Rick Beato

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. Blues playing, they’re all just languages, right? It’s like, just like you’d learn any type of language. My dad loved bebop. Now, when I was a little kid and he’s listening to these bebop records, whether it’s Charlie Parker or Dizzy Gillespie or Oscar Peterson, Joe Pass, great jazz guitar player, I’m just hearing this stuff. I don’t know any different. My dad was not a musician, but for some reason, he liked incredibly sophisticated-

… music that was very technical. And I just heard it and just was like, “Oh, yeah, okay, cool.” And not realizing that it was developing my ear, because I really, bebop is one of the hardest to improvise in that style, in that language of bebop. It’s very difficult to do. And hearing it as a kid is one of the things that I think enables you, just like languages, enables you to learn it as opposed to somebody that’s never been exposed to it and tries to learn it as a teenager. So I think it’s very similar to learning languages, which kinda is like my theory on perfect pitch, that every child is born with perfect pitch. And they start to lose the ability around nine months-

… when people become culturally bound listeners, when babies do. They start out as citizens of the world, you know? They have the neural pathways to hear the sounds, the phonemes of all 6,500 languages spoken on Earth. But then around nine months, they begin to lose that ability and they, when they become these culturally bound listeners, there’s a great YouTube video with this woman, Patricia Kuhl. She’s a language researcher. And I watched this, “The Linguistic Genius of Babies.”

I saw this in 2010, this lecture that she did, like a TED Talk, and she talks about this, that kids, they did an experiment. They exposed kids to Mandarin three times a week for 25-minute sessions, just a person speaking Mandarin to these babies. And they were able to recognize the sounds, the phonemes of that language even later on. And when I realized that my son Dylan had perfect pitch, I thought, “Why does Dylan have perfect pitch but no one in my family had ever had perfect pitch?” And I thought, “Well, it must be because of the things I exposed to him prenatally and then in the first nine months of his life.” ‘Cause that’s the only way I could explain it. Perfect pitch vs relative pitch

We’re gonna return to Joe Pass. We gotta go to Dylan. You mentioned Dylan. I guess that’s in part one of the origin stories of you putting out videos into the world, is the early videos you did with Dylan, a set of videos on his perfect pitch. And for people who don’t know, maybe you can speak to what perfect pitch means.

It’s the ability to identify any note without a reference tone. So you can play, it doesn’t matter how quickly they are, 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-

Relative pitch

… not to be confused with perfect pitch.

Is it fair to say that relative pitch, as far as the thing you would learn, is more useful-

… for musicians?

Yes.

Can you explain the difference between the two?

Relative pitch is basically learning how to identify pitches relative to a stated tonic or something that you’ve heard, or just relative to each other. If you hear a note and then you hear another note after it, you can recognize, let’s say, it’s a minor third interval. So if you’re on the note A, the next note would be C. So once you’re given a reference note, you can use relative pitch to identify the relative nature from one pitch to another.

And of course, intervals make up scales, and intervals make up chords-

Chords, yup.

… and so that if you develop it to any degree, relative pitch, you can understand, you can hear the music better. What does it take, since we’re taking a tangent on a tangent, what does it take to train your ear? What’s a TL;DR on the course before people go out and sign up?

It’s just practice, basically. You start with intervals. Typically with small intervals like minor second, major second. So minor second would be a half-step, major second would 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 does practice look like?

Well, my course, it will play you an interval, and then you identify it by clicking on whether it’s, you know, a major third, or minor third, or major sixth, or minor sixth, or perfect fifth, or tritone, whatever it is. And it will teach you gradually, over time, how to recognize all the intervals.

So you listen to a melodic interval or a harmonic interval. How quickly does the ear in the various age groups that we humans are in, how quickly does the ear learn the different intervals? Is it a week? Two weeks? A month? Two months? Five years?

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

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

Well, it’s great if you wanna 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, or the four major, to the five major, to the one major.” And you can just identify it immediately, and then you figure out what the first chord is, then you know what the rest of the chords are ’cause they’re in relation to whatever that first chord is. And for learning solos, for example, or learning melodies, being able to sound something out.

Now, do you recommend people couple that with music theory in terms of education, the education journey?

They have to be taught together because these terms are really music theory, right? Those intervals: major second, minor second, major third, minor third, perfect fourth. So as you’re doing that, and then you… Once you learn the intervals, the 12 intervals in an octave, then you learn them both melodically and harmonically, so played together and separate. Then you learn chords, and so then you learn to identify major, minor, diminished, augmented, suspended chords, things like that. Well, you’re basically learning music theory at the same time with that. Because learning… Music theory is just the name of things in music.

So there’s the sound of things. There’s the name of things, and then there’s the haptic, like playing the thing- … probably. So playing chords, playing scales, you have, I believe, a course on scales and on chords? Okay. Since we’re doing the tangent, let’s go. How do you recommend people… There’s a bunch of people listening to this that are curious about how they can start in playing guitar, maybe even playing piano and maybe playing other instruments. Although guitar, of course, is the greatest instrument of all time. Learning to play guitar

Absolutely.

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

Well, if you’re a beginner getting a good beginner guitar course and learning, first of all, the open chords in first position. A lot of songs can be played that way. A lot of old songs can be played that way, maybe not new modern songs necessarily.

So learning a few chords and with an eye towards maybe playing a song?

Yeah. With an eye towards… You learn the chord shapes and you learn how to strum basic patterns to begin with. I think the first thing for learning guitar is actually how to position your fingers so that you don’t mute strings that you don’t want to mute. That’s the hardest thing for people to do, basically, is to get their fingers arched to where they… If you’re playing a C major chord, your index finger’s on the first fret of the B string, and you have to have that open E string ringing there. And it’s hard for people to make those micro-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 finger’s on to play the note. And these are all fine adjustments that you’re doing.

I’m just a hobbyist recreational player, but it… Wow, you’re taking me all the way back. You’re right, it’s the haptic, the physical aspect of it is really tricky. Comfortably Numb is a good example, but if you do lead, you have to get a super clean sound. Now, that’s both when you’re playing fast, you want it to be super precise, but when you play slow, when you have one note, and you’re holding it, and you’re bending it- … it better be really clean.

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- … of the finger. Where does it fall? Like, how much do you bend the finger?

You have to have enough flesh on it to actually raise the string in pitch.

Yep. Yep.

otherwise it-

Yeah, ’cause you’re lifting it with part of a flesh. And of course, you have to decide, depends on how OCD you are, do you wanna be like the perfect, the proper musician? Or do you wanna do a Hendrix? So the thumb over the top.

Way over the top, yes.

And so, like, you… I if you have a fretboard here, I think the more, like, classical guitarists, the very proper, perfect perpendicular alignment of the fingertips to the fretboard, versus, like, Hendrix’s, like, “Fuck it. You nerds. I’m gonna do it.” With the messiness is part of the magic. Of course, like B.B. King is also kind of messy looking in terms of his positioning of the fingers, but his tone is incredibly clean.

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 can’t get your fingers on top of it like that. And, the thumb acts as a way to mute the lower strings from ringing if you’re playing through a loud amplifier. So there’s so many other micro-adjustments when you’re playing leads, ’cause you have to kind of mute the other strings that are… so they don’t ring out— … if you’re pl- playing the first note in Comfortably Numb and the solo at the end, and you’re at the ninth fret of the G-string, and you bend that- … if you bend that G-string and you accidentally hit the B-string under it- … you don’t want that ringing. So you have to kind of angle your index finger so it-

To mute

… to mute that. So all these micro-adjustments that you don’t even think about… I mean, you’re not thinking about that, Lex, when you’re playing it. You’ve done it so many times that these things are just part of your brain. That’s why this is such a great brain developer for kids to learn instruments.

Yeah, of course, you have to solve that puzzle. It must be really frustrating in the beginning, like holding a chord. Like all of ’em, and it hurts too, right?

It does hurt.

If you’re doing acoustic guitar.

Not for that long, though. For like a week.

Couple, couple, yeah.

Couple weeks.

Couple.

I don’t want to discourage anyone, you know. It’s actually pretty easy to learn basic stuff.

Right, but the pain is temporary, I guess is the point I’m trying to make. So, what else? So the physical component, play a few chords, where does the journey continue if you’re learning guitar?

Well then, it’s like if you play electric guitar, then you get into single note playing and stuff like that. That’s where it gets, to me, where it gets really fun. You know, you have single note playing with riffs, if you think of Back In Black, right, that has a riff embedded in the actual melody. Or many songs that have riffs, the Hendrix stuff that has chordal riffs, and you’re moving up the neck and involving all the fingers and things like that. So there’s… it really depends on what you wanna, what styles you wanna play.

So you’re thinking about song learning. So different components of song learning: so riffs in songs, lead-in songs.

And then you have finger picking, if you have Stairway to Heaven, songs like that. How ’bout wanting to learn that? That involves finger picking, because you have to isolate certain notes of the chord and play two together, you know, and multiple times.

There’s a few crossroads where you get to select things. So I guess you’re speaking to the fact there’s a… if you’re righty, there’s a right hand that you can use your fingers or you can use a pick. And that’s a choice you make.

And sometimes you use both, ’cause in Stairway to Heaven, you’re using the fingers at the beginning, or fingers and pick, hybrid, they call it hybrid picking, and then later on, you’re using the pick to flat pick the picking patterns.

On the music theory front, do you recommend people learn scales and chords and like the theory of it?

Later on, I would say. I wouldn’t say necessarily right off the bat. I think learning songs is the first thing that you should do ’cause 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, “Oh, okay, I’ll just pick it up for a second.” 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.

It was actually before the channel, ’cause 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?

Ready. Oh.

Now, I… just a quick backstory on this. I made this for my friend Shane’s wife who wanted to see… ’cause Shane was a friend that I was producing, and he was there, and Dylan had come down the day, in the day, and I said, “Oh, check this out,” and I played this stuff. He’s like, “That’s amazing. Can you make a video so I can show my wife?” And I was on the way to a school board meeting, ’cause I was on the school board at Dylan’s school- … and I said, “Hey, Dylan, come downstairs. I want to make this video. It’ll 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’ll take one minute.” “I don’t want to.” So I said to my wife, I’m like, “Nia, would you tell Dylan to come downstairs? I want to do this video.

It’ll take one minute.” She’s like, “Dylan, go downstairs.” And he had, he has a mouthful of candy there- … ’cause he was eating candy. So if you look at him, he literally has a mouthful of candy while he’s doing this.

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

Yeah, like got-… I don’t know, 80 million views. Something like… it had like 250,000 comments. Something like that. Insane.

How old is Dylan here?

He’s eight.

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

So when Dylan was about two, he… I was doing a FaceTime with my brother Jon, and I was like, “Check this out, Jon.” And I played the Stone in Love, Neal Schon’s solo from Journey, and I was like, “Check this out.” And Dylan would sing along and my brother Jon was like, “Wow, Dylan can sing all the notes.” And I was like, “Yeah.” Then I played Black Dog, Zeppelin-

… and Dylan would sing that. And it’s like, “Dylan’s got a good ear.” Then Jon and I were like, “Well, we have good ears, too.” So it was probably… Maybe we could have done that when we were that age. So a couple years, more years goes by. Well, he was about three and a half, and I’m in the car. I was like, “Dylan, sing the Star Wars theme.” And he sings it, and I’m like, “That’s in the right key.” And I checked. I play it on my phone, and I was like, “Oh my gosh.” Then I ask him, “Play… Sing the Superman theme.” Because we’d 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, I 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 play 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 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.

Oh, so you just associate the names- … of the thing he knows. What do you think is this in his mind? ‘Cause it’s not just individual notes. He can, like, hear everything. 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. Because it really is a… He just learned the language.

Yeah, the language.

There’s-

It’s like native music fluency, if you think of it like that.

So let’s listen to some of this.

Turn around. Here we go. As fast as you can, we’re going to start with single notes, then we’re going to do some intervals, then chords. Okay, here we go. A. C-sharp. B-flat. C. D. A-flat.

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

C-flat. Great. How about this? B-flat, A. Great. What about this? B-flat, A-flat.

This is incredible.

Great. How about this? C, B-flat.

And then how about this?

E-flat. What is it? E, E-flat. Correct. Okay. He’s annoyed. He’s annoyed. 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 going to do some polychords for you. These are really going to be hard. You ready? What’s this? C augmented over D-flat augmented. Okay, sing a B-flat. Very good. What’s this chord? A-flat major over A major. Great, sing an F-sharp. Excellent. What’s this chord? A minor over D-flat major. Great. What’s this chord? E add9 over F major. Excellent. E add9 over F major. So I had to look at my hand to make sure that that’s what it was- … ’cause they’re all in inversions.

So I think the reason that this went so viral is that the more that someone knew about music, the more that they shared the video. Because these polychords… So the people that were the best musicians looked at it and were like, “Oh my God.” You know, it’s C augmented over D-flat augmented. And the second chord was A-flat major over A major, but they were both in inversion, right? So it was like a first inversion A-flat major chord, first inversion A major chord. And then an A minor over D-flat major, and then E add9 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 you have to… He has to dissect each one. Like, what are the notes being played there, and what is… Like, what’s the theory? ‘Cause he’s actually using music theory- … to dissect them.

It must be in his brain, those components of the chords all sound different. Like—

Yes.

… very clearly different. It’s truly incredible. The human mind’s incredible. So you’re saying, like, some part of that is the things you hear in the first few months of life?

I did a thing where I played what I call high information music. High information music would be Bach, Well-Tempered Clavier, fugues, yeah, anything Bach. And I would play the Well-Tempered Clavier, and I would play… I have a friend who… Turkish pianist who’s one of the greatest improvisers I’ve ever heard. His name’s Aydan Esen. And I would play Aydan’s improvisations for Dylan. It had very sophisticated harmony and linear things in it. And Keith Jarrett, and mainly jazz, classical, and modern classical music. And then, 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 music-

… and I would look at him. In order for them to hear these phonemes apparently and develop this language, or get the … The language acquisition has to involve the social brain. So, when kids look at you, when a baby’s looking at you, they’re looking at your mouth and they’re getting social cues from that. And this is also another component of saying, “This is where this word stops or starts and stops. These are how the phonemes are separated from one another. These are how they’re connected.” So I believe that all kids are born with perfect pitch and then around nine months they begin to lose it. If you don’t engage their social brain, making these pitches know … I never played pitches for Dylan and said, “This is a C, this is a B-flat-” “… this is a G.” I just played complex-

… high-information music for him. And played with him.

And that applies maybe even more generally to high-information language. And it starts before they’re born. I think I saw some of these incredible scientists that work on the neuroscience, the neurobiology, psychology of language in early life. I think a big part is in the mother’s stomach you’re listening to the mother speak.

Yes. That’s right.

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

That’s right. And you’re picking up the 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 pretty good chance.

Much better chance.

Okay. All right. So that, as we unwind our way back Joe Pass and bebop. You were s- You were funny enough talking about what is bebop jazz, and that would 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.

Wasn’t a musician.

Which was very 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… we’d put on a record, I’d sit on one side of the room, he’d sit on the other and not say a word. Listen through the whole side A. I’d go flip it over, listen to side B, never say a word. And then get up and go do stuff. And we did that all the time.

And so the first time you impressed your dad was with the Joe Pass song, right? And by the way, we’ll have to go to this song ’cause people must have forgot, right? People just think you’re like a good communicator or something. They don’t realize how good you are at guitar, how good you are at actually a lot of instruments, but guitar especially. And there’s this video, “The greatest guitar solo, period.” Can you give me some context for this particular intricate, complicated solo? 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 learn to play guitar like this, you’ve accomplished something with your life.” And I was like, “What?” So this record stayed… 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 I was like, “Whoa, this is kinda cool.”

And so I said, “I think I can figure out some of this stuff.” So I figured out this thing.

Is it by ear mostly?

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 to Brother, Gino Vannelli 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’re just finding like, playing around with the, putting your fingers- … on the various positions.

Right, but trying every combination of fingers. I had never played that chord. That’s a weird-looking chord. And, but I kept … I moved my fingers around till I heard where it sounded like, “Oh, that’s it, definitely.” And I just looked at my hands like, “What is that?” Had no idea what it was.

So you were connected to the—you were really connected to the music. The … And so that’s why you can hear … It’s not necessarily … Did you even—you didn’t have perfect pitch.

No.

You, and not even relative pitch?

No, I did not. No, I didn’t know anything about intervals. I didn’t know anything about music theory, anything. This is all just-

Yeah. You’re just like playing-

… around with different shapes. That’s amazing.

That’s right. I mean, look at that weird bar there. But then you get into these things. So that stuff there, I could figure out … And then this. That stuff I could figure out. And then these things here. Those are just inversions of an—but I didn’t know that. I had heard Joe play that on the record. This is the last song on there. I’d listened to it a bunch of times and I started-

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 the chord shapes that I had never played before.

Would you recommend people do something like that on a really complicated song?

Yeah, but there are 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—

I’m sorry, hearing there’s .

Let’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 intro part is…

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

And he improvised all this. He could have played it like this.

But, you know, the first was the individual notes. Look at that.

Ooh, that’s hard. Maybe just play it like that. That sounds more realistic.

The amount of different genres that you’re able to replicate is just incredible.

This is just taking the needle, moving it there, then going back a little, oh, there. And then by the end, the record was so scratched. It was—but it was worth it. When I played it for my dad— … he couldn’t believe. I mean, he didn’t say, “That’s amazing.” He was just like, “Hmm, pretty good.”

So what was the role of bebop jazz in the history of music? It seems like it was influential in your life. Another guy you had an incredible interview with: Flea. People should go listen to that. Was a great conversation. One of the things that surprised me is just how many musical genres influenced Flea. And the guy showed up in a Miles Davis T-shirt.

That’s right.

And-

Bebop.

And –

Miles Davis played with Charlie Parker- … when he was 18 years old. And that’s… He was… Charlie Parker was really his mentor.

Can you explain to me why, with many of the folks you’ve interviewed and in general out there, in the world of jazz, all roads lead to Miles Davis? Why he’s such an influential figure?

Because he was the greatest innovator in the history of jazz. He was at the forefront of all these different styles of jazz. I mean, he started as a bebop player, and then he had records like the Birth of the Cool, and modal jazz, and hard bop, and records like Bitches Brew, where he started to, I guess you would call it 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 Coltrane in it. Had, I mean, had different piano players—Wynton Kelly—but Paul Chambers on the bass, Philly Joe Jones on the drums. And that particular group made just incredibly important records. And then he had his ’60s group, which was Herbie Hancock on the piano, Ron Carter on the bass, Tony Williams on the drums, and Wayne Shorter on the saxophone. And they made all these incredibly important records.

I forget who said it in an interview with you, but they talked about like Miles Davis, his music feeling like I think toes hanging over the cliff or something like this. Meaning, like, there’s always a risk, there’s a danger that you’re willing to make, to fuck it all up live. And that feeling is what creates the aliveness of the music. Like, can you speak to that? Just the creating in the music, the feeling like you’re on the edge. Like, you’re challenging the possibilities of what can happen, and it all can go to shit, and because of that, it feels alive.

Well, when I interviewed Ron Carter that played in Miles’s ’60s quintet, I asked Ron, ’cause Ron played bass on 2,200 recordings, famous records. And I said, “Did you guys ever rehearse with Miles?” “No, never.” I said, “So, what would you do?” He goes, “We’d just show up at the studio, and he’d have the charts, put them on the stand and we would just roll.”

And I said, “Would you listen to it after?” “No.” And I said, “Well, what about the live records that you did, when you’d record at clubs and things like that?” He goes, “We never knew that we were recording.” He goes, “Maybe I’d see a microphone, a different kind of microphone in my bass amp.” He goes, “Then months later, a record would come out and I’d see it, and I was on it, and I would take it down to the union and say, ‘I played on this record,’ so you get paid for it.” But he said, “We didn’t even know we were recording.” So Miles was always about, you know, don’t think about it, just play.

That’s crazy. That was on purpose. That was done on purpose. Not to do the rehearsals. None of that.

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

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

So his stepfather was a jazz bass player. And his… When his parents got divorced, he was born in Australia, and then they moved to New York. Then his parents got divorced, and his mom married his stepfather, who was a jazz musician. And they used to have jam sessions at their place, and Flea loved it. It was kind of like my upbringing with my dad, playing jazz all the time. Once it gets inside you, it’s just there. And so he is heavily influenced by jazz musicians.

Yeah, his impression was just hilarious. I mean, he’s a character. His whole physical way of being is a character. And his impression of just upright bass is just fun to watch. His whole-

His intensity when he picked up his bass during the interview… He’s an intense guy and funny, and you know, really emotional. And he picks up his bass, and there’s a fierceness that you immediately feel. And he talks about how he practices. And then when he starts doing the slapping stuff, he gets so into it. And I’m just sitting there going, “Whoa.” Like, “Wow.” Bass guitar

Yeah, he talked about his practicing routine with you. And one of the things, he’s like, “I have to practice the slap.” And- … you know, there’s differences in the structure of the different bands. But usually, like, the bassist has a vibe to them. I don’t know if we can put words to exactly what that is. There’s a kind of energy that drives the band.

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

Oh, interesting. But you also played drums. You also played-

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 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. ‘Cause you can put the root in there. You can put the third of the chord in the bass. You can put the fifth in there. You can play a lot of notes. And whatever you play in the bass kinda defines what kind of chord it is. So, the bass player has a lot of power. Greatest guitar solos of all time

I have to go back to our, the beginning of our conversation. What do you think are some of the great solos of all time? Can we put a few into consideration? You have a great list of the top 20 rock guitar solos of all time.

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

Yeah, on that day, right?

On that day. Right. Now the day later, I would have said, “It’s the second solo.” But I did the first solo because nobody talks about that solo. And that solo is equally great. And when David Gilmour… When I played it for him, and we talked about it in my interview with him, it was… Just to watch his face when he listened to it was incredible. I mean, I’m thinking to myself, it’s like, I’m sitting with David Gilmour, and he’s listening to Comfortably Numb. And he’s hearing it. He’s played it a million times live, but how many times has he gone back and listened to it on the record? Probably not for a long time. And then he’s hearing it, and he’s like, “Ooh.”

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

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

There was this funny moment where you made a video why David Gilmour will never be on the channel. And then you ended up, of course, interviewing him twice. He’s one of the greatest guitar players of all time. What do you think is at the core of his genius?

He has just an incredible melodic sense. He knows how phrases should be put together. There’s a flow to his ideas that I think is just incredible. It’s the same with Hendrix. This flow, how one idea leads to the next, how there’s space between them. It’s just like speaking.

That’s what I read about Miles Davis is, he’s very good at understanding tempo and the value of silence. And I think David Gilmour doesn’t always play fast. But he does a lot with less. And then some of that is also on the more technical side, probably the tone of the… I mean, he has one of the most uniquely recognizable tones in all of music. What do you understand about what it takes to shape the tone that is David Gilmour?

He has a very sophisticated setup- … for his tone, and that was one of the things when I went to his studio. And I said to him, “So David, is there anything I’m not supposed to see here?” I mean, he never sits down and shows- … people his gear, and he laughed about it.

But there I am, sitting there right next to all these pedals that… And I asked his tech, Phil, I said, “These are the same ones you used on the records?” He’s like, “Yeah.” His tech has been with him for, like, 50 years. And I mean, the exact ones? Yes. It’s just, it’s hard to… It’s hard to imagine that those things still… Of course, though. He’s just kept it. Yeah, this is his Binson Echorec that he played through, and this is this. You know, these are all the same effects pedals. And the… Wait, is this the same Hiwatt amp? Yeah. Is this the same… Yes. Yeah, you get some new stuff. But they keep all their own gear, and that’s… I mean, 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 an exact copy of his old one. So to him, it sounds exactly the same, plays the same.

Well, of course, they converge towards that kind of hardware. But there’s so many tiny details over the years. You see the final result of it, but there’s a, there’s a journey there, of exploring. And of course, he’s not… I guess he’s not doing any soft… Like, no emulation, no amp?

He does do emulation, actually. He does. He has this thing, this is… I asked him in the first interview about this. There’s a little rack thing that I had heard that he used, but I asked him for sure. It’s called the Zoom 9030. I put out a short where he talks about it. I said, “So, that Zoom 9030, is that a real thing?” ‘Cause I’ve read about it. He’s like, “Yeah.” And he talks about how, when he’s sitting there recording on his own… And he runs Pro Tools himself, and so he’ll be sitting there. There’s no one there to help him. He’s like, “I’ll just plug into this thing, and then I’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 talked about, “Oh, well, he couldn’t have used that. He’s recording through an amp,” and… ‘Cause it sounds great. And then he’s like, “Yeah, yeah, so that’s what I use.” And then 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 a-

… pull you forward?

And I can think of 100 questions to ask David Gilmour… 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 wanna talk about. So, that kind of guides me… ‘Cause I wanna make sure that I… There’s specific things that I need to play to, so that you can jog his memory. ‘Cause anytime you play something that somebody recorded, even 50 years ago, they’ll remember. If they don’t remember the exact specifics, that brings it to life to them again. And they can kind of piece together some aspects about it, and they can really talk. He can talk about the phrasing and the, you know, the kind of melodic direction of things like that.

So, there’s a lot of tiny details that go into a particular song, whether it’s in the production or how it’s played or how it was 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 do, 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 what it is. It’s that I can remember when records came out, who produced them, where they recorded them, who was the engineer, what songs are on it. And not only that, but the people I’m interviewing know that I can play all the parts- … of all the instruments, ’cause I’ve done breakdowns of their songs, which is why I get the interviews with them in the first place, really.

But the actual, like, the skill of the interview, the thing you’re not saying, the preparation, is you listening to bebop.

That’s right.

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

I will say this, Lex, is that the other thing is that most of these people have a really good sense of humor. When I was, when… The first time I interviewed David in New York, my brother John came along, and he is a massive David Gilmour fan. That’s his biggest influence as a guitar player. And so he said, “You’re interviewing David Gilmour? Oh, I’m coming.” I was like, “All right. Come on. Come on down.” So my brother John’s standing about five feet away. And John is a sales guy, but he… Great guitar player. So John’s like… I was like, “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 so during the interview, I said, I was like, “Hey, John, what was I gonna ask David?”

Oh, ask him about the Gilmour effect.” “Oh, yeah, that’s right.” And the Gilmour 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 Gilmour.” And so I always call it the Gilmour effect. Anytime I have, like, Yngwie Malmsteen- Anybody that played, that has chops that I- … interview, the, the, the negative comments are always, “Well, I prefer David Gilmour.”

Yeah, yeah.

And I said that, I told David that. He’s like, “Well, maybe they should keep their opinions to themselves.”

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

Stairway to Heaven. Hey Joe.

But in that list, your top Hendrix solo is Hey Joe?

It’s the first guitar solo I ever learned, so I had to put it on there. So, I don’t necessarily do these by… I do those in kind of how important they are to me and my development. So, there’s always a biographical component to these lists. Number three was Kid Charlemagne, a Steely Dan solo, Larry Carlton. Amazing solo, extremely difficult to figure out.

Probably, there’s two solos on the list that are just about, are very… That one I can play. But there’s a few solos that are very hard to play. Stone in Love by Journey, by Neal Schon, is very hard to play some licks. There’s a song… There’s a solo by a guitarist, Carlos Rios, that people don’t know. It’s Brother to Brother, a Gino Vannelli song, but it’s very hard to play and figure out. And that people don’t know the solos. I put it on my list ’cause I knew that a lot of people were gonna watch it and they’re gonna know what this solo is.

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

Yes.

It’s probably one of the greatest guitarists ever.

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

We should say he’s the guitarist for Ozzy Osbourne, the band.

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

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

Yes. And I did have Mark Knopfler on my list, Sultans of Swing.

That’s right, you did have-

Now, I had it high on the list, and I’ll tell you why. I would’ve had it lower ’cause it’s one of the early ones, ’cause I wanted people to be like, “Okay, oh, this is a serious list.” So Rick’s gonna talk about serious stuff. So- 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 played the video of. And I tried to get a couple of my friends to play the Ice Cream Man, Van Halen solo.

Yeah, it was just-

So I called Dweezil Zappa, and I was like, “Dweezil, 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.” Then I called my friend Phil X who’s an amazing guitar player, and he’s like, “No, I’d have to practice that.” I was like, “Come on, man, can’t let me play Ice Cream Man?” The opening lick of Ice Cream Man that he plays is very hard to play ’cause it’s an incredibly long stretch. And it hurt my fingers to do, and Eddie would turn his guitar up like this to play. And plus, it’s a tricky… It just… It’s a tricky rhythm, 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- … 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 Knopfler. I mean, his is unique guitars. There’s something about his tone. Speaking of Gilmour, there’s just the tone, the care, the timing of the notes. His improvisation, like the live performances of Sultans of Swing that’s been actually going somewhat viral recently, his pretty old live performance of Sultans of Swing. For me, Brothers in Arms, these kind of-

Great.

… soulful, mournful type of solos, he does really, really well. Also, the interesting instrumentation of Romeo and Juliet. Just so, so many… Just… Truly one of the greats.

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

Yeah. There’s certain songs like Europa by Santana, Santana can have that tone too. That Mark Knopfler makes me real- just how clean it is. I think he beats B.B. King in my book in terms of the cleanness of just pure beauty of a single note. It’s like the 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. You know?

Yeah, that’s-

When I hear Brian May, I can immediately recognize it’s Brian May. Incredibly melodic, the tone that he has. Gilmour, Hendrix, everyone that we’re talking about, Van Halen. It’s just, they have that one note. It’s like, “Oh, I know who that is.” And that’s why we’re talking about him.

That’d be funny. That’d be a good video-

B.B. King, you hear one note.

… as a test of like how quickly can you recognize just a solo starts playing-

That’s a great… I’m gonna make that video-

… one note

… tomorrow. Lex, you’ll-

I don’t know.

The day after tomorrow, you’ll see it.

I would love to see that.

Can you say, can you recognize these players by one note?

By one note. 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-

No, no, no, no.

… or five notes.

I guarantee you. So I was gonna do a video last week where I was gonna play songs in reverse, okay? See if you can recognize these songs in reverse. And I had my two assistants come in. It’s like, “Do you know what song that is?” They’re like, “Oh, that’s Adele.” Like, “What?” Then they’re like, “Oh, that’s, that’s Nirvana.” Instantly, they could recognize. Like, “Well, that’s not worth me.” It’s like, yeah, it’s so obvious. You hear the tone of the voice backwards, forwards, it doesn’t matter. You know who it is.

Oh, interesting. Okay. So it’s about the tone. How could you possibly know from a single note? I guess Van Halen, you can.

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

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

Yes. Well, we’ll see.

Put it on record, I’m skeptical.

I’m gonna do twenty of them. Can you recognize these guitarists from a single note?

Could you recognize Stevie Ray Vaughan-

Absolutely.

… versus Eric Clapton? 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 lexfridman.com/sponsors. We’ve got UPLIFT Desk, for my favorite office desks, BetterHelp, for mental health, LMNT, for electrolytes, Fin, 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 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 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 learned—it’s embarrassing that I didn’t know the stories behind the music—but I learned that Eric Clapton was married for a decade to the same woman that George Harrison was married to. And that this woman was the muse, the inspiration for like so many of the legendary songs of rock- … including Wonderful Tonight, including Layla- … and including George Harrison’s Something. Legendary song also. The same woman. Is she the greatest muse in rock history?

Probably, yes.

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

When I’ve interviewed the guys that are the producers, like Rick Rubin, Daniel Lanois, Brendan O’Brien, Butch Vig, the thing about producers, as opposed to people that are musicians—if you’re a musician, even if you’re David Gilmour, 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, sometimes at a time. Rick Rubin could be working on multiple records, and the variety of things that they do, you can talk to. I mean, I can talk to Rick about the Chili Peppers. I can talk to him about Johnny Cash. I can talk to him about Tom Petty, and all these records that I love, and there’s just so many interesting stories that …

I mean, these interviews could go on for days with Rick, and the variety of records that he worked on. And there’s so much knowledge to be gained, for me at least, and I think that the craft of production and recording engineering is something that is not well-documented. Especially since there are so few studios nowadays, where there used to be a mentorship thing, where you’d go and you’d work as an assistant engineer.

And you’d work your way up. I interviewed a guy named Ken Scott that worked with the Beatles. I interviewed him at Abbey Road Studios, it’s just two months ago, and he started as a tape op when he was 16. He started on the A Hard Day’s Night record with the Beatles, and he worked his way up, and he said the first time he ever recorded an orchestra was he recorded I Am the Walrus, the orchestra part.

He set up the mics, and I asked him, I said, “So where was the band?” “Standing right behind me.” The Beatles, right behind him. The guy I’m interviewing at Abbey Road recorded I Am the Walrus there. I mean, he recorded many Beatles songs, and 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 were like the first microwaves in 1965, and they were amazed by them, and it’s hard to imagine that I’m talking to people that worked on these historic records.

But, you know, they all start with a blank tape or an empty hard drive, and then, you’ve eventually filled them up with this music that you can’t, you can never imagine it not existing, like Stairway to Heaven, or whatever it is.

Yeah. It’s funny, like, looking back, even probably for them, just to realize they’ve created that magic is hard to believe. ‘Cause you’re looking at a blank thing and then magic comes out, and you don’t even understand. You don’t understand, probably a lot of these artists don’t understand where that came from. They’re channeling some deeper thing.

When I interviewed Brian May, he told me, I can’t even remember if this was, if we talked about it on camera or not, but we talked about Bohemian Rhapsody, and at the very end… There was a thing where he was depressing his whammy bar a little bit, and it sounds like the piano is out of tune. I never noticed it before. He mentioned this to me. And he said it always bothered him. And there’s always something about these songs that bothers people. Even these songs that he-

These old things, yeah.

Right. There’s always little things- … and they sit and they hear it, and they’re like, “Oh, man. I wish I’d been up a little higher on that,” or whatever.

I mean, that, that … there’s certain moments in songs that are just unlike anything else. In Bohemian Rhapsody when Freddie Mercury is, “Sometimes wish I’d never been born at all…” And then the guitar comes in. I mean, there’s just nothing like that. That was … That … I don’t even know. I mean, that, that whole thing, you’ve done videos on it. It’s an incredibly complicated composition. It’s, it’s crazy that a popular rock song could be this operatic, so complicated. The other thing akin to that moment is Phil Collins with In the Air Tonight, the drum bridge. Do do do do do do do do.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. What is that? 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 ’cause it might be bigger than musical. It might be cultural, a bunch of different elements, and plus, it’s him filled with … Like, I’ve seen live performances. He has, like, a headset. He does something. He’s like a telemarketer or something. Like, his whole vibe and look to him, he doesn’t look like a rockstar, 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 air drum to it. Everybody air drums to it, and it is a hook, and those are hard to create. Those are … Those moments are really hard to create, and usually they’re done by accident.

Yes, it’s hard. If you chase it, you’re not gonna get it. In your conversation with Sting, he said something about how modern music is simpler more minimalistic, and, ” The bridge is gone,” I think- … he said. And he said he thought that, “The bridge is therapy.” It’s, like, a chance for you to reflect, I guess, on the verse- … before the chorus comes in.

That’s right.

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

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

You could probably do anything, I guess.

Lennon used to… He would have some kind of biting lyrics, like “We Can Work It Out.” So McCartney writes the, you know, “Try to see it my way. Do I have to keep on going until I can’t go on?” And then, but the bridge is very Lennon. “Life is very short, and there’s no time. For fussing and fighting, my friend. I have always thought that it’s a crime, so I’ll ask you once again.” I mean, it’s very, you know, very Lennon-esque. This is … That was really a … kind of a real collaboration between the two of those.

This is where different parts of the band can clash- … in interesting ways. I mean, the Beatles are the epitome of that. Such … Like, each individual Beatle is a great talent in their own right. How were the Beatles able to create some of the greatest songs of all time all before they turned 30 years old?

I have never been able to figure that out, but I have a theory that- … because PA-

I have a theory.

Because PA systems were so bad back then- … and the Beatles … People screamed so loudly that the Beatles thought, “Okay. We don’t, we don’t need … We can’t tour anymore ’cause we can’t even hear ourselves, so we’re just gonna be a studio band.” And maybe because of … We have all these great late Beatles records, they’re 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, 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, 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 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 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, the- … you have this fluid intelligence versus crystallized intelligence. Fluid intelligence up until you’re about, you know, in your late 20s-

… 30 years old, and then crystallized, so you’re using… The crystallized is you’re using your life experience to write things, so you’ll find that composers like 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 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 of 30.

Creating something new. 27 Club

Yes.

Truly novel, that requires youth. It’s just a theory though, but it seems to apply. What do you think about the 27 Club? A bunch of the music greats died at 27. Hendrix, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Amy Winehouse.

Kurt Cobain.

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

Smoking.

Smoking.

I think about this a lot. If you go back and you watch videos, The Beatles, any of their movies, they’re smoking all the time. The Get Back documentary, they’re smoking constantly. Go watch any of the MTV Unpluggeds, Nirvana, Kurt Cobain is smoking every second that he’s not playing, he’s smoking. Every singer smoked. Every musician smoked. Nowadays, I asked my son, Dylan, “Dylan, does anybody smoke?” at his high school. He’s like- …”Smoke? Nobody smokes.” The- it was an absurd question. And that was part of culture.

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 life of a musician, this dopamine thing of getting on stage and being adored by tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, the high of that, and then the comedown 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 rollercoaster of your mind, and of course drugs will be a part of that. And you think everything is allowed and everything is possible. And then there’s also culture, depending on who you hang out with, that certain kinds of categories of drugs are good for your creativity.

And so, naturally, you start to abuse those drugs. I don’t know. I think it’s really interesting the role that drugs have played in the history of music. They have certainly been extremely destructive, but they have also certainly been productive 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 so many of these, virtually every famous singer- … no matter what genre of music, jazz, soul, rock, they all smoked.

Yeah.

Nat King Cole.

Miles Davis too?

Miles smoked- everybody smoked. Miles did… Well, Miles was a heroin addict too. I mean-

Yeah, yeah.

… so many jazz musicians.

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

Yes.

Yeah, some richness to the voice.

Nat King Cole, he smoked, I think, four packs a day. He died of lung cancer. Lotta heavy smokers though, in 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.

But, you know, it does seem to go hand-in-hand. And some of it has to do with the period, with the time period, with the place, ’cause sometimes it’s part of the culture. The drug is like you’re saying, smoking. If you were smoking now, that’s gonna be a very different experience than smoking 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 50 years ago. There’s a different vibe. So, sometimes the drug is a deep integrated part of the culture versus an actual chemical substance. The ’60s, right? I don’t know. They were on everything in the ’60s.

Yeah…. I mean, it has to account for something, Lex, you know?

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

Yeah, ’cause he was recording in a studio in Atlanta that I was working with a band that I was producing. And he was in—I was in Studio B, he was in Studio A. And this band that I was working with, they were called Jump, Little Children. And so, he had his assistant come in and ask, “Hey, is this… Are you guys Jump, Little Children?” “Yeah, yeah, 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, what is going on? Where are they?” Then all of a sudden they come back in the studio and they were stunned.

I said, “Where were you guys?” “Elton John just walked into our session. And he said he’s a big fan. He said to come over when we’re done and hang out in Studio A.” So we did, and he was there with Bernie Taupin, and they were working on a song. And we talked there for an hour, and he was talking about recording two records a year, and then they’d go on tour, and they’d write and record the whole record in two weeks. So Bernie would give him lyrics. Elton would go out and spend 15 minutes writing all the melody. He’d look at his lyrics, and he was doing that that day. Bernie was there, and they had a lyric sheet up on the piano. And Elton would go on, and they’d just re-… “Okay, just record this.” And Elton would sit there and play and come up with the song- … in 15 minutes or so.

Yeah, that’s crazy.

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. Then move onto the next song. I see this. I mean, it’s really incredible. That’s it. Yeah. True. There’s one there that I’ve sort of done the other day with Tiny Dancer, which is about Bernie’s girlfriend. So I just sort of ran it through and then put two verses together, then a mid-like, then a chorus, and then back to the sort of verse sort of thing. It’s, it happens very quickly. It sounds long, but it sort of starts off- << Blue jean baby, LA lady, seamstress for the band. Pirates man, pretty eye, you marry >>

Okay.

I mean, it’s really amazing that he just-

Yeah. He’s looking at just the lyrics.

Yeah, and it’s one of the, he’s one of the very few people that has the lyrics first and writes the music to it, which to me is far more difficult. 99% Of songwriters write the music first, and then they put the melody and lyrics to the finished backing track.

And maybe they write, like, lyrics, they write, like nonsense words kind of- … thing. And then they figure out from there. Yeah, that’s… I mean, I don’t know what skill that is exactly, but that’s incredible. I mean, in that process he makes it his own. Okay. You had an amazing interview with Kirk Hammett. I’m a huge Metallica fan.

Same here.

There is a lot of interesting stuff that came out of that, from that conversation. One is the distinction between heavy metal and hard rock. Which is very interesting. Of course, Metallica went through their own evolution. They had many periods. I mean, they’ve been around 40 years.

Over 40 years, yeah. Crazy.

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

James and Kirk’s, the downpicking, I used to be able to do that. I just can’t do that anymore. It hurts my thumb- … to do it. I think honestly, I thought a lot about it. It’s like, why does it, why is it so painful? Why is it so hard? It’s from swiping with your thumb on phones. And I think it affects that basal joint there, and—I’m sorry—no, I’m serious.

I love your theories.

Well, I think that that’s actually right, ’cause I’m thinking like, “Why does that hurt so much to do that? All the downstrokes and stuff.” It’s gotta be something. It’s like, yeah, it’s from swiping with the phone.

The other thing that came through is that he’s an improviser at heart. And that, I think, clashes with this kind of rigid structure that metal is. So there’s a real soulful, melodic aspect to him. And he gave a lot of props to James Hetfield for just being a great composer, being a great musician and writer of riffs, of rhythm.

The improvisation part of it you don’t think of ’cause they’ve… ’cause you have the finished songs that you listen to. But those songs are born out of improvisations, of jams, of little fragments of ideas. And then they craft them into these masterpieces.

Also, you mentioned that… This is weird that I didn’t know, that Hendrix used different gauges of strings.

Yeah, he was the one that talked about that, wasn’t he?

Mm-hmm, yeah, mm-hmm.

Yeah, that was really interesting. See, these are the things that I like to learn from these interviews with these people. I was like, “What? 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 Apple was really good at this, right? Like, completely breaking out of what you’re supposed to do, the ways you’re supposed to do them, and doing it completely differently. You often ask musicians what their perfect song is. First of all, that’s an interesting question.

What is a perfect song?

Like, one surprise is, Hans Zimmer said God Only Knows by the Beach 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 the 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. Like, if you ask me, I don’t even know. I guess you just say it, whatever, right? Like, what would I even say? What’s a perfect song? Yeah, I would go… See, I feel the pressure.

Right?

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

Sultans of Swing hits on so many levels- … ’cause it’s got a great melody, great lyrics, and then multiple great guitar solos. And has such a unique sound to it. The other thing is that it sounds very different from other Dire Straits songs. I mean, this is like early- … Dire Straits Strat tone. And then you think of like Money for Nothing is a Les Paul, and it’s a totally different kind of vibe than him playing it on Sultans of Swing. But that song’s amazing.

Plus it’s about music.

Yes.

So it’s like there’s a meta aspect to it. But then there’s also like, we’re talking about this guitar stuff, but Leonard Cohen, Hallelujah. I mean, Leonard Cohen in general. Like these songwriters, they go super simple on guitar. And there, it’s just what’s that called? Singer-songwriter type. I told you off my one of my, maybe the music guest that’s a dream guest is Tom Waits. I’ve wanted to talk to Tom Waits for a very long time, and I’ve gone through different periods of… You’ve met me at a point in my life where I’ve given up on it a little bit. And I was trying-

That’s when it’s gonna happen. That’s-

Okay.

Once you give up on it, it’s gonna happen.

Yeah. Yeah.

Why Tom Waits won’t be on your podcast.

Exactly. Exactly, dude. This is, this is my, this is my moment.

Tom, come, come here. Let’s do it. I wanna see it.

I’m such a fan of, like the Zappa-like artistry on the musical front, which Tom Waits has, but I’m a sucker for great lyrics. Lyrics to me is such a big part of great songs. And he’s another example. He has a song called Martha. It’s about a love story that didn’t work out, and it’s an older man calling the woman that he was in love with, and basically reminiscing about like, you know, thinking about like, “What would’ve happened if it worked out?” That kinda thing. And then, you know, I loved that song for a long time, and you know at some point I found out that he wrote that when he was in his early 20s. And you realize, it’s similar with the Beatles, like- … These guys somehow were able to capture the human condition so masterfully, and they’re kids.

This, I don’t get it. I don’t understand it.

I can’t speak for Tom Waits, but in the Beatles case, they went to Hamburg, they spent time on their own, they played cover gigs that were eight hours long, and they lived-

Yeah, they’ve lived-

… they lived life. It’s not like, not like kids today.

Now you’re on a porch. You also had an amazing interview with Billy Corgan, of Smashing Pumpkins. He is definitively one of my favorite musicians.

I love Billy.

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

He’s talking a little music theory there. Seventh and ninth over the chord that he’s playing. So if you’re playing a C chord, he’s singing a B, would be the seventh, D would be the ninth. And he does use a lot of those notes. But almost all these people that we’re talking… No, all these people that we’re talking about use these notes, and this is why their songs… And when I interviewed Sting, I called them surprise tones, and Sting’s like, “I like the way you use the word surprise.” Notes that are outside the chord that are dissonant with the chords that they’re playing, but then that creates emotion. Dissonance equals emotion. And 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 articulate it in Aries, it’s not actually that depressing. There’s something about that melancholy feeling that is somehow the other side of the coin of happiness. It’s a kind of longing.

Or 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 nothing like you’re alone in a car driving, listening to, like, whatever it is, Bruce Springsteen. Well, I think Louis CK has a bit about that. And was it Bruce Springsteen? But sometimes he has to pull over to the side of the road and just weep, or something like this. It’s just there’s something about that. Sometimes a song just connects with you. And I don’t know, nothing like a melancholy song could do that. It…

You think about, like, maybe things you regret or how life could’ve worked out. And sometimes it’s not even about, like… It’s not even real. It just connects something in the soul. The uneasiness that we all feel. Maybe the loneliness we all feel that underpins so much of the human condition, and it just connects with that. I don’t know what that is.

There’s a Kurt Cobain lyric. It was on the In Utero record, from the song Frances Farmer. The chorus part is, “I miss the comfort of being sad.”… and I was like, “Yes.” < > I was like, “Yeah, that’s it right there.”

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

Oh, amazing.

Like that line is… 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 when Pearl Jam was huge with Ten. Is, is that line is “Someday-“

“Someday you’ll have a beautiful life. You know, someday you’ll be a star in somebody else’s sky. Why, why, why can’t it be, can’t it be mine?” Oh my God, that- … blows me away. That’s an amazing line.

Well, yeah, I mean-

The delivery is incredible on it too.

Yeah. Eddie Vedder, one of the great frontmen of all time. And that whole period, that whole moment in history of Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder that captured… That was the ’90s. That was one side of the ’90s that just… This singular moment in history. Who, who do you think are the great frontmen in the history of music? Greatest rock stars

Freddie Mercury, Robert Plant.

Freddie Mercury number one, probably.

Steven Tyler.

Jim Morrison.

Jim Morrison? Yeah. Roger Daltrey.

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

James Hetfield?

I mean, there’s nothing… I mean, I have to talk to you about this. I mean, it’s just the greatest, I think the greatest concert of all time. This is their historic performance in Moscow in September of ’91. This is shortly before the Soviet Union collapsed. Plus, we should mention AC/DC and Pantera-

… were there too. And about 1.6 million people were there. Now, by the way, there’s like some kind of reporting that there was a half a million people, 500,000 people. There’s somewhere I’ve seen statements like that. That’s a ridiculously inaccurate statement. So it’s a free concert, so any official counts don’t count. It’s definitely over a million. It’s very likely to be 1.5, 1.6 million people. And this moment in history that I think they channeled, it’s like whenever great music… Metallica was firing on all cylinders at the very top of their game, and they meet this moment in history and this place in history.

There was a, a defining part of the 20th century collapsing, and you have these people who are, for a moment, through music, are able to escape the fear, the anger they feel, the… all of it. There was also a political, social, cultural moment meeting the musical moment, and the set list, I was just… I listened to it several times over the past few days, just taking myself back into that moment in time. Listen to this set list: Enter Sandman, Creeping Death, Harvester of Sorrow, 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’s-

That just-

That’s my kind of set

… get the fuck out of here.

That’s-

This is amazing. This is-

That’s my kind of set right there.

I don’t know if you can think of anything that could beat that.

I think that the guys in the band would say that, too. That was… I mean, they were really at their peak. The Black Album had just come out then, and that must have been so, so exciting.

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

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

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

… Gary Oldman. Just a really… it’s a masterful celebration of Beethoven in an interesting kind of way through the perspective of a love letter that he’s written. But then I realized like… and this is early, this is many, many… this is a couple decades ago now, that, you know, he went deaf before he even started writing the Ninth Symphony, which is why they consider it 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 be turned around to see that people are actually clapping. I mean, there’s just this whole tragic element.

Plus, the meaning of the symphony that ends in this beautiful Ode to Joy, the symphony itself is a kind of… It starts with the chaos and conflict and ends with this celebration of peace and brotherly unity and a— I guess a call for that, a reaching for that, for that peace. And it’s a… and there’s a tragic element to it, again, connected to history, which is it was post Napoleonic Wars-

… and before the American Civil War. So like, you’re in this, in this middle… this respite from war, calling for peace, not knowing that truly horrific wars are coming. So you have the American Civil War, and you have the, of course, the two World Wars coming. So this, all of it together, and the fact that he’s conducting deaf, and he wrote this whole thing deaf. I was reading a lot about his process, and he just edits and edits and edits and edits. So the fact that he had to edit in his head is just insane.

I mean, it… Beethoven was sick all the time too. I mean, a lot of people were sick all the time. It was very common. What would motivate you to write music, this beautiful music that you can never actually hear except for in your head?

Right? Like, why… The amount of time it takes to write 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? One, and people would say, “Well, he hears in his head.” But what kind of enjoyment is it? You wanna hear the orchestra… I mean, it’s really profound that he was inspired to do this. There’s a thing called the Heiligenstadt Testament that he wrote. It was a letter to his brothers from 1802. I think they found it in his desk after Beethoven died, and he felt a sense of shame and humiliation because of his hearing loss.

And he said that he was afflicted with this thing where him of all people, that someone standing next to him could hear a flute that he could not hear, or a shepherd singing in the field that… And he could not hear this. And of all the people, why him? Where hearing played such an important part. Another person that would have had to have had perfect pitch, ’cause you could never do this- … if you didn’t have perfect pitch, which I think all of 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 it was like gradually losing your hearing for Beethoven?

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

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, Ode to Joy. Like, not a cynical thing- … but a call for the positive.

Yeah. Yeah. That’s, that’s… I’ve devoted many, many hours thinking about that.

And plus, Napoleon broke his heart, because he was a supporter of Napoleon- … because Napoleon was supposed to represent the French Revolution, this, this hopeful future of no more kings, no more monarchs, no more authoritarian regimes. And Napoleon ended up becoming, essentially, king. Becoming an authoritarian. And Beethoven sort of famously was critical of that. Nevertheless, I think maintained a fascination with Napoleon throughout his life. But sort of a kind of more sophisticated, complex view of human nature and human civilization. So becoming more cynical. Like, seeing more clearly that the world disappoints you, that dreams get shattered. And through that, is able to still do this call for the hopeful future. All right, so okay. 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 ’cause I was like, “I’ll never be good enough.” Never, never, but I need to-

Never say never, Lex.

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 movement.”

Play the third movement.

That’d be a dream come true. I’d be like, “For this-“

That’s motivation.

“That’s my dragon,” or whatever you do. You have to have a prince and rescue the princess. My dragon is the third movement of Moonlight Sonata. Okay. You often highlight the importance of Bach. In fact, so many of your guests…

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

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

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

And he got a manuscript of this piece, and he, I think he was 20 years old, 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 Bach wrote profoundly beautiful music, and some of the most complex contrapuntal music that I don’t think anyone has ever done like that. Extremely bright guy. Had 20 kids, 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.

And extremely productive. Also. I think from all the music teachers I’ve ever had, I understood the importance of studying Bach.

He didn’t write Master of Puppets, but he wrote some great powerful-

Well put.

… music.

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

I agree. I go back and I play Master of Puppets every time I’m trying out a new amplifier. That’s my go-to.

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

I’ll play Master of Puppets. I will play, I have to play some heavy riff- … and so usually it will default to some Metallica or something like that. Or I’ll play Alice in Chains, or I do usually, like, a lot of times I’ll go and I’ll do Drop D something or play Tool. I usually would do some drop tuning thing. And it’s always gotta be some type of metal that I’ll test to see if the bottom end’s tight on the amp and stuff. So, yes. AI in music

All right. We have to talk about this a little bit. You made a bunch of videos about it. There was a, there was a moment in time, it still goes on, but there was a moment where really people were freaking out about the use of AI in music. So there’s these, I would say, incredible apps like Suno, Udio. ElevenLabs Music is also great. They can generate basically text to song, full song from a text prompt. And a lot of people started freaking out just 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. 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 done, made a bunch of videos on this. I made up a fake artist, Eli Mercer, in this video. Then I did a thing for CBS News; I made up this fake artist, Sadie Winters, and came up with this song, “Walking Away.” Well, the computer, the program came up with it.

There is some creativity in a process. So in this particular thing, the process is you generate an image.

I did it in ChatGPT, the image.

The image?

Then I went to, then I went to Claude and I wrote the lyrics, ’cause Claude’s way better at lyrics- … than Suno is. Suno’s bad at lyrics, at least right now. So I did, I created the lyrics in Claude and then I imported the lyrics into Suno, and I had great results with the songs that it came up with. I always have to qualify that. But then I started thinking about this. People freak out about this, “Oh, this is bad, this is bad.” And then I thought, I was like, “No, who are going to be the ones that are gonna benefit from AI?” Well, the people that are already great songwriters, because you have to be able to recognize when it spits out something good versus when it spits out something that’s not that good.

And every other song, I’ve probably created 130 song ideas, out of which there’s three good ones.

And there’s a thing that’s happening where people’s ear very quickly is becoming attuned to AI slop. And that’s actually quite fascinating. Like, for example, one of the things, there’s this viral clip going around of an AI-based, like, a soul jazz remix of songs like 50 Cent’s “Many Men,” and I think it is super impressive. And there’s a different pipeline actually. It’s a tricky pipeline to how to pull that off, and I think a lot of the creativity in that, even that kind of remixing, is in the pipeline of how you actually do that, because there’s actually a lot of manual stuff in that pipeline. But I think ironically it’s very cool at first, but when you listen to it for a while you understand that this is AI slop.

For a soul remix, it actually lacks soul. But it made me think of, like, when I listen to soul or blues, I think I really want, in that case, to know… I don’t want an AI B.B. King, I want the real B.B. King. And if I know if any AI is involved in the B.B. King process, I’m tuning out. And I don’t think I’m being a curmudgeonly old dude in that. I think we humans want authenticity.

So when AI, when I first started making these AI videos, it started back in 2023, I made my first one, and I would take my phone, come up in the kitchen, I’d play a song, and then my youngest, Layla, and I have three kids, and my oldest, Dylan, as soon as I played it, “Why are you listening to AI?” And it’s 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 sound that were… That made incomplete-

It just couldn’t do the ambiances correctly, right? Because it’s trained on… A lot of these AI programs are trained on very low bit-rate MP3s, right? So, they feed all this stuff in there. So, they’re getting really inferior information in the training process, whereas now when they make these deals with the major labels, they’ll get the multitracks, and they’ll get high-quality WAV files to train from, right? And whoever opts in, they get the solo vocal tracks. You know, if Ed Sheeran wants to do it, or Drake, or whoever wants to give their voice to it, let it do its thing, and then get the royalties from it.

I’m not saying that any of them are doing it. I’m just giving an example. But every time that I would do it, I could be down the hall, and I would play something in my phone just to see if they’ll… “Why are you listening to AI?” They can instantly tell. Then it eventually started getting better. And then, it’d be like, “Is this AI?” I’d be in the car with Layla coming back from taekwondo practice, and she’s like, “Is this AI? Why? Does it sound like AI? Sounds like it could be AI.” And I’d be like, “Yeah, it’s AI.” She’s like, “Oh, it’s getting better.”

And then I did this song for… It was an NPR interview, and 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 to hear it.” So, we go down to the studio, and I play it for her, and she listens to the soloed vocal. She said, “Wow, this is really realistic.” “This is very hard to tell, even with the soloed vocal.”

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. And that’s- I don’t know the words correctly. I mean, they can be incredibly sophisticated, but there’s something, the edge is not there. Some kind of edge that we want in our lyrics. Some kind of surprise, but not cringe or not cliché. Or something truly novel in the lyrics. But if that’s the case, it’s kind of sad that that’s where the creativity has to come from, but not from the music. 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, they could as a creation tool. Then the musician… Like, some of the stuff is just not high quality sonically. So, the musician goes in and redoes stuff and changes things and adds parts, and then they actually do music production, and maybe they re-sing the parts, and they change the stuff. And then it’s just basically like an idea generator, and I think that that’s a great use of AI, is for that.

But see, if you do that, does it make you sad that you don’t necessarily need to learn instruments? So, basically, you can… I mean, you can think of it as a different kind of instrument, but you can write lyrics. You can hum the melody. You can just hum parts. You know? And then do an A/B kind of thing. Just kind of rhythm this kind of, and stitch them together. And never actually have your fingers on a guitar or fingers on a drumstick.

That’s why I’m not gonna use AI, Lex, is for that reason, because to me, it’s just boring. And I-

Yeah, it is.

… when I use it, it’s just like, “Eh.” But I used it for about a month or so, just because I was making videos. And I was trying to see how it’s advancing. Every three or four months, I’ll sit down, and I’ll see whatever new versions they have. And I’ll write some songs. I’ll prompt some songs and see what they come up with and see if they’re improving on the things. But ultimately, I don’t find it interesting to use.

I hear you. You’re a bit old school.

I’m old school.

As am I. 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-

I agree.

… fundamentally boring about it, and I’ve been trying to figure it out. 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. It doesn’t matter if it’s boring or not, it’s useful. But when the final output is the thing that AI creates, which it would be in music, then there’s something about us that just, like… We know. There is something boring about it.

We want to celebrate and see the thing that’s hard to create. And if AI can just text a song, “Generate a top 10 hit,” we’ll quickly lose value for that, I think. And so, we’ll want raw. Whatever shape that raw takes, I want to say raw talent, but that raw talent of any kind. And perhaps… It would make me a little bit sad, but that’s also awesome. Perhaps the new kind of raw talent that civilization is asking for is how to make great TikToks. Maybe that’s what raw talent looks like. It makes me a little bit sad because I’m a huge fan of long-form. But that also… Creating TikToks is also talent.

It is a talent. Absolutely. When I see anything that’s AI generated, I instantly recognize it. Any video, 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 don’t even wanna engage with the social media platforms, which is a danger. Which I think they need to crack down on the AI slop. YouTube’s done a pretty good job on it, but it’s hard to stay on this. It gets flooded with so much of this stuff, it’s so easy to create and put up there. And to just be in the whack-a-mole thing where you’re just trying to get rid of it all is a—

Yeah, it’s fundamentally boring. I think boring is a really good—

Yes, boring.

And it’s annoying to have to flip through the AI slop. But I think actually, as a civilization, it’s just inspiring for authenticity ’cause you wanna be real. And being raw, which, one of the things I like about podcasts is people just shooting shit and just being themselves in the long form versus overproduced. ‘Cause I think AI is making people realize that AI is good at being overproduced. So there’ll be more.

Let’s get that covered.

Yeah. Even artists, ’cause you’re saying like, yeah, they’ll use it as tools. Part of me thinks like not really. Like, I think they’ll quickly, this kind of process of generating a bunch of different options and choosing the one you like the most, I think is a really frustrating process for artists. And I think it, I think AI will definitely be used extremely effectively as a very fine-grained tool in the image domain, editing images. But not like macro editing, but very specific kinda editing that Photoshop is increasingly integrated in. I’ll mention to you offline, so the whole iZotope RX group of software that does a lot of the denoising, D- All the D, removing the wind, all the—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 a, same thing on the audio, if you just need a little audio to create a feeling of a scene, the AI might be used there in that kinda way. But truly original stuff, eh.

I’ve saved videos where I’m doing, speaking over music, for example, in an interview. Somebody’s playing and we have two people speaking in lavs, but there’s so much bleed coming from the person playing- … that you can’t hear what we’re saying. And then we’ll split out the voice for that section, the two voices, separate them- … and then take the music and separate that stuff in. So it’s really helpful for things like that.

And now, once again, a 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 lexfridman.com/sponsors. We got Uplift Desk for my favorite office desks, BetterHelp for mental health, LMNT for electrolytes, Fin 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 Manchild. And you use that as an example of building up people’s intuition about the music business and how the music production for these popular songs is being done these days.

Who’s doing the songwriting, how’s it being done, and all that kind of stuff? I, I was wondering if you could speak to that.

In that particular song, Jack Antonoff, who is one of the writers, Amy Allen, Sabrina Carpenter, said in some awards thing that there’s an old guy on YouTube that says that Sabrina had very little to do with the song. And so he said in this clip-

You being the old guy.

Me being the old guy. That, well, Sabrina really was the—she’s amazing and she’s the one that wrote everything in the song. It’s like, so my response is like, “Well, why are you guys even included on the songwriting then?”

So one of the things you highlight is a lot of people are included on the list of songwriters.

Yeah, 10 people- … 11 people. I mean, you know. Like, why does Song of the Year have songs that are interpolations, meaning that they have melodies from other songs in their interpolation? They used to call it stealing. And then you have songs that use samples for the whole thing, like the Doechii song that’s out right now. And I said, “Look, she took a Gotye 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 her. You don’t have to actually create a track; you just can sing over someone else’s song that was already successful.

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

I mean, it’s so absurd.

It, yeah, it just feels unfair. It feels—it’s a good song, but it was also a good song before, and before that, it was also a good song.

Right, 2011, or Luiz Bonfá in 1967. So why is that considered to be in the top songs of the year? It’s like, come on, you can’t find another song that’s not based on that? That’s ridiculous. And Doechii has some really good songs- … on her record.

Yeah, but why are these the ones that are coming to the top, right?

Well, you know.

This is interesting. Hey, that might be just a criticism of the machinery of the business-

Absolutely.

… 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 they make at the top are good. I’m a big fan of Bruno Mars. He’s a great songwriter and is a great musician all around.

Absolutely.

You know, he is Michael Jackson reincarnated. I mean, he’s-

Super, super talented guy.

Incredible, right? You mentioned Billie Eilish and her brother write a lot of the songs.

So good. Yeah, super talented.

I mean, Taylor Swift is unlike anything. I mean, that’s a historic figure in music, but she’s a fundamentally, at least originally, a singer-songwriter. So that’s a, I mean, I’m sorry, but that is a, like, of the kind of music that Rick Beato gives props to. She’s the—she carries the flame forward.

She works on her own songs, absolutely, and she, but she never has more than two co-writers on things. YouTube copyright strikes

Wanna take a quick bathroom break? Okay. I have to ask you about this complexity that you’re facing on a basically daily basis. I think it’s a challenge a lot of YouTube folks experience, but you’re just so viscerally experiencing it because a lot of what you do on your channel is celebrate music, broadly. And so, as part of that process, you have to sometimes show clips of music, and I think all of that falls under fair use, quite obviously. And so you get all these YouTube copyright claims, and for folks who don’t know, if you get three of those, each one of those can be a strike on the channel and could take down your channel. And you get some insane amount. You said you got, like—I think I had a similar thing on my Rick Rubin episode—like, I think you said 13.

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

All the, all the three-letter name-

All the s-

… record labels, right?

The music business people, so, what’s the story there?

Well, this has been going on since the beginning of my channel, and I’ve made videos periodically. When I first started, it was just instant blocks. So you never knew back in—I started, it’ll be 10 years in June. So, when I’d play music in a video, YouTubers were not playing music in videos because they didn’t, because of the Content ID things and the take-downs and stuff. So, I would play music, and I’d just see what happens, and then you get a Content ID claim, or you realize the people were, quote-unquote, “blockers,” and I came up with that term that they would block your video, take down your video.

And I realized at first it was, like, anything Guns N’ Roses, which is still the case, Guns N’ Roses, AC/DC, I mean, many bands, Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin, and then, and then something happened. There was a guy on the skateboard on TikTok that had the Ocean Spray thing and he was listening to- … Dreams by Fleetwood Mac. And that blew up and became a number one song again. And the labels then realized—I mean, I’d made many videos about why this is wrong, and it should be fair use and everything. Well, because of that, the labels were like, “Ooh, maybe we should rethink this.” And then they just started demonetizing videos.

Demonetized means they get all the money that you make.

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, ’cause I thought it was ridiculous. I go over to Tuscany, I interview Rick at his house, and I hired a lawyer to fight this, who I’m gonna have on my channel. I don’t wanna say who it is, but he’s another YouTuber. And he had approached me a couple years ago, and it’s not cheap to do.

Oh, you’re gonna do, like, a public interview with him?

I’m gonna do an interview- … with him, yes.

Awesome. Okay.

I talked to him today about it, actually.

I can’t wait. That’d be great.

So he said, “You should fight these ’cause every single one of them is fair use.” And he went through my entire catalog. I have 2,100 videos, and he’s fought 4,000 Content ID claims and won every single one of them. 4,000. That’s a lot—I mean, when I do top 20 guitar solos, there’s 20 Content ID claims, you know? It’s, and it’s either, it can be either from the sound recording, if I used that, or if I just play it, it can be from the publisher.

That’s amazing. So is there, I mean, that’s still, he’s 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, 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-

… you know

… obvious one, but even reaction videos, right? Where those-

Yeah. Even reaction videos, yes, absolutely.

Those are more borderline. But I don’t know. I love those videos.

Absolutely.

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

Yeah, but those are breakdowns.

Yeah, those are breakdowns, yeah.

I think that the Content ID stuff that was happening with these major labels, they would hire third parties- … that would go out, use AI, and go and anytime they detect anything, they always go to the biggest channels first to get the most views. Makes sense and stuff. And they would claim everything that they could, and historically, YouTubers never would fight back. They were like, “Oh, this is easy money.” YouTubers never fight back at these things, because they’re afraid to have their channels taken down. So-

Right, you gotta say, “Hold my beer.”

There you go.

So, I mean, it’s important. So, you-

I mean, it took me years though, Lex. I didn’t… I’ve been doing this… So, I’ve been doing it for one year now, and I’m nine years—almost 10 years into my channel. So, it took me that long.

I mean, hopefully, there’s a ripple effect also. It’s not just your situation. Hopefully, you don’t have to deal with this for much longer. How has Spotify changed music? Sometimes we highlight the fact that they changed the nature of music and that the scarcity is not there. But also, a lot of 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-

Once you get going-

… that there’s some good to… I mean, there’s a lot of good to that, right? Well, have you… Did you go through that whole process? I still remember where I had to basically throw away the albums.

I never did that. When? After you uploaded them into your computer?

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

CDs, yep.

And then, and then you upload them into your computer. And you save them. And then how do you put it? Allegedly, a friend of yours pirates some extra songs. And 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 the big moment for me that was really difficult to do, really difficult to do, is throw away that stash and switch to Spotify.

Switch to streaming, and basically, rebuild the stash of playlists and all this kind of stuff. And that, it was heartbreaking ’cause so much love and effort went into that. Both the CD, the stashing of the CD, and the stashing of the MP3s in the computer. And then in Spotify, it just seems just effortless. But it helped me discover all kinds of artists I never would have discovered otherwise. And Pandora, I used a lot. Pandora is more prioritizing on the discovery part versus organization part. And that was really wonderful.

So, one of the things I… I’ll start with a positive that I like about Spotify, is that they show view count, they show play counts. Whether they’re real or not, that’s another question. But they show how many plays songs have, and that’s how the charts are based.

Does that give you signal that something is listened to a billion times? Does that mean something to you?

Yeah. It means that it’s a popular song. Well, that’s a massive hit. There’s very few songs that have a billion plays. Now, the downside of Spotify is the way that they pay their artists. Now they’ve lumped in podcasts that are getting a cut of this streaming with the music. And you know, the search and discovery. I mean, there’s benefits of algorithms and there’s negative things of algorithms. Algorithms happen to many times pigeonhole people into listening to the same genre of music all the time, and not expanding their discovery of new music. Where you might hear on the radio back in the day where program directors would play things that they liked, right?

And you might hear something, “Oh, what is that?” “Oh, that’s a new Soundgarden record,” or you know, like, “Whoa, I like that. I’m gonna go check that out.” You know, something you might not have heard or something odd.

Like, one thing I really love doing on Spotify is you can… you can have radio. Meaning, like, you have a few… It’s similar to Pandora, like you can… Okay, this is gonna reveal a little too much about myself. But usually when I go work out, I’ll listen to something like Rage Against the Machine radio. I’m sorry, I need-

What else would you listen to?

I need motivation. Classical music? I don’t know. But yeah, it’s pretty good ’cause it recommends a bunch of other stuff I wouldn’t even know. Some of it I know, obviously, but akin to the, similar to the Rage Against the Machine-y type thing.

It recommends a bunch of artists, and it’s like, “Oh, holy shit, that’s awesome.” So, I don’t know. That discovery works really well. So, some of it is the technology thing. But that experience was fundamentally more vibrant than I had previously with my stash. That I would just keep a stash, and I would listen to the same record over and over and over and over. But yeah, what’s lost is the, I’m sure you love this, but listening through the Led Zeppelin records, just driving in a car and listening to the whole thing all the way through. Yeah, that’s lost.

So, I have my old iTunes libraries from 2005- … that I’ve saved. The CDs that I uploaded into my computer. Anytime I do the, I play songs on my… When I’m doing interview, I always play WAV files, I put them in. And it’s funny that when I interview a mixer, I interviewed this mixing engineer, Andy Wallace, and people comment, “Wow, the song sounded amazing.” And you go, “Well, not only are they great mixes that he did, but I’m using WAV files in there.” And people notice the, and these are WAV files from 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-

Oh, I see.

… these are actually the original WAV 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 stuff.

For the most part, but I also use Logic- … And Ableton. I’ve got all those.

So you’re mostly on a Mac?

I’m only on a Mac.

Only on a Mac.

Only on a Mac.

I’m only the opposite.

Although we have multiple PCs, ’cause my kids use PCs.

Yeah, just to rebel.

They do it for gaming. They like to game.

Right, that’s true. But like in terms of editing, I hate how good Mac is-

So good.

… at just integrating. The, the hardware and the software just work well together. Both on the video en-

If I didn’t have a Mac, honestly, I wouldn’t be talking to you right now. Because I got a G3 that’s… So the only good thing that a major label did for me is when my band was on UMG and they bought me a G3 and an SM7 and Pro Tools Digi 001, 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 to Macs for that.

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

That’s kinda the industry standard, yeah.

I gotta ask you ’cause I know… I’ve never used Pro Tools. I’ve used… Again, I’m a caveman. I’ve used REAPER, I’ve used Studio One, that’s the most recent that I’ve used that. And- … for the most time I’ve used Ableton Live. I feel like I’m using 1% of the power of the tool. Like, Ableton Live makes me feel like I’m literally just pressing the record button.

Ableton’s amazing. It really is.

It is. But I feel like the… It, I mean, it’s designed for people that are doing like all kinds of MIDI stuff, and like looping and the—what is it?—the push buttons with the, with the beats. And the, it’s, it’s… I mean, I sound, I sound really out of touch. But it, it’s just the power is incredible. Also, it’s, I think it’s not just for recording, it’s also for live performances. So this is why Studio One has been a little bit nicer for me, because it’s simpler, made for 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 wanna be a recording engineer or producer, you, you become an expert. A lot of the… You know, Finneas and Billie Eilish, I think that they use Logic, that’s their DAW that they like to use. And Logic, you know, a lot of pros use Logic. You know, I fire up Logic every couple days and I use it for things. I have it on my laptop here and I have Pro Tools and Logic on my laptop. I use both. I use Pro Tools mostly though.

But Pro Tools, that’s where you feel at home?

Oh, yeah. I’m an expert in Pro Tools.

Are you using any emulation? Any amp sims or it’s all real amps?

No, I use amp sims. On my laptop here when I travel and things like that, I use Neural DSP, which I just did a video at their headquarters in Helsinki. And their CEO, Doug Castro, is a friend of mine. I actually talked to him today as a matter of fact. And I have a Kemper amp sim, you know, a modeler. I have an Axe-Fx, I’ve got a Helix, I pretty much have all these things. But for me, I can… I have 100 amps in my studio, so… And I have mics set up all the time, and cabinets, and stuff.

Oh, what do you mean?

I have 100 amplifiers. Real amplifiers.

Real? Wait, sorry, 100?

I have 100, yeah. About 100, maybe 95.

How does one go get to that level?

Collecting and being… I’ll be 64 in April, so-

So you just don’t let go?

I don’t let go, no.

Why would you get to 100? Like is it, is it tone difference, the-

Yes, so everything-

You know the tone difference?

… does one thing really well. And so it’d be like, okay, so I have this Marshall JCM800 that’s modded that does this one thing. It’s got great mids and it’s good for this kind of a tune, so I will pull that out. Then it’s like, no, I need more of like a scooped metal sound that’s more like Metallica or Dream Theater or something, so, oh, I’m gonna pull out my Mesa/Boogie. Or 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 why I have so many amps, because they all do… Every amp I have does one thing really well. If it doesn’t do it well, I get rid of it. And I’m down to 100.

Down to 100. It’s only 100. But it-

I can get by with probably 75.

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

The Strat? What do you play?

The Strat, yeah.

The Strat, 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 to look at the guitars, and I don’t really know why exactly, just to be in the aura of these great instruments. And they brought in this American Strat that had these different shades of… It was like a silver. And I just… I’ve never had this feeling. They talk about love at first sight. I just fell in love with the guitar. Can you just speak to the kinda guitars you have and you love?

I pretty much have… Mainly old school guitars, right? So I have Gibsons, I have Fenders, I have PRS guitars. And then I have… I have two Gibson acoustics. I have a 1957 Country Western that I’ve had for probably 30 some odd years. It’s a great guitar. And I have a J-45 Gibson, and I have a Martin D-28. So I only have three nice acoustics. And I have a Guild 12-string, and I have a Guild Nashville-tuned guitar. The low strings are up the octave, so the E, A, D and G are up the octave. That’s Nashville tuning. Six-string though. Like, basically what David Gilmour plays on Comfortably Numb in my video. He plays a Nashville tune, but with one variation. The low E is up two octaves. So he demonstrates actually the… 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 feels that the guitars, the acoustics have? Like, how do you know which one to pull out?

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

So it’s more about sound versus feel?

Yeah. All my guitars play equally well.

Okay.

I have them all set up to where they play well. I have a signature Gibson guitar that I’ve had for five years now.

When you say Gibson, Gibson Les Paul?

Gibson. It’s a double cut Les Paul Special. Yeah, with P-90 pickups.

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

That means two cutouts. Two, um-

Oh. Cool.

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

That’s the- That’s the… All right, nice.

Yeah. When you play this, you’re gonna be like, “Oh my God, this is butter.”

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

And what amp do you play through? Do you play through an amp sim, or do you have… What do you have, like a-

This is gonna be embar… Yeah. I use BIAS FX. I’m sorry.

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

Yeah, John is incredible.

John’s great.

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

Yes. I’ve known John since he lived in Atlanta when he got signed, and I knew John from way back then, right 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.

… in the world.

Absolutely.

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

Absolutely.

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

So my theory is that somebody’s gotta be successful, so why can’t it be you? 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 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 who you’d know. “Can you teach me this?” I can’t teach you what Dylan did, but 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?” ‘Cause we made about four different videos, and they got more and more sophisticated.

And 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 were 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 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, I had 4,000 subscribers the first month, another 4,000 then. Hit 100,000 after a year, and then six months later, 200,000, then three months later, 300,000. So-

I think there’s one thing that should be said, that in modern culture for young people, a lot of them will see YouTube and TikTok and Instagram, and they kinda wanna be famous. They wanna get the clicks and the views and so on, and that’s the thing they chase and optimize. I think the thing that you’re leaving unstated perhaps is that you spent many years pursuing the mastery of a craft. And there’s a lot of value to getting good at something.

Absolutely.

Offline. You can actually reveal your journey online, but the thing you’re chasing is not fame. It’s getting good at s- something. And I think actually what happens is even if the thing you get good at… is not the thing that you become famous for, if that’s the thing that ends up happening. It’s still, like, getting good at one thing, kind of somehow relates to getting good at another thing. Somehow they’ll lead you to get better at getting better at the next thing, at the next thing, and the next thing. 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 going to watch an old white-haired guy on YouTube.” That was kind of my thing. Well, that was not correct. And then it’s like, “Well, 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 when I produced 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 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-

Yes.

… meaning, like, 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 then again, the thing you’re leaving unstated there is like you spent a lot of years teaching music. Like, really exploring music. Trying a music career of like, trying to create, trying to produce, trying to be a musician, and all these… Not just trying. Like, being a, getting extremely good at it. I just, I think in modern culture there’s a sense you want to skip that part. “I wanna be famous. I wanna…” You know this. And that is a thing that’s not going to be in most cases effective as a primary thing to chase.

So I have an undergrad in classical bass. I have a master’s from New England Conservatory in jazz guitar. Then I taught college for… I taught jazz studies for five years- … from ’87- … to ’92. Then I got a publishing deal, my first publishing deal, in 1992- … with PolyGram Publishing. And then I became a producer when I was 37, having no idea how to engineer, I taught myself engineering. And then YouTube. I taught myself how to edit videos.

And then you taught yourself how to interview.

And I taught myself how to interview. I’d never done an interview before. I never was like, “An interviewer? What?”

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

Totally different thing

… totally different thing.

Totally different skill.

And then not just YouTube, but like, how to be like a… there’s a… ’cause you’re both a YouTuber and like a musician who posts stuff on YouTube. YouTuber means like you’re thinking about stuff like thumbnails and…

Which I make my own thumbnails. I’ve always made my own thumbnails.

By the way, before I forget, I think I speak for the entirety of the internet thanking you for how you introduce your videos and how you close them. ‘Cause you, this is a big part of YouTube, where people have a 30-minute introduction to a five-minute video. You just go straight in. That’s really wonderful. That’s, I mean, on all fronts. I mean, I suppose that has to do with the production skills that you have, of understanding, cutting, cutting the fluff.

To make a song.

Yep. Yeah, cutting, cutting the fluff, cutting the bullshit. I’ll just get straight to the core of the thing. I’ve heard you talk about maintaining friendships for a long time. You said, “Never waste a friendship.” Can you elaborate on that?

Yeah. That’s one of my things is that I really value the time I’ve spent with people—friendships and keeping in touch with people. I talk to each one of my siblings multiple times a week. I talk to my sisters probably every night, my two sisters. I have friends from college, I got 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…

And you must have met some incredible humans, and incredibly weird, and interesting humans throughout your life. So it’s worth it—the effort to connect and reconnect.

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

Yeah, what’s the point of this whole thing, right?

That’s right.

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

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

It is, right? Music does something. I’ll get… sometimes when I’m alone I’ll listen to a song, and there’s nothing quite like a song that makes me truly feel, like feel alive. And whatever that is: sadness, or hope, or excitement. Or when I’m working out, listening to Rage Against the Machine—like protest. Or as I was listening to Metallica, I was re-listening to the set that they played 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 ones that reverberate through generations and they carry that.

It’s one of the greatest things that humans ever did, creating music.

And all of that led up to you, some guy being listened to by millions of people on the internet. This is all a simulation, Rick. And I’ve been a fan of yours for a long time, like I told you. This is crazy to meet you.

Same, Lex.

Thank you for everything you do for the world, for celebrating music. For helping us discover and rediscover some of the incredible musicians and songs that have been created over the decades, over the centuries. Thank you for being who you are and thank you for talking to me.

Thanks, I appreciate it.

Thanks for listening to this conversation with Rick Beato. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. And now, let me leave you with some words from Friedrich Nietzsche, as I often do. “Without music, life would be a mistake.” Thank you for listening, and I hope to see you next time. This entry was posted in transcripts on February 28, 2026 by

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Host of Lex Fridman Podcast. Research Scientist at MIT, working on human-AI interaction, robotics, and machine learning. View all posts by Lex Fridman →