# Authenticity, AI, and the Future of Music Creation

**Podcast:** Lex Fridman Podcast
**Published:** 2026-03-01

## Transcript

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 LexFriedman.com slash sponsors.
It is in fact the best way to support this podcast.
We got Uplift Desk for my favorite office desk, Better Help for Mental Health, Element for Electrolytes, Finn for Customer Service AI agents, Shopify for selling stuff online, and our friend Perplexity for curiosity driven knowledge exploration.
The number of things that Perplexity ships at the rate it ships is freaking incredible.
Choose wiser, my friends.
And now, onto the full ad reads.
I try to make them interesting, but if you skip, please do check out our sponsors.
I enjoy their stuff.
Maybe you will too.
To get in touch with me for whatever reason, go to Lex Freeman.com/slash contact.
Alright, let's go.
This episode is brought to you by Uplift Desk, my go-to for all office and podcast studio furniture.
I'm sitting behind one right now.
The podcast you're about to watch or listen to was filmed behind three uplift desks.
It was upgraded from two because I had to expand and guess there's four people in a podcast to make it a little bit roomier.
In that room, there's four uplift desks because one of them I have I don't know how many months four monitors, four monitors, and a computer on which I do a lot of the editing and now a lot of the agentic stuff.
Every machine, every compute surface in uh my place is doing some kind of agentic work.
There's agents running all the time.
There's an agent running right now on this very computer I'm recording this with.
Anyway, that's on the software front.
On the hardware front, the desks just make me feel happy.
Uh long, long, long before Uplift was a sponsor.
I was using their desks.
And the fact that they're now a sponsor just brings joy to my heart.
I recommend it highly, without question.
The greatest standing desks of all time, customizable, 200,000 desk combinations.
Makes me more productive, brings me more happiness, an incredible product, incredible people, incredible desks.
Cannot recommend it enough.
Go to upliftdesk.com slash Lux.
Use code Lux to get four free accessories, free same-day shipping, free returns, a 15-year warranty, and an extra discount off your entire order.
That's UP L I F T D E S K dot com slash Lex.
This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H E L P Help.
We have an incredible episode coming up on psychiatry.
What an episode.
What a mind-blowing, no pun intended episode.
The human mind, as I'm sure we'll get to in that episode, is an incredibly complex machine.
And each individual mind has its own intricate complexities.
And the history of psychiatry, which is the focus of that episode, is uh a history of people trying to figure out how to be a kind of mechanic to that machine.
I personally think that talk therapy is one of the most powerful ways to at least elucidate, bring to the surface the issues that need to be resolved.
And that's what BetterHelp is about.
They figure out what you need and match it with a licensed professional therapist in under 48 hours.
It's easy, discrete, affordable, available everywhere.
Check them out at betterhelp.com slash lex and save on your first month.
That's betterhelp.com slash lex.
My daily zero Sugar and delicious electrolyte mix.
I gave Element uh actually a shout out in a recent video training video with uh Habib Narmagamedov.
What an incredible experience that was.
And it was a funny moment because uh when we hung out, Islam Ahmedov was there too, and uh I had Element with me.
And uh Islam came up to me.
He's he got really excited when he saw Element.
He's like, Oh, can I have one of these?
It was like a it was like an infomercial.
Uh it was almost like uh a kind of funny Dagestan version of a commercial for Element, but it was real.
And I was like, sure.
It was two people who love Element kind of uh exchanging the goods.
I guess he uh he was all out, so I'm always uh happy to share.
And that in that case, I had a giant stash, so it's not like I was uh letting go.
I still had a stash.
All right, anyway, get a uh free eight-count sample pack with any purchase, try it.
A drink element.com slash lex.
This episode is also brought to you by Finn, the number one AI agent for customer service.
Like I said, I have agents running everywhere all the time.
This particular agent specializes in customer service.
65% average resolution rate.
It's trusted by over 6,000 customers, including AI companies, the engineers of some of which I've already interviewed and will interview in the future.
It's built to handle complex multi-step queries like returns, exchanges, and disputes, obviously, customer service.
A deep care for the concerns of the individual customers is extremely important.
To the degree AI can help facilitate that, that's really important.
I'm a huge believer of what Jeff Bezos talked about in my uh conversation with him as he's always talked about an extreme focus on the customer.
A company that focuses on the customer is a company that's going to succeed.
And don't get comfortable just because you're making a lot of money, just because there's a lot of revenue, a lot of profit.
Don't get lazy.
Don't forget what brought you to the dance.
It's an extreme obsession of making the customer happy.
Anyway, go to fin.ai slash lex to learn more about transforming your customer service and scaling your support team.
That's fin.ai slash lex.
A platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking a lot of cool stuff.
Shopify's CEO that I always talk about, Toby, is now going wild programming.
And I think really important for the engineers at the company to see that the leadership is building, leadership is down, ground level, understanding the state-of-the-art technologies that are involved in uh engineering the product, in this case of Shopify, but also just products in general, how to build.
I think a builder is what makes for a great leader of other builders.
And so I'm always a fan of following along of all the incredible engineering that Shopify is doing behind the scenes to deliver all the products that are delivering.
So that you know, to have the infrastructure for a huge amount of people connecting and selling stuff, uh, plus the thousands of integrations that they have to handle seamlessly.
All of that at your fingertips if you just want to sell some t-shirts like I do, or actually run a legitimate large-scale business.
All of that is supported by Shopify.
Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash Lux.
That's all lowercase.
Go to Shopify.com slash Lex to take your business to the next level today.
This is 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 Beetto.
You had, I think, an incredibly fun and diverse beginning to your music journey.
I heard somewhere that one of the things that made you fall in love with music was uh listening to guitar solo, some epic guitar solo.
Uh, what's an early guitar solo that you remember you connected to spiritually, uh, musically, where you're like, wow, there's magic in this.
Well, the first solo that I learned was Hey Joe.
It was actually a good beginner song, you know, when I first started playing the guitar because it has pretty simple chords, right?
So it's like E C G D A.
And I learned the solo, and I figured out that's like, I'll say it's this pentatonic scale, E minor pentatonic scale, they'll do.
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.
And then I I got so obsessed with it, and I showed my younger brother John, who started playing guitar right at the same time I did.
So I was 14, he was 11.
And I would play rhythm for him for five minutes while he would solo over Hey Joe.
And then as soon as I'd start soloing, he'd throw the guitar down.
Then we get in a fight.
And so my mom eventually was like, What is going on here?
And I was like, John won't play rhythm.
John won't play rhythm for me.
She's like, okay, I'll play rhythm for you.
What what are the chords?
And I was like, okay, it's like E, the C G D A.
And so my mom would literally play rhythm for 20 minutes while I'd play.
Hashtag parenting.
That's amazing.
I when I 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.
Right.
It's what you do with those chords.
It's almost improvisation in the rhythm side.
He did all his really cool chord fragments, uh riffs and things like that.
That's just part of his that's the Hendrix style.
What do you think?
I mean, many people put Hendricks as the greatest guitarist of all time.
What do you think is part of that?
You know, I 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 the analysis of different songs and uh watch your top 20 lists where you're very opinionated, sometimes very uh openly critical about certain kinds of song.
It's fun.
Opinions are fun.
But they do change Lex from day to day, you know.
Like I'm exactly, but when anytime I do a list, if I do 20, I like to do 20 because that gives me some leeway to uh to throw in.
I have to throw in something that is so weird that people, you know, so uh something that a lot of people won't know just to have it on there, so I can at least introduce a per, you know.
I'll put somebody like uh Alan Holdsworth, who's a famous fusion guitar player.
Uh I'll throw in one of his solos or something, or just some 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?
Try to tell me that Hendrix is not up there.
I just am getting that vibe right now.
No, I'm not.
I I but I don't want to say greatest, you know.
You you can say, well, there are people that it that inspire Jimi Hendrix, Charlie Christian, older guitar players.
Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt were the first two really big, and probably and Andre Segovia were 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 Reinhard 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 um well, there's a huge movement right now, gypsy jazz movement, as they call it, that is um kind of built around this style of music that he played back in the early 20th century.
One of the things about Django is that he was in a fire, and he had two of his uh third and fourth finger, so his his ring finger and pinky were essentially melted together.
He had no use of them, although he could use them while he was cording, but a lot of these incredibly fast lines, he's just playing with two fingers, and it's amazing.
That what is that?
So that's gypsy jazz.
That's gypsy jazz, yeah.
Him, Stefan Grappelli, who's a violinist that played with him a lot.
How much of this is uh improvisation?
Everything he's doing there is improvised.
Feels so free.
Yeah.
And fun, like swing.
And then that leads to uh 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 this the big bands were happening in the, you know, from the 20s through the 40s, uh, small people would go out and play in small groups that they would tour with.
And uh, Charlie Parker, who's really kind of the one of the main figures of early Bebop, really developed the language of it.
Usually the the music that they're playing over are standard chord progressions that that they would use as vehicles to improvise over.
A lot of them were AABA form, and Charlie Parker created this uh language of improvisation that was far more sophisticated than the swing players of the big band era, you know, think of people like Benny Goodman uh of that era.
They would have really fast tempo songs, angular lines, chromaticism, things like that, chromatic notes, chromatic notes are just notes next to each other on the next to each other.
I like to think of it as connecting notes, connecting, you're putting in more notes than are supposed to be there, and so doing creating some interesting texture.
Yeah, so that is one of the most difficult styles to master because all these things are a language, yeah.
Blues playing, they're all just languages, right?
It's like just like you'd learn any type of language.
Um, my dad loved Bebop.
Now, when I was a little kid, and he's listening to these Bebop records, whether it's Charlie Parker or Dizzy Gillespie or Oscar Peterson, Joe Pass, great jazz guitar player.
I'm just hearing this stuff, I don't know any different.
My dad was not a musician, but for some reason, he liked incredibly sophisticated music that was very technical, and um I just heard it and just was like, oh yeah, okay, cool.
And not 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.
So 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 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 Cool.
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.
The kids they did a an experiment.
They exposed kids to Mandarin three times a week for 25 minute sessions, just to 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.
We're going to return to Joe Pass.
We've got to go to Dylan.
You mentioned Dylan.
I guess it's in part one of the origin stories of uh you putting out videos into the world is the early videos you did with Dylan, a set of videos on his perfect pitch.
And for people who don't know, maybe you can speak to what perfect pitch means.
It's ability to identify any note without a reference tone.
So um you can play it doesn't matter how quickly they are that they can per a person with perfect pitch can hear a note and immediately identify it, or a collection of notes.
And taking a tangent upon a tangent, you also have a course on ear training.
Yes, but my course is for relative pitch, not to be confused with perfect pitch.
Is it fair to say that relative pitch, as far as the thing you would learn is more useful for musicians?
Yes.
Can you explain the difference between the two?
Relative pitch is basically learning how to identify pitches relative to a 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 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 uh relative pitch you can understand, you can hear the music better.
Yes.
So what what does it take uh since we're taking a tangent on a tangent, what's uh what does it take to train your ear?
What's uh a TLDR in 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 be a half step, major second be a 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 is what is practice look like?
Well, my course, it will play you an interval, and then you identify it by clicking on whether it's you know a major third or minor third or major six or minor six or perfect fifth or tritone, whatever it is, and and it will teach you gradually over time how to recognize all the intervals.
So you you listen to a melodic interval or 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 uh 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 months, you can you can really make um a lot of progress on it if you practice daily.
What benefit does it have to uh to you as a musician in general?
Well, it's great if you 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 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 uh music theory, uh in tur in terms of education, the uh 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 you once you learn the intervals, the 12 intervals and an octave, then you 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.
So there's the sound of things, there's the name of things, and then there's the haptic, like playing the thing, right?
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 uh how they can start and playing guitar, maybe even playing piano and maybe maybe playing other instruments, although guitar, of course, is the greatest instrument of all time.
What are the early steps of that journey?
What what do you recommend people do in general?
Well, if you're a beginner, uh getting a good beginner guitar course and learning first of all the open chords in first position.
Uh a lot of songs can be played that way.
A lot of old songs can be played that way, and maybe not new modern songs necessarily.
So learning a few chords and with an eye towards maybe playing a song?
Yeah.
With an eye towards you learn you learn the chord shapes and you learn how to strum basic patterns to begin with.
I think the first thing for learning guitar is actually how to position your fingers so that you you don't mute strings that you don't want to mute.
Yeah.
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 micro adjustments.
You take it for granted, like you've been playing guitar for I don't know how many years, forever, right?
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 mid-air strike the string that your fingers on to play the note, and these are all fine adjustments that you're doing.
I'm I'm just a hobbyist for creational player, but it if wow, you're taking me all the way back.
You're right.
It's the haptic, the physical aspect of it is really tricky.
Comfortly 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.
Yes, and for that, it's I guess you have to really place the finger in the right place.
Plus, there's the well, there's the calluses, so it doesn't hurt.
And then the positioning of the string on the curvature of the finger.
Where does it fall?
Like how much do you bend the finger?
You have to have enough of flesh on it to actually raise the raise the string and ditch.
Yeah.
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?
Uh so the thumb over the top, way over the top, yes.
And so, like you, if you have a fretboard here, I think the more like classical guitarists, the very proper, perfect, uh perpendicular alignment of the the fingertips to the fretboard, versus like Hendrix is like, fuck it, you nerds.
I'm gonna do it with the messiness is part of the magic.
Of course, like BB 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 that's true.
If you're wearing it lower, lower, then you so you can't get your fingers on top of it like that, and the thumb acts as as a way to mute the lower strings from ringing if you're playing through a loud amplifier.
So there's so many other micro adjustments when you're playing leads, because you have to kind of mute the other strings that are so they don't ring out.
If you're playing 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 fing index finger so it mute to mute that.
So all these micro adjustments that you don't even think about.
I mean, you're not thinking about that lex when you're playing it.
You've done it so many times that these things are just part of your of your brain.
That's why this is such a great brain developer for kids to learn instruments.
And 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 hurts too, right?
It does do an acoustic guitar.
Not for that long though.
For like a week.
Couple, yeah.
A couple weeks.
Couple.
I don't want to discourage anyone.
You know, it's it's actually pretty easy to learn basic stuff.
Right.
But the the the pain is temporary, I guess is the point I'm trying to make.
It is uh so what else?
So the physical component, play a few chords.
Where does the journey continue if you're learning guitar?
Well, then it's like if you play electric guitar, then you get into single note playing and stuff like that.
That's where it gets to me, where it gets really fun.
You know, you have single note playing that with riffs, if you think of back in black, right?
That has a a riff embedded in the in the actual melody, or many songs that have riffs, the Hendrix stuff that has chordal riffs, and you're moving up the neck and and uh involving all the fingers and things like that.
So there's it really depends on what you wanna, 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.
If you have stairway to heaven, songs like that.
How about wanting to learn that?
That involves finger picking because the you have to isolate certain notes of the chord and play two at together, you know, and multiple times.
There's a few crossroads where you get to select things.
Uh so I guess you're speaking to the fact there's the if you're right either 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?
Uh pro later on, I would say.
I wouldn't say necessarily right it right off the bat.
I think I think learning songs is the is the first thing that you should do because that you want to keep people motivated.
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 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 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 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 gotta talk about this Dylan video.
So this might be one of the earliest that's the first one.
That's the first video on the channel.
Well, 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 gonna do the hardest ear training test of all time.
Are you ready?
Right.
Now I uh just a quick backstory on this.
I made this for my friend Shane's wife, who wanted to see because Shane is a uh friend that I was producing, and he was there, and Dylan had come down the day in the day, and I said, 'Oh, check this out!' And I played this stuff.
He's like, That's amazing.
Can you make a video so I can show my wife?
And I was on the way to a school board meeting because I was on the school board at Dylan's school, and I said, Hey, Dylan, come downstairs.
I want to make this video take one minute.
Just need to do this thing for my friend Shane.
And he's like, I don't want to.
And I said, Come on, this will take one minute.
I don't want to.
So I said to my wife, I'm like, would you tell Dylan to come downstairs?
I want to do this video.
Take one minute.
She's like, Dylan, go downstairs.
And he had to he has a mouthful of candy there because he was eating candy.
So if you look at him, he's he's he's literally has a mouthful of candy while he's doing this.
And we should say on Facebook, uh, it went quite viral.
Yeah, like got I don't know, 80 million views, something like that.
They 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 discover that Dylan has perfect pitch?
So when Dylan was about two, he I was doing a FaceTime with my brother John, and and I was I was like, check this out, John.
And I played the Stone in Love Neil Schoen's solo from Journey.
And and I was like, check this out.
And Dylan would sing along, and my son, my brother John was like, Wow, Dylan can sing all the notes.
And I was like, Yeah.
And then I played Black Dog Zeppelin and Dylan would sing that.
And it's like Dylan's got a good ear.
And then John and I were like, Well, we have good ears too.
So we probably maybe we could have done that when we were that age.
So a couple year more years goes by.
Well, he was about three and a half and I'm in the car I was like Dylan sing the Star Wars theme and he sings it and I'm like that's in the right key and I check I play it on my phone I was like oh my gosh and then I ask him play sing the Superman theme because we had been listening to John Williams soundtracks the week before and he sings that and that was in the right key and I ask him another song so I turn the car around I go back to the studio I go to the piano hit the note B flat and Dylan says Star Wars Star Wars starts on a big B flat major chord but it's the note B flat is the main one that you hear and then I played the note G and he goes Superman and that's the first note in the trumpet part of the of the Superman theme and then I realized that he had for perfect pitch and then in five minutes I taught him the name of the 12 notes which he already knew but he just didn't know the names also you just associate the the names to the thing he knows what do you think is this 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 it's like perfect.
Um it's like native music fluency if you think of it like that.
So let's let's listen to some of this.
Turn around.
Here we go.
As fast as you can.
We're gonna start with single notes, and we're gonna do some intervals, then chords.
Okay, here we go.
A.
C sharp, C, B, A1.
Okay, good.
Two notes at once.
Here we go.
C flat.
Great.
How about this?
Great.
What about this?
This is incredible.
Um then how about this?
E flat.
What is it?
E E flat.
Correct.
He's a he's annoyed.
He was annoyed.
Yeah.
But 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 polychords.
Okay, I'm gonna do some polychords for you.
These are really gonna be hard.
You ready?
What's this?
C elemental for D flat element.
Okay, sing a B flat.
Very good.
What's this chord?
Uh oh, A flat major over A major.
Great.
Sing an F sharp.
Excellent.
What's this chord?
E9 over the Q.
Great.
What's this chord?
Yeah, nine over F major.
D had nine over F major.
So I had to look at my hand to make sure that that's what it was.
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 were like were would looked at it.
I was like, oh my God.
You know, C augmented over D flat augmented.
Um the second chord was A flat major over A major, but they were both an inversion, right?
So it was like a a first inversion A flat major chord, first inversion A major chord, and then uh A minor over D flat major, and then E add nine over F major.
And for an eight-year-old, I mean for anyone, plus they're all close voiced, they're all just right next to each other.
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 and you have to die, 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.
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 you're saying like some part of that is the things you hear in the first few months of life.
I did a thing where I I played what I call high information music.
High information music would be Bach, well-tempered clavier, fugues, any anything bach.
And I would play the well-tempered clavier, and I would play, I have a uh friend who Turkish pianist who's one of the greatest improvisers I've ever heard.
His name is Iden Essen.
And I would play Aydon's improvisations for Dylan.
It had very sophisticated harmony and linear things in it.
And Keith Jarrett and um mainly jazz, classical and modern classical music.
And then we would play listen to rock music once he was born.
I'm talking on my wife's stomach before Dylan was born, starting at 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 the music, and I would look at him.
In order for this uh for them to hear these phonemes, apparently, and develop this language or get the the language as acquisition has to involve the social brain.
So when kids look at you, you.
You're 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 uh this is where this word stops or starts and stops.
These are how this the phonemes are separated from one another.
These are how they're connected.
So I believe 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 no 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 them and and played with them.
And it applies maybe even more generally to high information language.
Yes.
And it starts before they're born.
I think I I I saw some of the these incredible scientists that work on the neuroscience and neurobiology, the psychology of language in early life.
I think a big part is you in the mother's stomach, you're listening to the mother speak.
Yes, that's right.
So like that's that's how on the language side, you're picking up the language already.
That's right.
And you're picking up the music, 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 you have a pretty good chance.
Much better chance.
Okay.
All right.
So that as we unwind b our way back, uh Joe Pass and uh Bebob.
You were you were funny enough talking about uh what is Bebop jazz and and uh be 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 is weird.
I we never my 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, 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.
He'd put we'd put on a record, I'd sit on one side of the room, he'd sit on the other, and not say a word, listen through the whole side A.
I'd go flip it over, listen to side B, never say a word, and then get up and go do stuff.
And we did that all the time.
And so the first time you impressed your dad was with the Joe Pass song, right?
And by the way, we'll have to go to this song because uh people must have forgot because uh people just think you're uh um like a good communicator or something.
They they don't realize how good you are at guitar, how good you are actually a lot of instruments, but guitar, especially in there's this video.
The greatest guitar solo period.
Uh can you give me some context for this particular intricate complicated solo?
Who's Joe Pass?
Joe Pass was a guitarist, he lived from 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 learned to play guitar like this, you've accomplished something with your life.
And I was like, what?
So this let record state was unopened until about March after Christmas.
And one day I was like, okay, I'll open it up and I put it on.
I start listening to it.
And uh I was like, whoa, this is kind of cool.
And so I said, I think I can figure out some of this stuff.
So I figured out this thing.
Is it by by ear most?
Yeah, just by ear.
I didn't know any of the chords or anything.
If you can listen to a little bit here.
If you go back to that brother, brother 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.
So 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 um like playing around, putting your fingers on the various positions, right?
But trying every combination of fingers.
I'd never played that chord.
That's a weird looking chord.
Yeah.
And but I kept I moved my fingers around until I heard to where it sounded like, oh, that's it, definitely.
And I was looked at my hand, I was like, what is that?
Had no idea what it was.
So you were connected to this.
You were really connected to the music.
Yeah.
And so that that's why you can hear.
It's not necessarily.
Did you even do you you didn't have perfect pitch?
Yeah, 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 you're 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 stuff I could figure out.
And then these things here, those are just inversions of but I didn't know that.
I had heard Joe play that on the record.
This is the last sign on there.
I listened to a bunch of times, and I start.
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, yeah, I would recommend.
I feel like the struggle.
The struggle is where it's at.
This is true for education in general.
People like there's all these educators that try to make learning easier and more fun and all that kind of stuff.
Great.
Wonderful.
But part of the thing is the struggle.
Absolutely.
But yeah, let's uh start hearing there's you're nuts.
I heard licks like that all over this, so I knew that that was and then these licks here.
He plays a lot of ideas like that.
That's basically a 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 okay, so if you just take this first part here, when he goes so this this intro part.
You make it sound so simple when you break it down.
And by the way, Joe Paz, 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 note.
That's hard.
Maybe it's playing it like that.
That sounds more realistic.
The amount of uh 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 uh um, but it was worth it when I played it for my dad.
He couldn't believe I mean, he didn't say that's amazing.
He was just like, 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.
Uh another guy you had an incredible interview with uh Flea.
People should go listen to that.
It's a great conversation.
One of the things that surprised me is just how many musical genres influence Flea.
And the guy showed up in a Miles Davis t shirt.
And Bebop.
And Miles Davis played with Charlie Parker when he was 18 years old.
And that's his Charlie Parker was really his mentor.
Can you explain to me why, with many of the folks you've interviewed, uh and in general out there in the 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 birth of cool and Modal jazz and um hardbop 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.
Now, Miles made records with many people, but the 50s quintet had John Cole train in it.
I mean, it had different piano players, could be Winton Kelly, but Paul Chambers and the bass, Philly Joe Jones and the drums.
Um and that particular group was uh made just incredibly important records.
And then he had his 60s group, which was uh Herbie Hancock and 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 uh in in uh interview with you, but they talked about like uh Miles Davis um his music feeling like I think uh I think toes hanging over the cliff or something like this, meaning like there's always a risk, there's a danger that you're willing to make to fuck it all up live, and that feeling is what creates the the aliveness of the music.
Like, can you speak to that?
Just the the creating in the music the feeling like you're on the edge.
Like you're challenging the possibilities of what can happen and it all can go to shit, and because of that, it feels alive.
Well, when I interviewed Ron Carter that played in in uh Miles's 60s quintet, I asked Ron, because Ron did so records, he played bass on two 2200 recording, famous records, and I said, Did you guys ever rehearse with Miles?
No, never.
I said, So you what what would we do?
He goes, We just show up at the studio and he'd have the charts, put them on the stand, and and we would we just roll.
And I said, Would you listen to it after?
No.
And I said, Well, what about your what about the the live records that you did at when you'd record at clubs and things like that?
He goes, We never knew that we were recording.
He goes, Maybe I'd see a microphone, a different kind of microphone in my bass amp.
He goes, then months later, there 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 you can get paid for it.
But he said, We didn't even know we were recording.
Yeah.
So Miles was always about, you know, don't think about it, just play.
That's crazy.
That was on purpose.
That was done on purpose, not to not to do the rehearsals, nothing, none of that.
Yeah, he wanted people to just feel it, play it.
Thought is the enemy of flow, as Vinny Caluda told me.
Thought is the enemy of flow.
How do you make sense that Flea, the bassist for the right hot chili peppers, is influenced by Bebop Jazz?
So his stepfather was a jazz bass player.
And his uh when his parents got divorced, his he was born in Australia, and then they moved to to New York.
Then his parents got divorced, and his mom married his stepfather, who's a jazz, jazz musician, and they then they used to have jam sessions at their place.
And Flea loved it.
It was kind of like my upgrade bringing with my dad playing jazz all the time.
And once once it gets inside you, it's just there.
And uh, and so he is heavily influenced by jazz musicians.
Yeah, his oppression, which is 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 intensity, when he picked up his bass during the interview, it he's an intense guy and funny and you know, really uh um emotional and um and he picks up his bass and there's a fierceness that you immediately feel, and he starts he talks about how he pre practices, and then when he starts doing slapping stuff, he gets is so into it, and 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 slap, and yeah.
No, there's differences in the structure of the different bands, but usually like the the bassist has a vibe to them.
I don't know if we can put words to exactly what that is, as 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 my I majored my undergrad degree is in classical bass.
So I I always think of myself as a bass player first.
And I always think the bass is the most important instrument 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 our the beginning of our conversation.
What what do you think are some of the great solos of all time?
Can we can we put a few into consideration?
You have a great list on uh top 20 rock guitar solos of all time.
Yeah, so I put comfortably numb as my favorite, is my top one.
Yeah, 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 were talked about it in my interview with him, it was just to watch his face when he listened to it was incredible.
I mean, I'm thinking to myself, it's like, I'm sitting with David 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?
Probably not for a long time.
And then he's hearing he's like, ooh.
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 um where you when 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 uh Miles Davis is he was very good at understanding tempo and the value of silence.
Yes.
Uh and I think I think David Gilmore doesn't always play fast.
Right.
But he does a lot with less.
Yes.
And then uh some of that is also on the more technical side, probably the tone of the I mean, it'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 and that was one of the things when I went to his studio, and I said to him, So, David, is there anything I'm not supposed to see here?
I mean, he never sits down and shows people his gear, and he laughed about it.
But there I am sitting there right next to all these pedals that and I and I asked his tech film, I said, these are the same ones he used on the records.
He's like, Yeah.
It's tech has been with him for like 50 years.
And I mean, the exact ones, yes.
So it's just hard to it's hard to imagine that those things still of course though, they he's just kept it.
Yeah, this is his uh Bincent echo that he played through, and this is this, you know, the these are all the same effects pedals, and the wait, is this the same high watt amp?
Yeah, is this the same?
Yes, yeah, you get some new stuff, but uh but they keep all their own gear, and that's uh I mean he's did so he does sell his guitars for charity, but like he has a black strat that is a it's a signature version.
It's like he's exact copy of his old one.
So to him it's it sounds exactly the same, plays the same.
Well, of course, they converge towards that kind of hardware, but there's so many tiny details over the years.
You see the final result of it, but there's uh there's a journey there of of exploring, and of course, he's not I guess he's not doing any soft, like no emulation, no amount.
He does do emulation, actually.
He does he has this thing, and that 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 that Zoom 93 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's he runs Pro Tools himself, and and so he'll be sitting there, there's no one there to help him.
And he's like, I'll just plug into this thing, and then he'll play a solo with this model.
It's like a kind of 90s modeling, early modeling thing.
And he'll play a solo, and then after a while, you hear the solo, and it's like, Well, I'm not gonna replay that.
That sounds great.
You get used to the sound of it, and that's what it is.
So people always talk about oh, well, he couldn't have used that.
He's recording through an amp, and because it sounds great, and uh, and then he's like, Yeah, yeah, so that's what I use, and then I've I have the video of it right there, and it says his presets DG1 and DG2, and you know, whatever.
What's your process for preparing for interviews like that?
You've done a few legendary people.
I never prepare for interviews.
Because I ask people things that I'm interested in knowing.
So just letting your curiosity just pull, yes, pull you forward.
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 to so that you can jog his memory because it anytime you play something that somebody recorded even 50 years ago, they'll remember if they don't remember the exact specifics, they that 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.
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, or 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.
You're saying you don't prepare.
I have an incredibly good memory.
Exactly.
That's that's what it is.
It's that I can remember when records came out, who produced them, where they recorded them, who was the engineer, what this what songs are on it, and not only that, but the with 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 be 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?
Oh, I'm I'm coming.
I was like, All right, come on, come on down.
So my brother John 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, it sounds like it's so he's a sales guy.
And and uh so during the interview, I I was like, hey John, what was I gonna ask David?
Oh, ask about the Gilmore effect.
Oh, yeah, that's right.
And 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 uh so I always call it the Gilmore effect.
Anytime I have like Ingve Malmstein, anybody that played that has chops that I interview that the the negative comments are always well.
I prefer David Gilmore.
And I said that I told David that he's like, well, they maybe they should keep their uh opinions to themselves.
Yeah, a lot of these folks have really wonderful personalities with uh 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?
Stare with heaven.
Hey Joe.
Well, in that list, your top Hendricks 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 I don't necessarily do these by I do those in kind of how how important they are to me and and my development.
So there's always a biographical component to these lists.
Number three was Kid Charlemagne, a steely dance solo, Larry Carlton, an 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.
Oh, but there's a few solos that are very hard to play.
Stone in Love by Journey by Neil Shaw Neil Sean is very hard to play some elixir.
Um the um there's a song there's a solo by a guitarist Carlos Rios that people don't know.
It's uh brother to brother, Gino Vinelli song, but it's it's very hard to play and figure out, and um that people don't know the solo.
So I put it on my list because I knew a lot of people are gonna watch it and they're gonna know what this solo is.
For me, it's a sentimental one.
My my first solo is Mr.
Crowley, Randy Rhodes.
I like the musicality, Mr.
Crowley, that there is a melodic component to it.
You're playing really fast, but there's there's a melody to it, and also there's like a legendary nature to the the the brief time we had to we had Randy Rhodes.
This is probably one of the greatest guitarists ever.
56 to 82, I think.
Terrible.
Um he was um um absolute brilliant guitarist, had his own style.
We should say he's the guitarist for Ozzy Osborne, the band.
Yeah, and uh that Mr.
Crowley solo is a is a great solo, great solo, and um he's incredibly influential as a guitar player um to for metal guitar players, and um I love Randy Rhodes.
Uh another guy, so one of my favorites is uh Mark Knoffler.
Yes, and I did have Mark Knoffler on my list.
Solons of the swing.
That's right.
You did it.
Now I had it high on the list, and I'll tell you why.
I would have had it had it lower because it's one of the early ones.
Because I want people to be like, okay, oh, this is a serious list.
So Rick's gonna talk about serious stuff.
So um and Rick's gonna play along with all these things.
So I wanted to kind of state that at the beginning of the video.
I mean, I made the video in one day to do 20 solos.
I think I played 19 of them, but the heart solo that I had on there, Nancy Wilson, I uh I played the video of.
And I tried to get a couple of my friends to play the um ice cream manhalen solo.
So I called Dweezel Zappa and I was like, Dweezel, can you play the Ice Cream Man solo?
I'm making a video about it.
He's like, Oh, I'd have to practice that.
And I called my friend Phil X, who's an amazing guitar player, and that and he's like, No, I'd have to practice that.
It's like, come on, man, cancel me play Ice Cream Man.
The opening lick of Ice Cream Man that he plays, it's very hard to play because it's an incredibly long stretch, and it hurt my fingers to do.
And Eddie would turn his guitar up like this to play, and plus it's a tricky, it's just it's a tricky rhythm, and and it's such a big stretch.
It's like, man, I can't, that hurts my hand.
I just love that that's the Van Halen solo you have.
The top 20.
See, I have to do some.
Yeah, yeah.
There's so many Van Halen.
My god, it could be there.
I could pick 25 different Van Halen solos.
But to me, I mean, there really is nobody like Mark Knoffler.
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 Salton the Swing.
That's been actually going like somewhat viral around uh recently.
His uh pretty old live performance of um Sultan's a swing.
For me, Brothers in Arms, these kind of soulful, mournful type of solos, he does really, really well.
Also the interesting instrumentation of uh Romeo and Juliet, just so many, is I it truly one of the great now.
Obviously, the intro to Money for Nothing is 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 um Europa by Santana.
Santana can have that tone too.
Yeah.
That Mark Knopfler makes me realize 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 Mae.
Incredibly melodic the tone that he has, Gilmore, Hendricks.
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 that's why we're talking about him.
That'd be funny.
That'd be a good uh video.
BB King.
You hear one note.
As a test of like how quickly can you recognize just a solo stars playing?
That's a great I'm gonna make that video tomorrow.
Lex, you the day after tomorrow you'll see it.
I would love to see it.
Can you say 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.
I guarantee you.
So I I was gonna do a video last week where I was gonna play uh 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 that's Nirvana.
Instantly they could recognize like, well, that's not worth making.
Yeah, it's so obvious.
You hear the tone of the voice backwards, forwards, it doesn't matter.
You know what it is.
Okay.
So it's about the tone.
Yeah.
How could you possibly know the from a single note?
It's uh I guess Van Halen, you can.
One note of uh BB King's vibrato, you could know.
I'm gonna uh what I'll do is I would separate the guitars.
I'll use I I can actually separate the tracks and I'll just play one note.
You think you can from a single vibrato you can know as BB King?
Yes.
Well, we'll see.
Put on record.
I'm skeptical.
I'm gonna do I'll do twenty twenty of them.
Can you recognize these guitarists from a single note?
Could you recognize Steve Ray Vaughn?
Absolutely versus Eric Clapton.
Yeah.
All right.
You might be right.
You might be right.
Quick 30 second thank you to our sponsors.
Check them out in the description.
It really is the best way to support this podcast.
Go to LexFriedman.com slash sponsors.
We've got Uplift Desk for my favorite office desks, Better Help for Mental Health Element for Electrolytes, Finn for customer service AI agents, Shopify for selling stuff online, and Perplexity for curiosity driven knowledge exploration.
Choose wisely, my friends.
And now back to my conversation with Rick Beato.
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 uh 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 gonna talk to Rick Beato listening to just a bunch of songs.
And I I learned, as embarrassing, that I didn't know the the stories behind the music, but I I learned that Eric Clapton was married for ten for a decade to the same woman that George Harrison was married to.
And that this woman was the muse, the inspiration for like so many of the legendary songs of rock, including uh 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.
Uh so in your interviews of musicians and producers, I think the thing you're ultimately fascinated by is their whole the process, the the the recording, the production, the songwriting, the different elements of the process.
So uh are there examples of different things that stand out to you from the all the interviews you've done?
And all uh by the way, all the recording and production you've done yourself.
So on the recording front, on the production front, on the songwriting process front, just things that uh pop into memory.
When I've interviewed the the guys that are the producers, like Rick Rubin, Daniel Annois, 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're 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 and all these records that I love, and there's just so many interesting stories that I mean, these interviews could go on for for days with with Rick and the variety of records that he worked on.
And um, and there's so much knowledge to be gained for me at least.
And I think that that the craft of production and recording engineering is something that is not well documented.
Um especially since there's no there's so few studios nowadays where there used to be a mentorship thing where you go and you work as an assistant engineer and you work your way up.
I interviewed a guy named Ken Scott that uh worked with the Beatles.
I interviewed him at Abbey Road Studios is just two months ago, and he started as a tape op when he was 16.
He started on the uh Hard Days Night record with the Beatles, and he worked his way up.
And he said the first time he ever recorded an orchestra was he recorded I am the walrus, the orchestra part.
He set up the mics and I asked him, I said, So where was the band?
Standing right behind me, the Beatles, right behind him.
The guy I'm interviewing at Abbey Road recorded I Am the Walrus there.
I mean, he recorded many Beatles songs, and he was 18 years old.
And the I mean, I just can't, I can't even fathom that.
We they have a little cafe in the basement of Abbey Road, and I said, Did the Beatles come in here?
He goes, Oh, yeah, they come in here and get coffee.
And I remember when they got two microwaves that uh like the first microwaves in 1965, and they were amazed by them.
And uh it's hard to imagine that I'm talking to people that worked on these historic records, but you know, they all start with a blank tape or an empty hard drive, and then you've eventually filled up with this music that you can't you can never imagine it not existing, like Stairway to Heaven or whatever it is.
Yeah.
It's funny, like looking back, even probably for them, just to 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.
I 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 the 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 they sit and they hear it and they're like, oh man, I wish I bent up a little higher on that or whatever.
I mean, that that 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.
Mm-hmm.
And then guitar comes in.
I mean, there's just nothing like that.
Yeah.
That was that I don't even know.
I mean, that that whole thing, and you've done videos on it.
It's an incredibly complicated composition.
It's it's crazy that a popular song, popular rock song, could be this operatic, so complicated.
The other thing akin to that moment is uh Phil Collins with uh in the air tonight, the drum bridge.
Yeah.
What is that?
I can't lose it.
I don't I don't understand how you can create that.
What is that?
Why is that so magical?
Why is that so singular inside a particular song and in rock history period?
Like these moments.
I don't 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 before he has like a headset, and he does just something.
He's like a telemarketer or something.
Like this whole vibe and look to him.
He's doesn't look like a rock star.
But he is.
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 airdrum to it, everybody airdrums to it, and it is a hook.
And those are hard to create.
Yeah, so it's hard if you chase it, you're not gonna get it.
Yeah.
And your conversation with Sting.
He said something about um how modern music is simpler, uh, more minimalistic, and the bridge is gone, I think you 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 out.
Right.
It changed my view of the bridge, I suppose, is the therapeutic nature of it, at least lyrically.
Um you think he's onto something?
The value of the bridge?
The bri 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 um we can work it out.
So McCartney writes the, you know, try to see it my way, do I have to keep on going until they can't go on?
And then, but the bridge is very Lenin.
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 uh c 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 Beatles is uh 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 the they turned 30 years old?
I have never been able to figure that out.
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 gonna be a studio band.
And maybe bec 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 Shea 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 the perfect thing of four supremely talented musicians, songwriters, singers, and then the best producer you could possibly have, George Martin, and and it was just a perfect storm.
I think that uh when I would talk to friends that would just play in local clubs, and they'd play four hour sets five nights a week, and they never lost their voices because they're always working those muscles.
And same with the Beatles.
They were always in the studio singing every single day, doing takes, and I think that that was part of it at least.
But you also have this theory that uh 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.
Well, I think it's the same in mathematics as well.
That you have this fluid intelligence versus crystallized intelligence, fluid intelligence up until you're about you know in your late 20s, yeah, 30 years old, and then crystallize.
So you're using the crystallizes, you're using your life experience to write things.
So you'll find that that composers, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart wrote their most important works at the end of their lives.
Beethoven, the late string quartets, the Ninth Symphony, things like that.
So they have a whole lifetime of experience that lead up to this, and there's not they're not improvising, but things for improvising, writing pop songs, and that I think when your mind is really most active and your brain processing speed is at its pinnacle, that this is just my theory that people can uh come up with those kind of ideas.
Same with improvising.
I think that most jazz improvisers, not all, but most do their best improvising before the age 30.
Creating something new, yes, truly novel that that requires youth.
It's just a theory, though, but it seems to apply.
What do you think about uh the the 27 club?
A bunch of the music greats died at 27.
Hendricks, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Janice Joplin, Amy Winehouse, Kirk O'Bain.
Kirk Cobain, of course.
A big part of music history is linked to drug history.
Mm-hmm.
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 unplugs, Nirvana.
Kirk 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.
And that was part of culture.
Yeah, it was for everybody.
I mean, that was 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 those things really and alcohol, unfortunately, can be easily abused, I think.
It seems like it's a the the life of a musician, this dopamine thing of getting on stage and be it 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 that there's also 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 think it's really interesting the role that drugs have played in the in the history of music.
They have certainly been extremely destructive, but they have also certainly been productive uh muses, inspirations for some of these folks.
Oh, absolutely.
Now, would we want to, you 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 the that so many of these uh virtually every famous singer, no matter what genre music, jazz, soul, rock, they all smoked.
Nat King Cole.
Yeah, Miles Davis, too.
Miles smoked everybody smoked.
Miles didn't well, Miles w was a heroin addict, too.
I mean, yeah, yeah.
So many jazz musicians.
But Miles had a sound to him.
You're right.
I mean, smoking must must play a gigantic role to that, adding some complexity to the voice.
Yes.
Yeah, some richness to the voice.
Nat King Cole, he's he smoked, I think, four packs a day.
He died of lung cancer.
Um 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 chicken or the egg, but I certainly wouldn't recommend doing drugs as a way to get better at music.
No, no, no.
But, you know, it does seem to go hand in hand.
And some of it has to do with the period, with the time period, with the with the place because sometimes it's part of the culture.
The drug is like you're saying, smoking.
If you're smoking now, that's gonna be a very different experience than smoking 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 50 years ago.
It's a different 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.
Uh on the songwriting front, you mentioned uh a story about Elton John recording, so he's one of the legendary songwriters.
But yeah, you've met him, and you know something about the process of his um 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 jumping little children?
Yeah, yeah.
And then all of a sudden, I couldn't see out into the live room.
Elton walked into the thing, and we were getting ready to track.
And I'm I'm pressing the button.
Yo, where are where are you guys?
What's up?
I thought we were gonna start this, and no one's responding.
I can hear talking.
It's like, what's going on?
Where are they?
Then all of a sudden 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 and hang out in studio A.
So we did, and he was there with Bernie Toppin, and they were working on a song, and he'd 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 on 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.
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.
It's really incredible.
Yeah.
That's it.
Yeah.
True.
And there's one that I've sort of done the other day, What Tiny Dancer, which is about Bernie's girlfriend.
So I just sort of ran it through and put two verses together, then a mid late, then a chorus, and then back to the verse sort of thing.
It's you it's a very it happens very quickly.
It sounds long, but it's sort of it sort of starts off Blue Jean baby lady seamstress for the bang.
You married.
Okay.
He's really amazing that he just looking at it as 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 uh nonsense words kind of thing, and then they figure out from there.
Yeah, that's I mean, I don't know what skill that is exactly.
That's incredible.
I mean, in that process, he makes it his own.
Yes.
Okay.
Uh you had an amazing interview with uh Kirk Hammond.
I'm a huge Metallica fan.
Same here.
Uh there's a lot of interesting stuff that came out of that from that conversation.
Uh one is the distinction between heavy metal and hard rock, which is very interesting.
Of course, Metallica went through our 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 is interesting, which is creating that really distinct sound.
James and Kirk's the the the down the down picking.
I used to be able to do that.
I just can't do that anymore.
It hurts my thumb to do it.
I think honestly, I I thought a lot about it.
It's like, why does it why is it so painful?
Why is it so hard?
It's from swiping with your thumb on phones.
And I think it affects that basal joint there.
And I'm just like, it's theories.
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 gotta be something.
It's like, yeah, it's from from swiping with a phone.
The other thing that came through is um that he's uh improviser at heart.
And that I think clashes with this kind of rigid structure that metal is.
So there's a real soulful melodic aspect to him.
And he gave a lot of props to uh James Hudfield 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've 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.
I also mentioned that this is weird that I didn't know that Hendrix was 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 uh from these interviews with these people.
I was like, what?
Why have I never heard of that?
It's like it's one of the ways you can find uniqueness of sound is by trying different things that are not.
I mean, I guess Zappa was really good at this, right?
Yeah.
It's completely breaking out of what you're supposed to do, the ways you're supposed to do them and doing it completely differently.
Uh you often ask musicians what their perfect song is.
First of all, it's a interesting question.
What is a perfect song?
Like one surprise me is uh 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 gonna ask that to people just to see what they now people are prepared if I ask that.
But it's like they're willing to go out on a limb and say it.
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 is it really cheesy to say the obvious thing I will go Sultan's a swing.
Even though like I'm tempted to say Europa but then like Sultan's a 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 on Sultan's a swing.
But that song's amazing.
Plus, it it's about music.
Yes.
So it's like there's a 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 it's just uh what's that called?
Singer songwriter type.
Uh I told you off my 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 on it a little bit.
That's when it's gonna happen.
Once you give up on it, it's gonna happen.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Um, Tom Waits won't be on your podcast.
Exactly, exactly.
This is this is my this is my moment.
Tom, come come here.
Let's do it.
I want to see it.
I I'm such a a fan of like the Zappa like artistry on the on the musical front, which Tom Ways has, but I I'm a I'm a sucker for great lyrics.
Lyrics to me is such a big part of great songs.
And and he's another example.
He has a song called uh Martha.
It's about a love story that didn't work out, and it's an older man calling the woman that he was in love with, and basically reminiscing about like time, you know, thinking about like what 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 then you know, uh at some point I found out that he wrote that when he was in his early 20s.
And you realize it's similar with the Beatles, like this these guys somehow are able to capture the human condition so masterfully, and they're kids.
Yes.
This I don't get it.
I don't understand it.
I can't speak for Tom weights, 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 live lived Yeah, they've lived they lived life.
Yeah.
It's not like not like kids today.
Now you're in a porch.
Uh you also had uh an amazing interview with Billy Corgan, the Smash of Pumpkins.
Uh he is definitively one of my favorite musicians.
I love Billy.
You asked him an interesting question about how he creates um this melancholy feeling that permeates a lot of his songs, and he jokingly said that uh the secret is all about the seventh and then and the ninth.
Um so like musically chord-wise, what do you think about that?
You think he's 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 about, no, all these people that we're talking about use these notes, and this is why their songs.
I and when I interviewed Sting, I called them surprise tones.
And Sting's like, I like the way you use the word surprise.
Notes that are outside the chord that are dissonant with the chords that they're playing, and that creates emotion, dissonance equals emotion.
And that's that's what I like.
I want music to be to depress me.
Yeah, what is that?
I don't know.
But melancholy, and I think you articulated in that interview is 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 a kind of longing.
Yes.
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, maybe a concert and so on.
But there's this, there's nothing like you're alone in a car driving, listening to like whatever it is, Bruce Springsteen.
Uh I think Louis C.
K has a bit about that.
Was it Bruce Springsteen?
But he's sometimes has to pull over to the side of the road, just weep or something like this.
It's just there's some there's something about that.
Sometimes the song just connects with you, and I don't know.
It mel nothing like a melancholy song could do that.
It's you think about like this 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's just connects something to the in the soul, the the uneasiness that we all feel, maybe the loneliness we all feel that underpins so much of the human condition.
It just connects with that.
I don't know what that is.
There's a Kurt Cobain lyric.
It was on the in utero record from the song Francis Farmer.
The chorus part is I miss the comfort of being sad.
And I was like, Yes.
I miss the comfort and being sad.
I was like, Yeah, that's it right there.
In terms of love songs, somehow I find powerful a kind of desperation.
So like I I've always connected with Pearl Jam's black.
Oh, amazing.
Uh that line, there's a friend of mine was going through a breakup, so I was listening, and he he's the one that introduced me to Pearl Jam during that that whole period uh when Pearl Jam was huge.
Uh with 10.
Is that line is uh someday someday you you'll have a beautiful life, you know, someday you'll be a star in somebody else's sky.
Why, why why why can't it be?
Can't it be mine?
Oh my god, that yeah blows me away.
That's an amazing line.
Why, yeah.
The delivery is incredible on it, too.
Eddie Vetter, one of the great front men of all time.
Yes, and that whole period, that whole moment in history uh of Kirk O'Bain and Eddie Vedder that captured that was the 90s that was one side of the 90s that just this singular moment in history um who who do you think are the great front men in uh history of music Freddie Mercury Robert Plant Freddie Murray number one probably Steven Tyler Jim Morrison myself yeah Roger Daltrey um well we have to say I have to say we have to say Jamesfield James Hetfield I mean there's nothing I have I mean I have to talk to you about this I have I mean there is the greatest I think the greatest concert of all time this is uh their historic performance in Moscow in um 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.
That's a ridiculously inaccurate statement.
So it's a free concert.
So any official counts don't count.
It's uh it's it's definitely over a million.
It's it's very likely to be 1.5, 1.6 million people.
And this moment in history that I think they channeled, it's like whenever great music, the Metallica's 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 um for a moment through music are able to escape the fear, the anger they feel, the all of it.
There's also political, social, cultural moment meeting the musical moment, and the the set list.
I was just I was I listened to this several times over the past few days, just taking myself back into that moment in time.
Listen to the set list.
Enter Sandman, Creeping Death, Harvester of Sorrow, Fade to Black, Sad But True, Master of Puppets, Seek and Destroy For Whom the Bell Tolls One, and Whiplash.
Look at that.
How is that that just 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 at their peak.
The black album had just come out then, and that must have been so exciting.
I mean, Woodstock was big.
There's there's certain moments in time when they really, really meet the moment.
Are you a fan of uh live live like big I used to be, but at this point, yeah, I can't uh, you know I'd much rather see people play in small clubs and or go to the I'd like to listen to the studio.
Go to the studio even.
I generally almost entirely agree with you.
I just think that there's these historic moments, but you don't know which are g gonna be which.
But you'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 mentioned, is uh as one of the greatest concerts of all time, is Beethoven's uh 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.
It's an excellent movie with uh Gary Oldman.
Yeah.
Just I really it's a masterful uh celebration of Beethoven in an interesting kind of way through the perspective of a love letter that he's written.
But then I realized like this early is many, many it's a couple decades ago now, that you know, he went deaf before he even started writing the ninth symphony, which is widely considered to be one of the greatest compositions of all time, the greatest symphonies of all time.
He 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 uh be turned around to see that people are actually clapping.
I mean, there's just this whole tragic element.
Plus the the meaning of the symphony uh that ends in this beautiful uh ode to joy.
The symphony itself is a kind of it starts with the chaos and conflict and ends with this celebration of peace and brotherly unity and a call, I guess a call for that, a reaching for that, for that piece.
And it's a 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 from war calling for peace, not knowing that uh truly horrific wars are coming.
So you have the the American Civil War, and you have the of course the two world wars coming.
So this all of it together, and the fact that he's conducting Deaf, and you 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.
I mean, he Beethoven was sick all the time, too.
I mean, there are a lot of people who 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.
Where do you get the motivation when you can't hear the actual finished work?
Well, and people would say, Well, he's here's 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 Hiligerstadt testament that he wrote.
It was a letter to his brothers in 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 s a shepherd singing in the field that and he could not hear this.
And and of all the people, why him were hearing played such an important part?
Another person that had 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 you love sound and music.
What do you think was like gradually losing your your hearing for Beethoven?
It must have been terrible.
I mean I just terrible.
I mean I've heard things where he had to s would have a stick in his mouth and and put it on the soundboard of the piano and you could feel the bribe vibrations in his skull and things like that.
Yeah desperately trying to Yeah.
I just but also there's what is what is that that he's able to write like one of the greatest symphonies ever while deaf.
So there's something about that we mentioned darkness but torment that he's going through and ultimately ow to joy like not a cynical thing.
Right.
Call for the positive Yeah.
Yeah.
That's that's uh I I have devoted many, many hours thinking about that.
And plus Napoleon broke his heart because he was a supporter of Napoleon because Napoleon was supposed to represent the French revolution, this this hopeful future of no more kings, no more monarchs, no more authoritarian regimes, and Napoleon ended up becoming a century king.
Right.
Uh becoming an authoritarian and be Beethoven um 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.
So becoming more cynical, like seeing more clearly that the world disappoints you, the dreams get shattered, and through that is able to still do this call for the hopeful future.
All right, so Beethoven, one of the greats for sure.
Like basically everybody, I know how to play the first movement of Moonlight Sonata.
But I always avoided the third movement because I was like, I'm never be good enough.
Never never say never like one of these days, maybe.
You know what would be great if Tom Waits writes me an email that says I only talk to people that can play the third movie.
Play the third movie.
That'd be that'd be a dream come true.
There you go.
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, the moonlight's another.
Okay.
Uh, you often highlight the importance of Bach.
In fact, there's so many of your guests.
Every famous songwriter is influenced by Bach.
It they are the greatest composer of all time, the greatest musician of all time.
Even Sting and uh Dominic Miller said they go to Bach even for like practice.
Every day.
People talk about Bach was not known other than in his places he lived.
Eisenach, he was born in Leipzig.
He spent many years.
Uh but Bach was known to great musicians.
It was difficult to find manuscripts, but there was a premiere of the St.
Matthew Passion that Mendelson had done in 17 in 1829.
It was on March 11th, I believe.
He had a manuscript because uh his father and mother collected manuscripts and he got a manuscript of this piece, and he I think he was 20 years old, and and they had a performance of it in Berlin.
And Beethoven, Mozart, they studied the well-tempered clavier, the two books of the well-tempered clavier.
But um Bach wrote profoundly beautiful music, and some of the most complex contrapunal music that I don't think anyone has ever done like that.
Extremely bright guy, had 20 kids, 10 of them, only 10 survived till adulthood.
Lost both his parents when he was nine, within nine months of each other.
Went to live with an older brother.
Extremely productive.
Yes.
I saw I yeah.
I think uh from all the music teachers I've ever had, I I I understood the importance of studying Bach.
He didn't write Master of Puppets, but he wrote some great powerful music.
Well put.
I I try to um educate the aforementioned music teachers of the brilliance of the Master of the Puppets.
Well, sometimes a good riff is greater than any any musical composition.
I I agree.
I go back and I play Master of Puppets every time I'm trying out a new amplifier.
That's my go-to.
That's your go-to.
So like so the the stereotypical like guitar store, when you come in, you're playing Master of Puppets.
I'll play Master of Puppets.
I I will play I have to play some heavy riff.
And so usually it will default to some Metallica or something like that.
Or I'll play Alice and 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 do some drop tuning thing.
And it's always got to be some some type of metal that I'll test to see if the if the bottom ends tight on the amp and stuff.
So yes.
Alright.
We'll have to talk about this a little bit.
You made a bunch of videos about it.
There was a there's a moment in time, it still goes on, but there's a moment where it's really people are freaking out about the use of AI in music.
Uh so there's these I would say incredible apps like Suno, UDO, Eleven Labs Music is also great.
They can generate basically text to song, full song from a text prompt.
And uh a lot of people start freaking out just by based on how good it is.
And so you start to immediately imagine how this is going to transform music and you're going to replace musicians and all that kind of stuff.
Uh it it is legitimately nerve-wracking because these are early versions, so you don't know where it goes.
But in your intuition now, you've been thinking about this, you made a bunch of videos.
Now, like being able to reflect, okay, everybody chill, calm down.
So if you write a prompt in Suno and it spits out a song, which I've did, 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 Chat GPT the image, and then I went to 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 so I did I created the lyrics in Claude, and then I imported the lyrics into Suno.
And I had great results with the songs that I came up that it came up with.
I always have to qualify that.
But I started thinking about this.
People freak out about this.
Oh, this is bad, this is bad.
And then I thought it was like, no, who are gonna be the ones that are gonna benefit from AI?
Well, the people that are already great songwriters, because you have to recogn 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 I've probably created 130 song ideas out of which there's three good ones, and there's a thing that's happening where people's ear very quickly is is becoming attuned to AI slop.
Yes, and that's actually quite fascinating.
Like, for example, um, 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 it'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 that of how you actually do that, because there's actually a lot of manual stuff in that pipeline.
Uh but I think ironically, it's very cool at first, but when you listen to it at for a while, you understand that this is AI slop.
Yes.
For a soul remix, it 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 an AI BB King.
I want the real BB King.
And I, if I if I know if any AI is involved in the BB King process, I'm tuning out.
Yes.
And then I don't think I'm being crummungly old dude in that.
I think we humans want authenticity.
So when 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 play it, 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 uh 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 bit rate uh MP3s, right?
So they feed all this stuff in there, so they're getting really inferior information on the tr in the training process.
Whereas now, when they make these deals with the major labels, they'll get the multi-tracks and they'll get high quality wave files to train 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 any of them are doing I'm just giving an example but every time that I would do it I could be down the hall and I would play something on my phone just to see if they'll like why you listen to AI oh they can instantly tell then eventually it started getting better and then 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 um 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 the studio and 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 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 so something, the edge is not there.
Some kind of edge that you we want in our lyrics, some kind of surprise, but not cringe or not cliche, some something truly novel in the lyrics.
But that if that's the case, it's kind of sad that um that's where the creativity is to come from, but not from the music.
Because then if we can create very realistic music that sounds really damn good, where's the role of the musician there?
I think the role of the musician is that in actually if they use AI to assist them in coming up with ideas, like uh 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 resing 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 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 and then do A B kind of thing, this kind of rhythm, this kind of and stitch them together, and never actually have your fingers on a guitar or or fake.
That's why I'm not gonna use AI, Lex, is for that reason because to me it's just boring.
And I when I use it, it's like it's like eh.
I 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 every three or four months, I'll I'll I'll sit down and I'll see whatever new versions they have and I'll write some songs.
Write some songs, I'll prompt some songs and see what they come up with and see if they're improving on the things.
But ultimately, I don't find it interesting to to use.
I hear you.
You're a bit old school.
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 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 in music, then there's something about us that just like we know we there is something boring about it.
Yes.
We want to celebrate and see the thing that's hard to create.
And if AI can just text the song, generate a top 10 hit, we we we'll quickly lose value for that, I think.
And so we'll want raw, like raw.
Whatever, whatever shape that raw takes, I wouldn't say raw talent, but that raw talent of any kind.
And but 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 uh great TikToks.
Maybe that's what raw talent looks like.
It makes me a little bit sad because I'm a huge fan of long form.
Uh, but that that also creating TikToks is also talent.
It's a it is a talent, absolutely.
Um, when I see anything that's AI generated, I instantly recognize it.
Any videos, I'm like, ugh, 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 dis then they 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 um, it's hard to it's hard to stay on this, it's getting it gets flooded with so much of this stuff.
It's so easy to create and put up there, and to just be in the um in the whack-a-mole thing where you're just tr trying to get rid of it all is.
Yeah, it's fundamentally like it's fundamentally boring.
I think boring is a really good boring.
And it's and it's annoying to have to uh flip through the AI slop.
Yeah.
But I think actually as a civilization is just inspiring for authenticity because you want to be real raw and being raw, which I you know, one of the things I like about podcasts is people just shooting shit and just being themselves in in the long form versus overproduced.
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.
Like I I think I think I think they'll quickly this kind of process of generating a bunch of different options uh and choosing the one you like the most, I think is a really frustrating process for artists.
And it I I think it I think AI will will definitely be used extremely effectively as a very uh fine grained tool um in the image domain, it's editing images, but not like macro editing, but very specific kind of editing that photo Photoshop is increasingly integrated in.
Uh I'll mention to you offline, so the whole um uh Isotopa Rex group of software that does a lot of the denoising, the all all the de removing the wind, all the they they integrate machine learning extremely effectively for working with audio in different kinds of ways.
There's a bunch of different other programs that do that.
Maybe for like B-roll footage.
And uh same thing on the audio.
If you just need a little audio to create a feeling of a scene, yeah, it might be used there in that kind of way.
But truly original stuff.
I've saved videos where I'm doing speaking over music, for example, in an interview.
Somebody's playing, and and we have two dialogue, two people speaking in labs, but it's but there's so much bleed coming from the person playing that you can't hear what we're saying, and then we'll split out the voice for that section.
The two voices separate them, and then take the music and separate that stuff.
And so it's really helpful for things like that.
And now, once again, quick 30 seconds thank you to our sponsors.
Check them out in the description.
It really is the best way to support this podcast.
Go to LexFreman.com/slash sponsors.
We got Uplift Desk for my favorite office desks, BetterHelp for Mental Health, Element for Electrolytes, Finn for customer service AI agents, Shopify for selling stuff online, and Perplexity for curiosity-driven knowledge exploration.
Choose wisely, my friends.
And now back to my conversation with Rick Beato.
So you have this video breaking down Sabrina Carpenter's 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.
Who's doing the songwriting?
How is it being done?
Uh and all that kind of stuff.
I was wondering if you could speak to that.
In that particular song, uh, 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 of in the songs.
So my response is like, well, why are you guys even included on the songwriting then?
So one of the things you highlight is a lot of people are are included on the list of uh songwriters.
Yeah.
Ten people, eleven people.
I mean, you know, like why are the songs why is Song of the Year have songs that are interpolation, meaning that they have melodies from other songs in their interpolation.
They used to call it stealing.
And then um, you have songs that are use samples for the whole thing, like the Dochi song that's out right now.
And I said, look, she took a Gautier 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, you just can sing over someone else's song that was already successful.
Yeah, you're pointing that out, the song Anxiety broke my brain.
I mean, it's so absurd.
Yeah, it feels unfair.
It feels it's a good song.
But it will 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.
Um, 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 that's not based on that.
That's ridiculous.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And and Dochi has some really good songs on her record.
Yeah, but why are these the ones that are coming to the top, right?
Well, this is interesting.
That that that might be just a criticism of the machinery of the business that drives them.
It's not necessarily like a lot of these folks are really good musicians.
First of all, I think a lot of them are also good, like the actual songs that make it to the top of good.
I'm I'm a big fan of Bruno Mars.
So he's a great songwriter, and he's a great musician all around.
Absolutely, you know, is a Michael Jackson and uh reincarnated super super talented guy.
Incredible, right?
Yes.
Um, you mentioned Billie Eilish and her brother, right?
A lot of the songs.
Yeah, super talented.
I mean, Taylor Swift is unlike anything.
I mean, that's a historic figure in music.
She's a fundamentally, at least originally a single songwriter.
Yes.
So that's uh I mean that I mean I'm sorry, but that that is uh like of the kind of music that Rick Beato uh 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.
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 uh it's a challenge a lot of YouTube folks experience, but you're just so viscerally experiencing it because a lot of what you do 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 uh copyright claims, and for folks who don't know, if you get three three of those, it's those each one of those can be a strike on the channel and could take down your channel, and you you get some insane amount.
You said you got like uh I I think I had a similar thing on the Rick Rubin episode, like thirty-I think you said 13.
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 all this record labels, right?
The the music business people.
So, what what's the story there?
Well, this has been going on since the beginning of my channel and I've made videos periodically when I first started it was just instant blocks so you 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 I realized at first it was like anything guns and roses which is still the case guns and roses ACDC I mean many bands Fleetwood Mac um Led Zeppelin and then and then something happened there that there was that guy on the skateboard on TikTok that had the ocean spray thing and and he was listening to Dreams by Fleetwood Mac.
Yep and that blew up and became a number one song again.
And the labels then realized, I mean, I had made many videos about about why this is wrong and it should be fair use and everything.
Well, because of that, the labor's like, oh, maybe we should rethink this.
And then they just started demonetizing videos.
Demonetize means they get all the money.
They get all the money.
In a one hour video, if they 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 uh I hired or hired a lawyer to fight this, who I'm gonna have on my channel.
I don't want to say who it is, but he's another YouTuber.
And uh he uh had approached me a couple years ago, and and it's not cheap to do.
Oh, you you're gonna do like a public interview with him?
I'm gonna do an interview with him, yes.
I'll talk to him today about it.
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 um entire catalog.
I have 2100 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.
It's and it's either it can be either from the sound recording if I use that, or if I just play it, it can be from the publisher.
That's amazing.
Yeah, so is there I mean, that's it's still you're 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 cause a lot of stuff that are reaction videos or whatever that are not where they play the whole song.
I mean, I'm using these things and I'm talking a lot of the times it's in interviews or it's in I'm breaking down a solo and there's a 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 like a voice teacher is listening to a vocal performance.
Yeah, but those are breakdowns.
Yeah, those are breakdowns, yeah.
Well, 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 um anytime they detect anything, they always go to the biggest channels first to get the most views.
It 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.
Yeah, youtubers never fight back and 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, I mean it's important.
I mean, it took me years though, Lex.
I didn't I've been doing this, so I so I've been doing it for one year now, and I'm nine years, I'm ten years into my channel.
So it took me that long.
I mean, hopefully it uh there's a ripple effect also.
It's not just your situation.
Hopefully you don't have to deal with this for much longer.
Right.
Um how does Spotify change music?
So sometimes we highlight the fact that they change the nature of music and that it's um the scarcity is not there.
But also allows it, it's like every kind of music is available and so fast and it's so easy.
It's easy to explore.
It's a commodity, it's like turning on a water faucet.
Do you think there's some good to I mean there's a lot of good to that, right?
Have you did you go through that whole pro I I I still remember where I had to basically throw away the albums and never did that.
Well, if you after you down 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.
When 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.
Uh 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 be 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'd never would have discovered otherwise.
And Pandora, I use a lot.
Pandora is more um uh prioritizing on the discovery part versus organization part.
And that was really wonderful.
So one of the things I I'll start with the positive that I like about Spotify is that they show view count, they show play counts.
Whether they're real or not, that's another question.
But but they show how many plays songs have, and that's how the charts are based.
Does that give you signal that something is listened to a billion times?
Does that mean something to you?
Yeah, it means that that it's a popular song.
Well, that's a massive hit.
That's very few songs that have a billion billion plays.
Now, the downside of Spotify is the way that they pay their artists.
Now they've lumped in podcasts with that that are getting a cut of this the streaming with the with the music.
Um you know, the search and discovery.
I mean, there's you're saying 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 um the discovery of of new music where 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 some, oh, what is that?
Oh, that's a new SoundGarden record or something.
You know, like whoa, I like that.
I'm gonna go about check that out.
You know, something that you might not have heard, or something odd.
Like one thing I really love doing on uh Spotify is you can you can have radio.
Yeah.
Meaning like you have uh a few, it's similar to Pandora, like you can this is gonna reveal a little too much about myself, but usually when I go work out, I'll listen to something like Rage Against the Machine Radio.
I'm sorry.
I need to What else would you listen to?
I to I need motivation, classical music, I don't know.
Um but yeah, it's pretty good because it recommends a bunch of other stuff.
I I wouldn't even know some of it I know obviously, but s uh 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 that discovery works really well.
So this is some of it is a technology thing.
Um but that experience is fundamentally more vibrant than I had previously with my stash.
That we just keep a stash and I would listen to the same record over and over and over and over.
But yeah, there's what's lost is the the I'm sure you love you love this, but listening through the Led Zeppelin records, just driving in a car and listening to the whole thing all the way through.
Yeah, that's lost.
So I have my old iTunes libraries from 2005 that I listed that I that I have saved the the CDs that I uploaded into my computer.
Yeah.
Anytime I do that I play songs on my um when I'm doing interview, I always play wave 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 wave files in there, and people notice there, and these are wave files from from you know original encoding, not not remastered things that Spotify keeps doing and adding a bunch more top end and things like that.
That these are the these are actually the the original wave files from off the CD that I ripped 20 years ago.
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.
Pro Tools.
For the most part, but I also use Logic and Ableton.
I've got all I've got all those.
So you're mostly on a Mac?
I'm only on a Mac.
Only on a Mac.
Only on Mac.
I'm only the opposite.
Although we have multiple PCs, because my kids use PCs.
Yeah, just to rebel.
But they do it for gaming.
They like to game.
That's true.
I but like in terms of editing, I hate how how good Mac is.
So good.
At just integrating the hardware and the software just work well together.
Both on the code.
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 a um, they bought me a G3 and a and an SM7 and Pro Tools DigiO one, 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.
So I gotta give it 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 gotta ask you, because I know I've never used Pro Tools.
I've used again, I'm a caveman.
I've used uh Reaper, I've used Studio One, that's recently I've used that.
And yeah, for the most time I've used Ableton Live.
I feel like I'm using one percent of the power of the tool.
Like Ableton Live makes me feel like I'm literally just pressing the record button.
Ableton's amazing.
It really is.
It is.
Yeah.
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 the the what is it, the push buttons with the with the beats and the is I mean I sound 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.
Yes.
So this is why Studio One has been a little bit nicer for me because it's simpler, made for uh recording more so.
Any DAW that you get used to, Lex, that's just use anything.
Using it, yeah.
And and you have to become a master at the things if you want to be a recording engineer or producer, you you you become an expert.
A lot of the you know, Phineas and Billy 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 I I fire up logic every couple days and I use it for things.
I've I have it on my laptop here, and I I have Pro Tools and Logic on my laptop.
I use both.
I use Pro Tools mostly though.
But Pro Tools is that's where you feel like at home.
I'm an I'm an expert in Pro Tools.
Are you using any uh emulation, any AMP SIMs, or it's all real amps?
No, I use AMP SIMs.
On my laptop here, when I travel and things like that.
I use um Neural DSP, which I just did a video at their headquarters in Helsinki.
And they're um the CEO, Doug Castro is a is a friend of mine.
I actually talked to him today, as a matter of fact.
And I have a Kemper AMP SIM, you know, uh 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.
So and I have mic set up all the time on cabinets and stuff.
I have a hundred amplifiers, real amplifiers.
Real.
Yeah.
Wait, sorry, a hundred.
I have a hundred, yeah.
About a hundred, maybe ninety-five.
How do how does one go get to that level?
Collecting and being I'll be 64 in uh in April.
So you just don't let go.
I don't let go, no.
Why would you get to a hundred?
Like, is it is a tone difference?
Yeah, so everything does one thing really well.
Uh-huh.
And so it'd be like, okay, so I have this Marshall JCM 800 that's modded that that does this one thing.
It's got great mids and it's good for this kind of a tune.
So I will pull that out.
Then it's like, no, I need more of like a scooped metal tune sound that's more like Metallica or Dream Theater or something.
So I'm gonna pull out my my uh Mesa, Mesa Boogie.
Or I need a uh I need something that's chimey that's more like Brian May or like the Edge.
I'm gonna pull out my Vox AC30.
So everything and and that's that's why I have so many amps because they all do every amp I have does one thing really well.
If it doesn't do well, do it well, I get rid of it.
And I've and I'm down to a hundred.
Down to a hundred only a hundred.
Yeah.
Uh but I can get by with probably 75.
Come on.
But you then you're really running the risk of not having just the right answer.
But you're using emulation, so it's it's that's 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.
No, nobody agrees with me on this.
I only have like one.
I I do have some side pieces, um, but one main thing.
The great strata, what do you play?
Yeah, American strat.
I said I would never do this, but I was in a guitar store.
I live next to a guitar store in Cambridge.
And one day I would always stop by, I don't know why.
I just just look at the guitars, like I don't really know why exactly, just to be in the aura of these great instruments.
And I they they brought in this American strat that had these different shades of, it was like a silver.
And I just I've never had this feeling.
They talk about love at first sight.
I just fell in love with the guitar.
Can you just speak to the kind of guitars you have and you love?
I pretty much have mainly uh 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 uh 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, and I have a guild 12 string, and I have a guild um Nashville tuned guitars.
The low strings are up the octave.
So the E A and D and G are up the octave.
That's Nashville tuning.
Six string though.
Like basically what David Gilmore plays on comfortably numb in my video.
He plays a Nashville tune, but with one variation, the low E is up two octaves.
So um he demonstrates actually the uh and this is how he wrote comfortably numb.
The the chorus part of it was with this particular guitar that he's playing in the video.
What can you say about like the different uh feels that the guitars, the the acoustics have?
Like what how do you know which one to put pull out?
It depends on the kind of part that I'm playing.
If I want something with really tight mid range, with not that doesn't have a lot of low low bass, this particular old Gibson that I have, the 57, I will pull that out.
It's got very balanced strings and uh you know 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 what kind of sound I'm looking for.
If I'm more about sound versus feel, yeah.
All my guitars play equally well.
Okay.
I have them all set up to where they play well.
Um I have a signature Gibson guitar that I've had for five years now.
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 like that means two cut cut, two um oh yeah, as opposed to Les Paul that has one cut.
So it's a Les Paul special with that has two.
I have it over there.
My signature guitar.
That's the all right, nice.
When you play this, you're gonna be like, oh my god, this is butter.
Now I'm I 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 gonna be in yeah, yeah.
I use bias fx.
I'm sorry.
Lex, I I use amp sims too, so I just got the new John Mayer Neural DSP plug in today that I have not tried out.
He did a modeling of all his amplifiers that that that neural DSP did, and um, it sounds great.
John played it, it sounds just like his amps.
Yeah, John is incredible.
John's great.
I've been uh fortunate enough to have dinner with him two times.
And uh outside of being an incredible musician, he's also conversationally just yes.
I've known John since he was he he lived in Atlanta, but when he got signed, and I knew John from way back then, 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 uh your YouTube channel in your mid-50s and found incredible success.
You've you've had essentially multiple careers.
Um is there some wisdom you can extract from that?
So my my theory is that somebody's got to be successful, so why can't it be you?
That was that was that's that was my when I started my channel.
I mean, I didn't start it to it started by accident with the Dylan video, and um, and really so many people reached out to me.
I started it six months after that viral video.
So many people wrote to me, can you teach me this?
Pro musicians, well-known ones that you would who you'd know.
Can you teach me this?
I can't teach you what Dylan did, but I can I can teach you relative pitch, develop your ear that way.
But then I had conservatories writing to me about this stuff from all over the world.
How did you teach Dylan this?
Because we made about four different videos and they got more and more sophisticated.
And um, so I thought, okay, I'll make some YouTube videos and explain this stuff.
This is that's really why I started.
So I didn't have to keep, I couldn't answer the emails.
There's so many of them.
So I just started making videos on how to train your ear and music theory.
And that's really how I started my channel.
And and my wife was like, What are you doing?
I said, I'm making YouTube videos.
Why?
So I don't have to keep telling people how I did this stuff.
And then all of a sudden, you know, few I had 4,000 subscribers the first month, and another 4,000, then hit 100,000 after a year, and then six months later, 200,000, then three months later, 300,000.
And 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.
Absolutely.
Offline.
You can actually reveal your journey online, but the thing you're chasing is not uh 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 uh that ends up happening, it's still like getting good at one thing, kind of somehow relates to getting good at another thing.
Somehow 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.
My theory of my channel has always been make videos on things I'm interested in.
And at first I thought, oh, nobody's gonna watch an old white-haired guy on YouTube.
Yeah, that was kind of my thing.
Well, that was not correct.
Um 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.
I never let them record me in the studio.
There's virtually no pictures of any band I ever produced.
So from 1999 to 2015, when I December 2015, when that Dylan video came out, no one took my picture.
There were no pictures of me on the internet.
You're fully behind the camera kind of guy.
I mean like no, no, no.
No.
No pictures, no, 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 the again, the thing you're leaving unstated there is is like you spent a lot of years you know 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 a 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 uh going to be m in most cases effective uh as a primary thing to chase.
So I have an undergrad in classical base, I have a master's from New England Conservatory and 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, no having no idea how to engineer.
I taught myself engineering.
And then YouTube.
I taught myself how to edit videos.
And then you taught yourself how to interview.
No, I taught myself an interview.
I'd never done an interview before.
And there was like an interviewer.
What you haven't just done that.
You've taught yourself not how to do you 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 you're both a YouTuber and and like a musician who posts stuff on YouTube.
YouTuber means like you're thinking about stuff like thumbnails and which I make my own thumbnails.
I've always made my own thumbnails.
By the way, before I forget, I think I I speak for the entirety of the internet.
Thanking you for how you introduce your videos and how you close them.
Because you this this is a big part of YouTube where people have a 30-minute introduction to to a five-minute video.
You just go straight in.
That's really wonderful.
It's I mean uh and on all fronts.
I mean, I I suppose it has to do with the production skill that you have of understanding, cutting cutting the fat 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.
Um I I have friends from college.
I get friends from growing up.
I have friends from, you know, both colleges I went to.
I have friends from all different eras in my life that I keep in touch with and visit whenever I can.
And you must have met some incredible humans and incredibly weird and interesting humans throughout your life.
Mm-hmm.
So it's worth it, the effort to connect and reconnect.
I mean, it's that pretty much everything in life.
Nothing means anything more than the friendships that you make in your and your family.
Yeah, what's the point of this whole thing?
That's right.
What's the role of music in uh in the human experience?
Well, hopefully to enlighten people and to create the soundtrack of their life.
It is, right?
Yeah.
Music music does something.
I'll I'll get sometimes when I'm alone, I'll listen listen to a song, and there's nothing quite like a song that makes me truly feel like feel alive, and whatever that is, sadness or hope or excitement, or um when I'm working out, listening to Rage Against the Machine, like protest.
Or as I was listening to the Metallica, the I was releasing to the set that they played in in Moscow, just hyped.
Like truly hyped.
I was like pacing listening to it.
And there's nothing like that.
I've never found anything.
And I don't know what that is in the human psyche that's that, but I'm so glad we found it.
We humans created instruments that can vibrate strings and together create harmonies and melodies and and the 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.
Uh 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 over the decade, over the centuries.
Um 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.