And the Gilmore effect is my thing that I say in the comments section when people say, anytime anybody plays anything technical, oh, yeah, that's great, but I much prefer David Gilmore.
And so I always call it the Gilmore effect.
Anytime I have like Ingve Malmstein, anybody that played that has chops that I interview, the negative comments are always, well, I prefer David Gilmore.
And I said that, I told David that he's like, well, maybe they should keep their opinions to themselves.
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And now back to my conversation with Rick Beatto.
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.
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 Beatos, listening to just a bunch of songs.
And I learned, it's embarrassing 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 so many of the legendary songs of rock, including Wonderful Tonight, including Layla, and including George Harrison's something legendary song also.
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 Lanois, 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.
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 and all these records that I love.
And there's just so many interesting stories that, I mean, these interviews could go on for days with Rick and the variety of records that he worked on.
And there's so much knowledge to be gained for me at least.
And I think that the craft of production and recording engineering is something that is not well documented, especially since there's no, there's so few studios nowadays where there used to be a mentorship thing where you go and you work as an assistant engineer and you work your way up.
I interviewed a guy named Ken Scott that worked with the Beatles.
But I have a theory that because PA systems were so bad back then.
And the Beatles, people screamed so loudly that the Beatles thought, okay, we don't, we don't need, we can't tour anymore 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 Chase Stadium.
People are screaming so loudly they can't hear themselves.
They're like, okay, forget this.
We can't tour.
We'll just make studio records.
So that's what they did.
And in that one year, like from August 6th, 1965, they put out Help.
Then in December 3rd, they put out Rubber Soul of 65.
Then August 5th, they put out Revolver.
So within 365 days, they put out three 14, I think 14 song records.
So they wrote and recorded three incredibly important records.
They were in the studio.
It's like working out.
They're practicing their craft every day, writing songs, trying to outdo the other ones.
And so you had the perfect thing of four supremely talented musicians, songwriters, singers, and then the best producer you could possibly have, George Martin.
And it was just a perfect storm.
I think that when I would talk to friends that would just play in local clubs and they'd play four-hour sets five nights a week, and they never lost their voices because they're always working those muscles.
And same with the Beatles.
They were always in the studio singing every single day doing takes.
Well, 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.
So they have a whole lifetime of experience that lead up to this.
And they're not improvising, but things for improvising, writing pop songs.
And that I think when your mind is really most active and your brain processing speed is at its pinnacle, that this is just my theory, that people can come up with those kind of ideas.
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.
You have to be able to control the roller coaster of your mind.
And of course, drugs will be a part of that.
And you think everything is allowed and everything is possible.
And then there's also a culture, depending on who you hang out with, that certain kinds of categories of drugs are good for your creativity.
And so naturally start to abuse those drugs.
I don't know.
I think it's really interesting the role that drugs have played in the history of music.
They have certainly been extremely destructive, but they have also certainly been productive.
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.
But yeah, you've met him and you know something about the process of his 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're going to start this.
And no one's responding.
I can hear talking.
It's like, what's going on?
Where are they?
Then all of a sudden, they come back in the studio and they were stunned.
I said, where were you guys?
Elton John just walked into our session and he said he's a big fan.
He said to come over when we're done and hang out in studio A.
So we did.
And he was there with Bernie Toppin.
They were working on a song.
And we talked there for an hour and he was talking about recording two records a year.
And then they'd go on tour and they'd write and record the whole record in two weeks.
So Bernie would give him lyrics.
Elton would go out and spend 15 minutes writing all the melody.
He'd look at his lyrics and he was doing that that day.
Bernie was there and they had a lyric sheet up in the piano.
And Elton would go on and they just read, okay, just record this.
And Elton would sit there and play and come up with the song in 15 minutes or so.
But then there's also like, we're talking about this guitar stuff, but Leonard Cohen, hallelujah, and 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, uh, 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, and I've gone through different periods of you've met me at a point in my life where I've given up on it a little bit.
I'm such a fan of like the Zappa-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 time, you know, thinking about like what would have happened if it worked out, that kind of thing.
And then, you know, I love that song for a long time.
And, you know, at some point, I found out that he wrote that when he was in his early 20s.
And you realize similar with the Beatles.
Like, these guys somehow are able to capture the human condition so masterfully.
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.
I think there's a social way of listening to music when maybe a concert and so on.
But there's this, there's nothing like you're alone in the car driving, listening to like whatever it is, Bruce Springsteen.
I think Louis C.K. has a bit about that.
Was it Bruce Springsteen?
Please sometimes has to pull over to the side of the road, just weep or something like this.
It's just Something about that sometimes the song just connects with you, and I don't know it.
Nothing like a melancholy song could do that.
It you think about like maybe things you regret or how life could have worked out, and sometimes it's not even about like it's not even real.
It just connects something to the in the soul, the uneasiness that we all feel, maybe the loneliness we all feel that underpins so much of the human condition.
Uh, that line is 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.
Um, well, we have to say, I have to say, we have to say, James Hedfield, James Hetfield.
I mean, there's nothing I have, I mean, I have to talk to you about this.
I have, I mean, this is the greatest, I think, the greatest concert of all time.
This is uh, their historic performance in Moscow in September of 91.
This is shortly before the Soviet Union collapsed.
Plus, we should mention ACDC 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 a ridiculously inaccurate statement.
So, it's a free concert.
So, any official counts don't count.
It's definitely over a million.
It's very likely to be 1.5, 1.6 million people.
And this moment in history that I think they channeled, it's like whenever great music, the metallic was firing on all cylinders at the very top of their game, and they meet this moment in history and this place in history that was a defining part of the 20th century collapsing.
And you have these people who are for a moment through music are able to escape the fear, the anger they feel, all of it.
There's also a political, social, cultural moment meeting the musical moment.
And the set list, I was just, I listened to this several times over the past few days, just taking myself back into that moment in time.
Listen to this set list: Enter Sandman, Creeping Death, Harvester of Sorrow, Fate to Black, Sad but True, Master of Puppets, Seek and Destroy For Whom the Bell Tolls, One, and Whiplash.
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 ACDC.
The other, which actually is a legitimate thing you've mentioned, is as one of the greatest concerts of all time is Beethoven's world premiere of Ninth Symphony.
You know, I didn't really know the personal side of Beethoven until I saw this movie called Immortal Beloved.
Just a really, it's a masterful celebration of Beethoven in an interesting kind of way through the perspective of a love letter that he's written.
But then I realized like this early, this many, many, this couple decades ago now, that, you know, he went deaf before he even started writing the Ninth Symphony, which is why they considered it to be one of the greatest compositions of all time, greatest symphonies of all time.
He went deaf, couldn't hear anything before he even started writing it.
And so there's that famous story of him in that world premiere of having to be turned around because he can't hear people applauding.
So he has to be turned around to see that people are actually clapping.
I mean, there's just this whole tragic element.
Plus the meaning of the symphony that ends in this beautiful ode to joy.
The symphony itself is a kind of, it starts with the chaos and conflict and ends with this celebration of peace and brotherly unity and I guess a call for that, a reaching for that, for that piece.
And there's a tragic element to it, again, connected to history, which is it was post-Napoleonic Wars and before the American Civil War.
So like you're in this, in this middle, this respite from war, calling for peace, not knowing that truly horrific wars are coming.
So you have the American Civil War and you have, of course, the two world wars coming.
So this, all of it together.
And the fact that he's conducting deaf, and he wrote this whole thing, deaf.
I was reading a lot about his process.
And he just edits and edits and edits and edits.
So the fact that he had to edit in his head is just insane.
Like, why the amount of time it takes 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.
Where do you get the motivation when you can't hear the actual finished work?
Well, and people would say, Well, he's here, here's in his head.
But what kind of enjoyment is it?
You want to hear the orchestra?
I mean, it's really profound that he that he was inspired to do this.
There's a thing called the Heligerstadt Testament that he wrote.
It was a letter to his brothers from 1802.
I think they found it in his desk after Beethoven died.
And he felt a sense of shame and humiliation because of his hearing loss.
And he said that he was afflicted with this thing where him of all people that someone standing next to him could hear a flute that he could not hear, or a shepherd singing in the field that and he could not hear this.
And of all the people, why him where hearing played such an important part?
Another person that would had to have had perfect pitch because you could never do this if you didn't have perfect pitch, which I think all these great composers, for the most part, Brahms didn't, from what I know, but all the rest of them for sure had perfect pitch.
So they could hear these things in their head, and that's how they composed.
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.
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, right?
Becoming an authoritarian.
And Beethoven sort of famously was critical of that.
Nevertheless, I think maintained a fascination with Napoleon throughout his life.
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?
Well, the people that are already great songwriters, because you have to be able to recognize when it spits out something good versus when it spits out something that's not that good.
And every other song, I've probably created 130 song ideas, out of which there's three good ones.
So when AI, 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 Layla, and I have three kids, and my oldest Dylan, as soon as I played, why are you listening to AI?
And I was like, oh my God, instantly.
It's like, how do you know?
Oh, it has this ringing sound in the thing.
So it took me probably about four or five days to figure out, okay, what are they hearing that I'm not hearing?
So I did it.
I separated all the parts.
And what they're hearing was the artifacts that are in the vocal reverb that sent that were that made incomplete.
It just couldn't do the ambiences correctly, right?
Because it's trained on a lot of these AI programs are trained on very low bit rate MP3s, right?
So they feed all this stuff in there.
So they're getting really inferior information in the training process.
Whereas now, when they make these deals with the major labels, they'll get the multi-tracks and they'll get high-quality WAV files to train from, right?
And whoever opts in, they get the solo vocal tracks, you know, if Ed Sheeran wants to do it or Drake or whoever wants to give their voice to it, let it do its thing, and then get their royalties from it.
I'm not saying that any of them are doing it.
I'm just giving an example.
But Every time that I would do it, I could be down the hall and I would play something in my phone just to see if they'll like, why you listen to AI?
Oh, they could instantly tell.
Then eventually it started getting better.
And then it'd be like, is this AI?
I'd be in the car with Layla coming back from Taekwondo practice.
And she's like, is this AI?
Why does it sound like AI?
Sounds like it could be AI.
And I'd be like, yeah, it's AI.
She's like, oh, it's getting better.
And then I did this song for, it was an NPR interview.
I created a song with a fake artist, and the song was called Neon Ghosts.
And I played it for Layla in the car.
She's like, can you separate the tracks?
I said, yeah, I have them separated back home.
Okay, I want to go down here.
So we go down to the studio and I play it for her and she listens to the soloed vocal.
She said, wow, this is really realistic.
This is very hard to tell, even with a soloed vocal.
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.
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 facebook.
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.
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.
When I see anything that's AI generated, I instantly recognize it.
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, And then they kind of just, then they don't even want to engage with the social media platforms, which is 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.
It gets flooded with so much of this stuff.
It's so easy to create and put up there.
And to just be in the whack-a-mole thing where you're just trying to get rid of it all is fundamentally like it's fundamentally boring.
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.
Even artists, because you're saying, like, yeah, they'll use it as tools.
Part of me thinks like, not really.
Like, I think, I think, 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.
It's editing images, but not like macro editing, but very specific kind of editing that Photoshop is increasingly integrated.
And I mentioned to you offline, the whole Isotope RX group of software that does a lot of the denoising, all the D, removing the wind, all the they integrate machine learning extremely effectively.
There's a bunch of different other programs that do that.
Maybe for like B-roll footage and the 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 dial two people speaking and laughs, but it's but there's so much bleed coming from the person playing that you can't hear what we're saying.
And then we'll split out the voice for that section, the two voices, separate them, and then take the music and separate that stuff.
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And now, back to my conversation with Rick Beatto.
So you have this video breaking down Sabrina Carpenter and his song Man Child, 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.
In that particular song, Jack Antonoff, who was 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 songs.
So my response is like, well, why are you guys even included on the songwriting then?
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.
And for folks who don't know, if you get three of those, each one of those can be a strike on the channel and it can take down your channel.
You get some insane amount.
You said you got like, I think I had a similar thing on the Rick Rubin episode.
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 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.
And I realized at first it was like anything Guns N' Roses, which is still the case, Guns N' Roses, ACDC.
I mean, many bands, Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin.
And then something happened.
There was that guy in the skateboard on TikTok that had the ocean spray thing and he was listening to Dreams by Fleetwood Mac.
And that blew up and became a number one song again.
And the labels then realized, I mean, I had made many videos about why this is wrong and it should be fair use and everything.
Well, because of that, the labels are like, ooh, maybe we should rethink this.
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's just sitting there and listening to it and they're like, you know, like a like a voice teacher is listening to a vocal performance.
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, makes sense and stuff, and yeah, 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 and at these things because they're afraid to have their channels taken down.
Right, have you, did you go through that whole pro?
I still remember where I had to basically throw away the albums and never did that.
Well, if you, 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 yeah, and then, and then you upload them into your computer yep, and you save them, and then you uh, how do you put it?
Allegedly a friend of yours pirates some extra songs yep, and then puts them on the computer.
So you have, 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.
Both the CD, the stashing of the CD and the stashing of the MP3s in the computer.
And then in Spotify, it just seems just effortless.
But it helped me discover all kinds of artists I never would have discovered otherwise.
And Pandora, I use a lot.
Pandora is more prioritizing on the discovery part versus the organization part.
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, there's benefits of algorithms and there's negative things of algorithms.
Algorithms happen to kind of a lot of many times pigeonhole people into listening to the same genre of music all the time and not expanding their, you know, the discovery of new music that you might hear on the radio back in the day where program directors would play things that they liked, right?
And you might hear something, oh, what is that?
Oh, that's a new Soundgarden record or something.
You know, whoa, I like that.
I'm going to go check that out.
You know, something that you might not have heard or something odd.
But that experience is fundamentally more vibrant than I had previously with my stash.
That would just keep a stash and I would listen to the same record over and over and over and over.
But yeah, what's lost is the I'm sure you love this, but listening through the Led Zeppelin records, just driving in a car and listening to the whole thing all the way through.
Anytime I do that, 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 the song sounded amazing.
Well, not only are they great mixes that he did, but I'm using WAV files in there.
And people notice there, and these are WAV files from original encoding, not remastered things that Spotify keeps doing and adding a bunch more top end and things like that.
These are the original WAV files from off the CD that I ripped 20 years ago.
If I didn't have a Mac, honestly, I wouldn't be talking to you right now because I got a G3 that's the only good thing that a major label did for me is when my band was on UMG and they bought me a G3 and an SM7 and Pro Tools Digi01, the first ProSumer 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.
But I feel like that, I mean, it's designed for people that are doing like all kinds of meaty stuff and like looping and what is it, the push buttons with the beats.
And the, man, I sound really out of touch, but it's just the power is incredible.
Also, it's, I think it's not just for recording, it's also for live performances.
If I want something with really tight mid-range with not that doesn't have a lot of low, 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.
So I think there 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 spend many years pursuing the mastery of a craft.
And there's a lot of value to getting good at something.
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 you're 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.
But if you're just chasing fame and trying to figure out how do I do the viral thing or so on, it just seems to you might actually get there, but it'll be unfulfilling and not long-lasting.
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.
I want to be famous.
I want to, you know, this, and that is a thing that's not going to be in most cases effective as a primary thing to chase.
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 and 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 releasing to the set that they played in Moscow, just hyped, like truly hyped.
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.
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 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.