Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 208 | Rick Beato on the Theory of Popular Music

Episode Date: August 22, 2022

There is no human endeavor that does not have a theory of it — a set of ideas about what makes it work and how to do it well. Music is no exception, popular music included — there are reasons why certain keys, chord changes, and rhythmic structures have proven successful over the years. Nobody has done more to help people understand the theoretical underpinnings of popular music than today's guest, Rick Beato. His YouTube videos dig into how songs work and what makes them great. We talk about music theory and how it contributes to our appreciation of all kinds of music. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Rick Beato obtained a master's degree in jazz studies from the New England Conservatory of Music. He is currently a producer and owner of Black Dog Sound Studios in Georgia, as well as host of a popular YouTube channel. He has worked as a session musician, songwriter, and lecturer at Berklee College of Music and elsewhere. He is the author of The Beato Book Interactive as well as other music-training tools. Web site YouTube channel Discogs page AllMusic page Wikipedia Twitter

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app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. It's a well-known trope that there is a connection between music and mathematics. It's never quite made sure what exactly this connection is, but certainly scientists love music as a general rule. Albert Einstein, very famously was a violinist and so forth. I think that there's more to it than just the idea that math involves numbers or counting, right? I mean, that's certainly part of it. You have a time signature, you have certain numbers of beats, certain numbers of notes per measure and so forth. But it goes more deep than that. I think that there is not just mathematics of music, but there is a theory of music. I mean, this is not my idea,

right? There's a whole field of study called music theory. I guess my point is that scientists love theory, even experimental scientists, love the idea that there is something out there in the world that we can think about in a systematic way, talk about it, understand why it works, the way it does. and music absolutely falls into that category. So today's episode, we're very happy to have Rick Beato on the show. Rick has become famous on YouTube, where you probably have seen him. Many of you have seen him. He started out as a musician, as a music professor.

He's taught at places like the Berkeley College of Music and as a music producer. But then he started making these videos on YouTube, where he first started by explaining music theory, explaining chords and progressions and so forth to people on YouTube. And then he applied his knowledge of music theory and music production to explaining popular music, why certain songs work. My favorite subset in his YouTube videos is the series called What Makes This Song Great? And to me, like even though it's about music,

this is quintessentially mindscapey material because it's taking something we all know about, we all experience music, and it's trying to understand it. at a deeper level. It's not just this song is great. It's what makes this song great. And you dive into why this chord progression goes the way it does, why this change of tempo or this change

of mode is effective in this particular place. And as we talk about on this episode, there's a connection between the psychology of music and the science of it, right? Certain things are very well known to cause certain emotional reactions. This chord change

will make you sad. You know, this key is very upbeat. Why is that? And part of it is, you know, we don't know, but from the practitioner's point of view, it's just fascinating how we can take these different ingredients and put them together to cause an effect. And then, of course, Rick also has opinions, and he shares knowledge about questions like, why is there a certain chord progression that seems to dominate all of popular music? And he has very interesting insights to the extent that it doesn't need to be that way. This is a choice that the music industry has made. So he's a great explainer of things in a way that is perfectly suited to this audience.

So I think that this is an episode that everyone is really going to like, even if it's a tiny bit of a departure from our usual fare. So let's go. Rick Biotto, welcome to the Mindscape podcast. Thanks, Sean. Appreciate it. So I have to ask a semi-personal question to start here. Like if 10 years ago someone had said, oh yeah, you're going to be a very successful YouTube star. Would you even have known what that meant? Would that have been in your scope of possibilities?

No. The only thing I used YouTube for was to send videos to my mom of my kids. That's pretty much what YouTube was. That's what it was. The very first thing I used to YouTube for was looking at old music performances, right? Like people put all these things online. That was great. People you couldn't see live, suddenly you could see on YouTube. And my mom used to send me guitar videos of people that she would find online or music videos. Same thing. Right, right. So, but that's pretty much what I used YouTube for. People complain about the internet in a lot of ways in social media and how it's denigrating society or dragging us down. But there's just so much good in it that I can't really get on the side of complaining.

It's a balance, but there's a lot of good going on. I agree. And so how did it happen? I mean, I think I know the answer to this story, but how did you get into making YouTube videos about music? So I had this intern named Rhett Schall. Rhett is now a YouTuber himself, is a guitar player. He had been interning with me since probably 2013 or so. And I started my channel in 2016, almost exactly six years ago.

It was June 8th. I made my first video of 2016. And in December of 2015, I did a video. a friend of mine asked me to make a video of my son, a guy that I got a guy named Shane that I was producing, a country artist. And I, my son Dylan, I was saying, oh, Dylan's got perfect pitch. And I played these really complex scores. Shane's like, oh, make a video of that so I can show my wife Angie. And I said, okay.

And so I put it on Facebook on my personal Facebook. Sent, sent Shane a link. And I went off to my, I was on the school board at my kid's school, went off to my school board meeting. and I came back and Shane says, that video you put up, it's got 5,000 views. I said, what? Like on Facebook? Five thousand. He says, I think it's a viral video.

I said, no way. And the next day, he calls me in the morning, he says, it's got 22,000 views. I said, it's unbelievable. And then by the next, by that night, it had a million. And it was getting, you know, 10,000 views a minute and stuff. And got 20 something million, 23 million views, something like that. And, but that was on Facebook. and Facebook at that time is kind of like TikTok is now.

You could have these really massive viral videos. And so we did a couple of videos like that. And six months later is when Rhett suggested me. He said, you should be a YouTuber. I'm like, what? Nobody's going to watch a white-haired guy on YouTube. And we want to make videos about it. Music theory, you know, history, whatever, film scoring, whatever.

And that's what I started doing. So I started with music theory and nothing to do with music production or rock music or pop music or anything that I'd been making my living at for the last 20 years. It was all stuff when I was a college professor in my 20s. I taught jazz studies. I have a master's degree from New England Conservatory in Jazz Studies. I have an undergraduate degree in classical base. So I have a pretty wide knowledge base from all. all different types of music, all different genres.

And so that's kind of how I started. I just started with one video and just kept making them. Now I'm up to 1,000 videos. And that 1,000 videos, I cannot even imagine. I'm up to a little over 200 podcasts and it's just exhausting. So kudos to you for doing the video thing. But the feature, the subject matter of that first video is kind of interesting, right? Why did it become viral?

Is it just because people are fascinated by the idea of perfect pitch? Maybe you should remind us what perfect pitch is for those who are not music experts. Perfect pitch is to when the ability to identify any pitch without a reference tone. So my son Dylan can hear a 12 note chord and tell you not only what every note is so quickly, but he can tell you at the time when he was eight years old, he could say, oh, it's, you know, an E-add-9 over F-major, you know, specifically what the notes were, which would be, and the chord voicing might be from the bottom up, C-F-A, B, E, F-sharp, G-sharp. So here's this E-B-F-S-S-Sharp, and that's E-ad-9, in inversion, and then F-major is in inversion, C-F-A.

And the fact that he could listen to it, he could pick it out, separate the two things, and name them, instantly is so beyond just regular perfect pitch, you know, because that involves music theory. So it's an eight-year-old kid that not only has perfect pitch, but he's got this, he's got the music theory part of it. It has to help that he's the offspring of a music producer slash professor. That's, well, yes. So when I knew, when I realized he had perfect pitch when he was about three and a half, I thought, oh, I'm going to teach Dylan music theory because Dylan had had an incredibly good memory too that I remember I did a I did a thing I said to him Dylan um he wanted me wanted me

to buy him these cup stacking things this thing he did in his gym class and I look and it's like 40 bucks for these cups that have no bottoms in them and you stack them as fast as you can and stuff I was like that's ridiculous it's so expensive and he's like and he said can I do something for it and I said okay, and we had just watched this Vsauce video about 52 factorial. And the amount of possibilities of a deck of playing cards. And I go, I go, Alexa, what is 52 factorial? And it goes 80, you invite Gentillion, blah, blah, blah. And it names this 87 digit number.

And I said, if you can recite this, Dylan, I'll buy this for you. He goes, oh, no problem. Record it for me. So I say it again. I recorded my phone. He goes, just send it to me. He goes to his room for about two minutes. And he comes back.

He says, okay, I got it. And I said, no way. And he recited it. Then I was like, wait, how do I check? I said, is that right? And so then I had to listen back. And then he said, I'm going to write it down. And we had a whiteboard in the kitchen at the time.

Then he wrote it down for me, the 87 digits. You know, sweat. And then I recorded them doing. So, okay, well, make a video with me. But he also got lucky because, as I recall, you have a video explaining how adults who don't have perfect pitch cannot develop it. This is not going to happen. It's an early onset skill.

Well, this is my theory anyways. My theory is that people develop it when they develop language. And I call it native music fluency. Because your native language is the one that you learn as a baby. Whatever languages you learn, as a baby you retain. And perfect pitch is the same thing. But people can learn. I mean, you do ear training and music training.

So people can learn relative pitch Where it's pretty much, if you're really good at it, like having perfect pitch. Yeah, okay. And then, so I guess this is what I want to get into is just this intersection of music theory and popular music. And the big question, well, let me put it this way. When I was in junior high school, you know, we had math, sorry, music class,

and we had a music teacher, Mr. Bell, I still remember his name. And unlike all the preview, yeah, exactly, all the previous, unlike the previous music teachers I had, he used pop music to explain what he was talking about. And he explained to us that, you know, popular songs have a structure, intro, verse, chorus, and there's like the instrumental part, and every group has a rhythm section, and then, you know, the lead instruments and singers. And as a budding physicist at the time, like the idea there was a theory, even at that super simple level, there's a theory of the structure for a this song totally changed the way that I thought about music. And is that a fair sort of model for what you're trying to spread more widely to the people out there on YouTube? Absolutely. Absolutely.

I try to teach people things that of whatever the genre of music is, whether it's the structure of a song, whether it's if it's a how to listen to a jazz tune, you know, how motifs are repeated and developed, or I just interviewed Bernard Purdy, who's a famous drummer that played with Aretha Franklin and Steely Dan, and he has a drumbeat called the Purdy Shuffle that a lot of people, Jeff Piccaro from Toto, used for Rosanna. It's a variation of the Purdy Shuffle.

or John Bonham from Led Zeppelin used it on Fool in the Rain, his own version of it. And I interviewed Bernard in New York last week, and he's 79 years old. And I asked him about how he miced his drums, how he taped his drums to deaden the overtones. And then he pulled off his hi-hat. I started filming as soon as he came in there before we even had the camera set. I'm filming on my phone. He said, oh, this hi-hat, this is no good the way they make the clutch on the hi-hat. It's the thing that holds the hi-hat to the top symbol.

And he says, these are too long now. And they produce too many overtones. And it's so fascinating to talk to a guy that was around when people were developing the sounds of how drums were recorded from the 60s to the 70s, how they went from three microphones to six microphones or seven microphones. and from mono to stereo. And it's just, it's all part of the history of music, the history of recording. So it's all these things I try to teach simultaneously. And there's the historical part of it that's really important to preserve.

I mean, are you a believer that people can appreciate music perfectly well without knowing any theory at all? But do you appreciate it in a different way if you do? Is that fair? Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, music touches people in different ways. don't ever think about the theory of a song that I like never even occurs to me. I only think of it if I have to explain it to someone. Right. Okay. So you yourself don't really. Me, myself, I made a video on the, uh, this song, um, Josie by Steely Dan this is a couple months ago,

but the intro. I call it the weirdest intro of all time or something like that. And, and I started and the video was very short. I just did the intro. And I thought, I thought, well, I need to break down the whole song. And I thought to myself, I've never learned this song. I've been listening to it for 45 years. It's so odd. Why have I never figured it out? Because I just enjoy listening to it.

Yeah, good. And then did you discover reasons why it was good in the process of sort of taking it apart and thinking about it? I discovered that it was even weirder than I thought to myself, how would you come up with something like that. It's so, there's a randomness to it that makes, that sounds so good. Right. The part sounds so good together. This was, did not fit with any kind of theory. This is purely them experimenting with things that they thought sounded good together. Perfectly legitimate way of doing it. And I want to get into, and well, let me just ask it right now.

Do you think that the most successful popular songwriters and musicians, I mean, what percentage of them, know any music theory at all versus being completely intuitive musicians and what percentage are like highly trained in that stuff? I think that that people know a lot more music theory. They might not know the names for them, but they know how things are put together. For example, does Elton John, well, Alton John, this is maybe a bad example. I did a breakdown of Tiny Dancer last week. And Elton John uses a lot of chord inversions.

Now, does he know their chord inversions? Of course he does because he is doing them on purpose. He'll play a G7 chord with a B in the base and he moves it up to a D in the base. And he obviously knows he's got one hands playing the chord as GBDF. And so he plays a B in the base and D in the base. He knows what notes are in the chord because he's playing it in his right hand. So he knows that these other notes are cool bass notes to use. They're inversions.

So, but does he say, does he know that with the B and the bass, it's a first inversion? Maybe not. Maybe not we don't know what that's called. It doesn't matter. He knows that it sounds good. Right. That's the intuition part. But he, but also the progressions are very sophisticated, Sean, too. He sees, he goes to all these different places using his intuition. But he has to know what the chords are to come up with them, put to put them together too. So. And that intuition is trained by the fact that we grow up listening to music, right? It's not like if you were put on a desert island as a baby, you would figure all this out. But you sort of pick up things from the air. Even if you don't, like you say, know the names for them, certain things sound good and you figure that out. Yes. A great thing that I learned from watching the Beatles Get Back documentary was that the guys in the band have phenomenally good memories. For example, any time that they would go into a cover song, Paul McCartney, you would start winner, John Lennon,

they would play it and they would never make mistakes. When John Lennon went to, and these are songs that they played back in the 50s and early 60s when they were in Hamburg. You know, they learned, they knew a thousand songs. Then when John Lennon would say, oh, this needs an organ part, he'd go over and sit down at the Lowry organ they had. I think that's what they had in the video. And he didn't ask Paul McCartney, what are the chord changes? He sat down and just played the right chords and didn't make any mistakes ever. Now, if I'm narrating this as the video is going on, I'd be saying some things like,

notice that John Lennon just sat down at this. They're writing the song. He says to sound of the keyboard. He doesn't ask what the chords are or anything. He just sits and starts playing and never makes a mistake. And the guys are just, they were geniuses. You're confused about your credit score. One site has one number and another site, something.

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the narrator of Andy Weir's audiobook Project Hail Mary, massive sci-fi adventure about survival and science, and what happens when you wake up alone very far from Earth? I really had to make a decision because I caught myself

getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm narrating some of these sections and it's like, okay, yo, yeah, yo, is this indulgent? And I really thought about it. I was like, no, at this point, it would kind of be betraying the trust the author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't go through it. But there's places in this book that deeply emotionally affected me, and I left it on the mic. That's great.

Because it served the story. People will say like, oh, my God, I cried at the end. It's like, yeah, dude, me too. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and IHeart Audio Book Club on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, it's not fair. I mean, they were pretty good. The rest of us can't always keep up. But let me just do a very little bit of asking about what music theory is or, you know, what it sort of comes down to in modern Western music. There's a lot to cover. I will encourage everyone to go to your channel because you cover it all. But it takes a long time to get there. So I guess, you know, octaves and scales are probably the very first thing one should think about, right?

And I've always had this really basic question. So, you know, we have an octave. That makes sense to me at the mathy level, right? There's a note and there's another note with twice the frequency. But then we divide it up into 12 intervals or 11 intervals, I guess. Yep. And okay, so we can do that. And it's equally spaced and there's a logarithm in there.

And so I even get that. But then we pick out some subset of those 11 notes and call it a scale. a major scale, a minor scale, a blues scale, or whatever. So who says, who decides that we should pick out those notes? Is that cultural? Is there some deep mathematical reason why we do that? Or is it just, yeah, it sounds good. Let's not ask too many questions.

When equal temperament came into common use. So that's equal temperament as equal spaces between the notes? Yeah, yeah. So during the Baroque era, you know, Bach has these two different cycles of Walter Tempera Clavier, two books, book one and book two. The first book was written in 1722. The second book was written in 1742. So when he was 37 and 57 years old. And there's 24 preludes and 24 fugues in each key. And this is when you were able to play in every key and modulate anywhere. and have the instruments not be out of tune, as they would be in some of the earlier temperaments that they have. So who decided on this stuff? As far as the names of what to call them, I mean, there were early music theorists that came up with some of these names,

but some of the names of the modes were, go back to Pythagoras, I believe, you know. So, but I guess what I'm asking is less about the name than the specific subset of notes that make up the major scale, right? So there's some half steps and some whole steps. And it sounds good when you play them together. You know, sometimes you're going up by a little bit. Sometimes you're going up by a lot. And it sounds good. Is there an understanding of why that sounds good?

Or do we just, you know, say this is how this sounds. Let's put it to work. Okay. So this is interesting. This is an interesting question, an interesting topic. So when I was, when my girls were young, well, they're still pretty young, I was in a car and I said, let me play you something. And I played the music to psycho, the slasher, the shower scene. And I said, what do you think? That sounds scary. Okay. Now, they don't know what the movie is. They have no idea what this is. Why does that sound scary? Well, it sounds scary because it is a cluster that's called

an X cell. So it's four chromatic notes. They're not played consecutively chromatic. They're in different octave. They're dispersed in different octaves. But they give, because of the way the overtone series works, there's a lot of beating of intervals, right? Because you have all these close. It may not be a half step, but maybe a minor nine interval, which is a half step, banded. So it could be like from C to C sharp up the octave. So that would be a minor nine as opposed to C right next to C sharp would be a minor second interval. And then maybe you have a B in there and that's a major seventh interval. So you have all these beating intervals that are beating really quickly and it gives a very tense sound. And it just sounds scary. And they don't know that any theory or anything,

but they know that it sounds scary to them. So what does that mean? I'm not sure what that means, but I think it means that certain combinations of notes together have inherent properties that will sound will produce a certain emotional response from a human. Yeah, that's exactly what I want to dig into this. It probably differs from culture to culture. It could, yeah. I bet that there's both some commonalities and some differences from culture to culture. Because some of the reasons why there might be commonalities is there is there is

math behind it. I promise there be no math or physics, but, you know, there is the idea that notes sound good if they're a ratio of a half or a third or four-fifths next to each other, was if there a ratio of 11-12ths, you're going to get a little jumpy in some sense, right? So, so maybe that helps explain why scales fit together in nice ways. And if you're teaching someone to improvise, you know, just stay in the scale. Whatever you play will sound pretty good. Right. Yes. That's, that's, you're absolutely. you're absolutely correct with that. And when we're listening, okay, so just tell the audience, I mean, what are the scales

people should know about? Everyone says there are major scales and minor scales. Is that enough? Or should the semi-sophisticated pop music listener be a little bit more knowledgeable? Well, those are pretty much the main scales that people should know. But there are certain scales. there are modes that are commonly used in pop music, like the Mixolydian mode that most rock songs are based on. Can you explain what a mode is?

Mixalilidian mode would be a major scale, but with a flatted seventh. So if you start on C, so C, D, E, F, A, B, flat, C, as opposed to B natural C. So that's a Mixilidian scale. And a lot of rock chord progressions are based on the Mixalydian scale or melodies are. And the Lydian scale is another mode that's very common in rock music. The verse part on Don't Stand So Close to Me, or Every Little Thing She Does is Magic by the Police, are both examples of melodies that are Lydian melodies. So I guess I thought, maybe I'm totally wrong about this, or maybe it's equivalent, I thought that a mode was the same set of notes but with a different starting point, rather than starting at C major, you go up.

But maybe if you just shift, it's equivalent. It is. Yeah. It is. It is. It is. So Lidian is the fourth mode of the major scale. So every scale, I call them parent scales.

There's really a group of parent scales. There's the major scale. The minor scales within the major scale. It's the Aeolian mode is really the natural minor scale. But you have other types of minor scales. You have the melodic minor and the harmonic minor scale. Then you have the harmonic major and the double harmonic major scale. Those are pretty much all the parent scales and all modes are derived from those five different parent scales.

And if you're listening to a song, could you identify what scale it is taking advantage of? Yeah. Okay. You can pretty much just play the chord progression. You can just sing the scale that the melody is using and know if you can sing the starting note of the base of the, root note of the chord and sing the scale, you know what the notes are, uh, are, are, what, what mode it comes from. And again, just to be like super naive about this, there's also what key the song is in,

which is a different question. Yeah. So the key refers to how many sharps or flats it has, and whether it's major or minor. Uh, there are 12 major keys and 12 minor keys. And they have a key signature associated with them. They go around this thing called the circle of fifths. So the circle of fifths would be if you go in a sharp direction, it's C, G, D, D, D, A, F, F, sharp, or G, then D, flat, A, flat, E, flat, B, flat F, and then you're back to C. So that's a circle of fifths. And it starts with C has zero sharps or flats.

The key of G has one sharp, D major has, G major has one sharps, D major has two sharps. If you go in the flat direction, F major, is one flat, B flat major has two flats, E flat major has three flats. And this is just something that you commit to memory. These are the basic building blocks of music theory. I usually start with key centers. Then I teach people scales and how to build chords, how to build basic major, minor chords. And, you know, same question for keys as for scales.

Can you listen to a song and know what key it's in, or do you need perfect pitch to be able to do that? Well, Dylan can tell you what key it's in, but I can tell you that it's in a major key or minor key, or it's in a mode. But I don't know, unless I have a reference tone, I don't know the exact key it's in. Although if I'm hearing a guitar, I can pretty much tell you what key it's in. If I'm listening to somebody play on guitar, I can tell you what the chords are and things like that. I can recognize the shapes of them. And that's just mostly from super duper familiarity with playing and watching other people play the guitar. I call it a, it's a collection of recognized sounds.

Okay. Right? It's a vocabulary of recognized sounds. Pitch memory, tonal memory, whatever you want to call it. It's, you recognize what a D major chord on guitar sounds like just by hearing it or an E minor chord or A major. They just have a certain sound to them. You can recognize the shapes. And most people that are, that have played for a long time can instantly recognize the

shapes. Okay, okay, good. I got it. And so that's all the music theory I wanted to cover, mostly to inspire people to go watch your videos and learn more details. So, and they're not, they're, they're way more interesting than what I just described there. Well, you need to know what you need to know, right? Like, you need to learn the scales, the keys, the chords. Good. And the circle of fifths, very, very important. But what I want to get into then is the connection between these ideas and how the song makes us feel, how we react to it, right? Is there any sense? So if I have a key, if a song is played in a key, like you'll often hear musicians say, you know, could we play in a different key?

Like my fingers don't go that way or whatever. Is the feeling of the song changed by going to a different key? Isn't it in some sense just increasing the pitch of every note by the same amount in some very vague understanding? That's a great question. Now, I would say yes, and I don't have perfect pitch, but I think that certain keys have certain sounds to them. People with perfect pitch really say that that's the case. Certain keys, A major is a very bright key, for example, or D major is a very bright key, and D-flat minor is a very kind of dark key. There's certain keys that if you try to transpose a song to a particular key, where to me it just sounds weird. I went to see I won't say who the artist is, a very famous duo from the 80s back about four years ago or so.

I went to the show and they were playing their hits. Now, like I said, I don't have perfect pitch, but they were playing them tuned down so far that they didn't even sound like the songs. I couldn't even, I didn't even know what songs they were, Sean, and they were these famous hits. But because of their voices, because they're older, they needed to tune them. them down and they just sounded so weird. Yeah. I think Joni Mitchell sounded better in the 80s and 90s than in the 60s because she lost the ability to get up so high. So sometimes that can work against you. But I mean, it's really interesting. The famous quote, of course, Nigel Tufnell in Spinal Tap saying that D minor is the saddest of all

possible keys. And I still, I think maybe the connection with perfect pitch helps me understand a little bit because whether we know it or not, it's not just the relationships and frequency between the notes, but the note affects us somehow, right? And that's at the heart of these keys having it I think that's true. I absolutely believe that's true. Yes, whether people know it or not. And everyone has a certain amount of this pitch memory, Sean, that is, they have a feeling that's, whether they realize it or not a subconscious feeling of these things that that um that affects them in in certain ways i think yeah okay good and then okay so to again put it to use in some sense um if we if we know enough music theory so we know some scales and some chords and so forth there is there's a

set of words i hear over and over again when you're giving your videos you do this wonderful set of videos on what makes this song great and often you will hear well because we go from this chord to this chord or we modulate from this key to this key, it gives us a sense of excitement or resolution or nervousness or fright or whatever. How systematic is that? Like if I said, I would like something that makes us feel melancholy, does that translate in your mind into a certain chord change? Or is it just you fool around to see what makes that work? Both. Okay. I believe that. I think we come up with this stuff by seeing what makes it work but there are certain things, certain type melodies,

like there are certain minor keys like Aeolian, which is natural minor, that has a very melancholy sound to it. And the note in the natural minor, beyond the minor third of the chord, the flat six, which is one of the important notes of the scale that gives the Aeolian mode or the natural minor scale, it's flavor because it leads you down to the fifth,

as opposed to the Dorian mode, a Dorian melody, has a natural six, and that leads you up to the flat seven. And when you have notes that are leading down to really strong anchor tones in the scale, the root or the fifth of the chord, so a flat second pulls you down to the root, and a lot of metal uses a lot of flat two chords and things like that. It has a really strong pull back down to the tonic, has a dark sound, whereas a sharp four leads you up to the fifth, and a flat six leads you down

to the fifth. So the sharp four is from the Lydian scale, has an uplifting, a celestial sound or otherworldly sound, whereas that flat six has a more melancholy, depressing sound, I think. I think most people think this, too. From the writers of parenthood and life as we know it comes, it's not like that, a new family drama about starting over and second chances. Scott Foley stars as Malcolm, a recently widowed pastor and dad of three. And Aaron Hayes is Lori, newly divorced with two teens.

Their families used to do everything together. Now they're navigating single parenthood and maybe something more. Watch It's Not Like That, All episodes streaming May 15th on Prime Video. Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense, except let's choose that single example that you mentioned of the flat two, I guess, that is useful in heavy metal. What is that? What's a flat second? Flat second would be in the key of C, it would be a D flat. So just a half step above the root. So it's not in the major scale, right?

It's a step below what would be the second note. If you go, do re me, do re. It would be, I'm such a terrible singer here. If I had my guitar, I can play it for you, which I do have my guitar. So there's your dough. that's note C to D instead of

that's a flat 2 Got it So it's just a single note has a certain darkness to it That makes me think of the Batman song from Lego Lego Batman

Exactly So So composers use these things To to you know evoke certain feelings

composers, you know, film composers, they know how to use these these devices, these intervals within scales that will give you these, will give the listener a certain sense of, like I said,

Lydian is a otherworldly or celestial. Thomas Newman, the composer, great film composer, he used that. I was watching a talk that he was giving on YouTube. and he said he talked about the difference between the sharp four and the flat two. And the sharp four gives you a feel of hopefulness, things like that. I'm feeling very manipulated just by these frequencies. It's almost, is there a worry that it's making it too mechanical to understand these things too well?

I mean, I think the answer is no, but I can see why people would be concerned. No, people just play the things and then they realize every time I use that, It gives it, it has a celestial sound or hopeful, you know. Right. And this is just tools in their, in their repertoire that it's not there to manipulate the listener. But I guess it is actually. I think all songwriters do that. Sure.

Sure. But it also speaks to this idea that you don't need to be trained in music theory to have these feelings in some sense. I mean, you talked about the root note of the scale, right, that first note where you start. And is this connected to the concept that you raised in some of your videos about musical gravity? Like you want to come back to that starting point. It's exactly what I'm talking about. Musical gravity, that certain keys, certain tones have a want to move, have a very strong pull to a certain pitch. like I was saying that flat two wants to move down to the root.

And it's commonly used that way. Yeah. And it's interesting because it's not in the major scale. So this is, you know, one thing I wanted to ask about was the major scale is so common because the notes all more or less sound pretty good together. But then you get some interestingness by deviating from that, right? By taking something that is outside your expectation. and that the sort of heaviness of metal is one way to be interesting in that context. Yeah.

So when I interviewed Sting back in November, and Sting, I asked him about surprise and music. And he says, he goes, that's funny that you use that term. He goes, if I'm not surprised within the first eight bars, I stop listening. And the surprise, meaning going someplace that people aren't expecting. Right. That that's really important, having some odd note that you go to that's unpredictable. Oh, what is that? And Joni Mitchell is a great example of a person that just always goes to these places that are just, whoa, wow, wow, that's amazing. It's beautiful, just incredible, just intuitive.

ear that she had of going to these different modulating to different keys that you would never expect and these beautiful melodies that float on top of these incredible chord progressions that she comes up with with these alternate tunings and she's such a genius. Then she comes up with the lyrics that work with them. And Sting is the same way. I mean, they just come up with these incredible lyrics that go with these, you know, all this things where it just goes to places you don't expect. And that's what I love about music. I want to always be surprised. Well, while thinking about this podcast, I came up with a theory for the meaning of life. It's to, you know, explore little bits of dissonance and surprise and chromatic things off

key, but then always to resolve to the tonic. That's my new theory of what we should be doing in our lives. There you go. No, that's true. That's, you know, always bringing it back, you know, when you go outside somewhere, bringing it back to the home base is really an important thing. Otherwise, things don't feel like they're complete. And of course, we can overdo it. So one of my favorite videos that you have is on the four chords that ruined pop music. What are these chords and how has the ruination taken place? The one, four, five, and six. The one, four, five, and six. chords. How is it taking place? Because there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of famous songs over the last 20 years that have been written with this exact same chord sequence or

variations of the same sequence. You know, it can be 4165, 4156, 1456, 1454, any of the permutations of those four chords is the are the four chords that ruined pop music. And we've all seen these videos of like someone playing this chord progression and just singing different melodies over it and doing every song, right? That's in the top

20. Exactly. And you don't see it as much these days. It's not used as much. It was used in all different genres of music. It was in pop. It was in rock. It was in country. but really from the late 90s to 2016, 2017, 2018, it was just used over and over and over. And one of the reasons I think is that people that worked at record labels, they didn't think that songs sounded like singles if they didn't use that chord progression. So the people that were in charge thought, oh, whether they were.

knew it or not, they would just always think that songs that had that chord progression sounded like hits, and those would be the singles. But what I loved about that video is that you did an experiment. You collected data. You said, you know, let's pick some of the most successful hit songwriters in our lifetimes, The Beatles, and Max Martin, who actually, I'll confess, I did not know Max Martin's name. But tell us who Max Martin is. Everyone knows who he is, even if they don't know his name.

He's a Swedish composer that pop songwriter producer that said, I'm not sure how many number one hits he's had now, probably in the high 20s or so, maybe 30. But he's not the artist. He gives these to other people. And so we all know Max Martin songs, but we don't know that they are Max Martin songs if we're not in that. That's right. And he has very few songs that use that chord progression as the Beatles did. I think that the Beatles had only one song of their 27 number one songs, which, which was Let It Be that had the one, four, five, and six.

And even Let It Be used a few other chords beyond those. So it's not that you need to use those chords to make a hit. Clearly, if Fetles and Martin didn't do it. But so you're saying this is more commentary on the music industry than it is on music theory. Correct. And is this a lesson for young songwriters? Like, should they try to march to the beat of their own drummer, as it were? Do you use a different chord progression?

Yeah, and I think that people have moved on from that now, finally. I almost need to make a video about that. Have we seen the end of 14, 5, 6? And I haven't heard, you know, I'm not hearing it a lot. And maybe when I hear it again, I'll be, I'll think to myself, wow, it's nice to hear that again. It reminds me that there's one music theory-esque question that I had. So as a very naive music person, someone who loves it but doesn't, know a lot. To me, the first thing is actually a melody in a song. But whenever you talk to musicians, they're always about the chord progression. And if I just knew the melody, could I figure out what the chord progression is? Or is that an extra thing that is added in the particular track? No, you cannot figure out the chord progression from the melody, unless it's Bach or Beethoven or

a classical. It depends what the melody is. But usually for pop songs, you can't. can't tell what the chord progression is necessarily because there's a lot of different possibilities. But there's a relationship. You know, you want to be singing songs that are either in or close to those chords or I don't know. I'm making this up. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it depends on the song. I mean, some songs really describe the chord progression.

It depends on the song, I guess. Some songs really describe the chord progression in the melody very clearly. A song that doesn't do it, for example, is smells like teen spirit. which has an incredibly sophisticated melody, but it doesn't necessarily spell out the chords. Whereas, well, I mean, a song like Norwegian Wood by the Beatles, John Lennon's song, is in one scale. So it really spells out the scale.

It's in the mix of Lydian mode. And it spells it out with the guitar part and with the vocal melody. Does this mean in principle that I could have the same melody over a different chord progression? Yes, absolutely. And people do that. It's called reharmonization. You take a melody and you just put different chords under it. Oh, okay. Good. I did not know that was allowed. Yes, that's really loud. And jazz players do it all the time. They do lots of crazy things. I mean, I love it. But is, is it just a stereotype or is it true that there's a slightly higher level of musical sophistication for a typical jazz song than for a rock song? Usually, yes, yes, there's, there's, depends on what rock song, but a lot of, most jazz songs have more sophisticated chord progressions and melodies than rock songs.

Okay, I'm glad that we were able to verify my prejudices along those lines. Yeah. You know, I wanted to get into, it's interesting because this is, I presume that this is most of what you do now, making YouTube videos rather than, okay. So there are some videos that are going to be more popular than others. And I love the music theory explanations, but there's a great demand out there for top 10 lists, you know, best guitar solos of all time and so forth. You do mix that in. Do you have like an agenda when you do that?

You're trying to teach people along with just making a provocative list? Or is it just like, I think this is fun. Let's just go for it. I use those lists to expose people to things that they would never heard. I always put things that are out in left field that would never be on a top 20 or top 10 list. I just did a video at the top 20 strangest guitar solos ever. And it was basically an excuse to expose people to weird guitar solos by players that they would normally hear. Like Alan Holdsworth was one of the people who's a really, Alan passed away in 2016,

but it was a really sophisticated, you know, progressive rock guitarist and instrumentalist and amazing guitar virtuoso and had really weird song structures and very, very advanced chord progressions that he would improvise over. And so it was my excuse to expose people to people like Alan Holdsworth. And the few of the people that I put in there that are out in left field, I use the video to draw people in and then expose them to things that they wouldn't normally hear. Good. I think that's a great. I have the same philosophy of my podcast, try to mix in big names with people you've never heard of before. Right. But the other genre of video that you come

out with that I love that I've already mentioned are the what makes this song great videos. And one of the things I just got to ask while I have you here, you're often saying, oh, let's just play the drum track or the backing vocals. Like, where do you get these individual tracks? Is there technology that will isolate them or do you just know people who know people? There are some technologies that you can isolate some things if they are panned to the side or they're right in the center of the stereo image. There are pieces of software that will separate them. But I typically will get them.

If the artist is in the video, I get them from the artist. I mean, I had Brian May in my Bohemian Rhapsody video. People say, where'd you get the tracks of Bohemian Rhapsody? From Brian May who's in the video. I did, I had a video on Kiss from a Rose and Seal is in the video. Where did you get the tracks from Kiss from Rose? I'm from Seal. He's in the video.

Okay. You know, so, but pretty much all the ones that I play on that series are multi-tracks that I've, or stems, which are usually stereo versions of like the drums or be a guitar stem with the left and right. And they're just things that people have given to me over the years. You do know that Brian May also has a PhD in astrophysics, right? I do, yes. Yes, just like me. So we have that in common. He's better at playing the guitar than I am.

But we have something in common. I love that about Brian. Yeah, he's done serious astrophysical research. It's pretty awesome. So from doing these, what makes this song great videos, let me sort of re-ask the question that I alluded to earlier. These are all songs you think are great. And one of the great things is about it is you're pretty ecumenical when it comes to genre.

Like you'll do folk songs in heavy metal and progressive rock and whatever. Do you find yourself liking the songs even more or discovering things about them when you sort of analyze them at this slightly more conscious level than just grooving to them? So here's, this is something I like to tell people. I don't say it that often, but when I say, what makes this song great? I have a question mark in the title. And the reason I have the question mark is that not every single song that I've analyzed, I think is necessarily a great song. It's why I think other people think it's a great song. Okay.

Even though in general, 99% of the songs I think are great songs or 95% of the songs I do are I think are great songs. But it's really more answering the question, why do people think that this is a great song? Why is this a hit song? My Best Skin Ever at 45? Give me a theme song and a best skincare award because it feels like this. Right? That's Farmhouse Fresh Skin, all right?

I'm blowing. And everyone asks how. The best skincare is Farmhouse Fresh, and the award is you, your best you. Visit Farmhousefreshskincare.com and use code radio for a free starter routine with any purchase. Hey, everyone, it's Cal Penn. I'm the host of Earsay, the Audible and I Heart Audio Book Club. This week on the podcast, I am sitting down with Ray Porter, the narrator of Andy Weir's audiobook Project Hail Mary, massive sci-fi adventure about survival and science.

And what happens when you wake up alone very far from Earth? I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm narrating some of these sections. And it's like, okay, yo, yeah, yo, is this indulgent? And I really thought about it. I was like, no, at this point, it would kind of be betraying. the trust the author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't go through it. But there's places in this book that deeply emotionally affected me and I left it on the mic.

That's great. Because it served the story. People will say like, oh my God, I cried at the end. It's like, yeah, dude, me too. Listen to Eursay, the Audible and IHeart Audio Book Club on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. That makes perfect sense. You know, when I read someone like Dan Brown who wrote the Da Vinci code.

You know, I don't think he's a great writer in the sense of what I look for in a writer, but he's getting something right, right? He's appealing to some people, and that's a talent, that's a skill. He's doing something really, really well. Right. It's exactly right. And, however, I do want to say it was just before we did this listening to the video that you did about comfortably numb, and I don't think you were faking your enthusiasm for that

one. You seem to be very genuine. No, no, no, no, no. like I said, 95, 98% of the songs that I do are songs I really love. And since you're there, I mean, you have been a music producer and musician and music professor. Talk a little bit about the way a song gets made in pop music, especially, let's say, like, now versus 20 years ago versus 40 years ago. I get the feeling it's not someone, an artist who is at home with a guitar, writes a song,

and then brings it in, teaches it to the band, and they record it. day. Like it's a little bit, there's more moving parts these days. Yeah. That's correct. Yeah. That used to be how it was done is that they would, when I started, that's what it would be. You'd show it to your band and you'd rehearse it. You come up with an arrangement. And then if you were had enough money, you go in a recording studio. And if you had even more money, you'd go get higher a producer and you would record it. And nowadays, people can open up their laptop and, you know, get a DAW with a, some type of a DAW interface, analog to digital interface,

and record all the parts, you know, with simulated amplifiers, simulated drum, you know, drum samples and, and keyboards and pretty much do everything in a laptop. Plug the mic into the, into the DAW, into your converter and do your vocals,

and you can pretty much do everything in computers. It seems like guitars, or stringed instruments more generally would be harder to do in that way. Like if I just gave a computer a musical score, it could play the piano part or the drums, right? Yeah, guitar is harder to do a digital version of, but you can get samples that are, you know, are pre-recorded sections and piece together a guitar part like that.

And so is it, so, okay, so you can do. that now. The computers are helping us do this. It would seem to me that there's sort of two directions that pulls us in. On the one hand, maybe it takes us away from the organic, soulful side of people playing their instruments or even the sort of virtuoso side of people playing their instruments really, really well, since anyone can do it and ask the computer to do it. On the other hand, it sounds like it's a democratizing influence where anyone can make an album, which I think is great. So I don't know, where do you come down there?

Well, I wouldn't be able to, I wouldn't be talking to you right now if it weren't for computers and DAWs because the only way I was able to become a producer at 37 was that they, Digit Design invented Pro Tools with the Digi-O-O-1 interface, and I was able to purchase one for $1,200 bucks

and learn the software. I couldn't have gone as a 37, year old to a studio and intern for two years to learn how to become a producer and how to engineer things. I taught myself, taught myself how to edit and digital audio workstations. And then that eventually led me to be able to learn how to edit video and make videos because you edit videos just like you edit audio. And as a matter of fact, you use the waveforms, the audio waveforms to know where you are, just like editing a podcast. You look at the waveforms and you know where to make cuts.

So you do think that there is some positive effect of this, but presumably there's some negative effects of too much technology creeping into the making of music also. Yeah. People don't really have to be virtuosos on instruments anymore. You don't have to hire session players if you don't want to. The fact that you can fix any performance and don't have to play anything in real time makes it to where anyone can do it, but the fact that anyone can do it

kind of makes it maybe not as special? I don't know. That's a debate to have. Yeah. Well, you give a couple examples in your videos with autotune, which can fix the pitch of singers,

and then also with quantization of drum beats. And I say that only reluctantly, because quantization means something very different to physicists than it does to music producers. But in both cases, you're sort of like rubbing off the rough edges, right? You're making something a little bit perfect, which takes away some of the meaning of it, or is that just us being grumpy old men? Is it good to be more perfect?

Or is it making it too similar and clean and therefore not as exciting? Well, it kind of depends on what it is. You know, people have been using drum machines since the 80s, and some of my favorite songs have drum machines on them. Tears for Fears and a lot of 80s music when drum machines first came out, the songs that I really love use drum machines. Tom Petty used drum machines. On some of his big songs, he used drum machines. He also used real drummers. And I'm not going to say that, you know, no auto tune, you know, uses, you know, there's nothing that's, you know,

nothing that's good about autotune. I saved many of performances by having autotune on records I produced where the vocal vocalist wasn't here or just couldn't hit a pitch. And I would have a take that the tone of it was great, but the pitch might have been off on a line on a couple notes. And it was way easier to fix those and have the exciting performance and get it and have those notes be more in tune than using a worse performance that was more in tune. So it really comes down to trade off. But in the case of the drum beats, I mean, I think this is a very specific

example of the question that I have in mind. We have in mind the idea that the perfect drummer will be just exactly on time, right? Like the same amount of interval between every two beats in the measure or whatever it is. And so what could be bad about fixing that? Because real drummers are or not, you know, John Bonham was not exactly marching to a metronome, but during most of those Led Zeppelin songs. No, so I find that the human element of these great drummers, I just interviewed Bernard Purdy, and he had a drumbeat called the Purdy Shuffle that they use in Steely Dance song, Home at Last and Sisters of Babylon. Bernard just has such an incredible groove, And shuffles are based on triplets.

And it's almost impossible to do a great shuffle as program a great shuffle to where it feels really good because there's so many dynamics in it and having that triplet feel when it's so rigid that it's got no variance. It just sounds weird to me. It sounds really unnatural. Straight rock beats though are, you know, when they've been quantized and things like that, people don't notice them as much. It's just like a drum machine. So, you know, it's not always bad. But when people say, I made a video about this song called Sucker by the Jonas Brothers. And there was a New York Times reviewer saying how this was such a great groove.

And I was the contrarian on it. And I said, it's not really a groove. It's been quantized. And I chopped up, I chopped up the thing. And I changed the tempo to show that it was all quantized onto the 16th. known on a grid, which is why I could change the tempo and change the timing of the song. I can make it faster or slower because it was perfectly edited to a grid. So there really wasn't a groove.

It was, at least not a human groove, you know. There's a quote that I love from, I think it's Francis Bacon who says there's no excellent beauty that has not some strangeness in the proportion. I mean, I think this is what it's getting at, both from the dissonance stuff when we were talking about melody and harmony and from the groove. Like if it's too clean and too crisp and too predictable, it's not what we find really beautiful. Yeah.

I do find, though, that people nowadays have been listening to quantized music for so long for a generation that anything that's not quantized, they notice. They notice that it's not quantized. And there's a lot of singers that, that mimic auto tune in their regular singing, they mimic the weird, whatever you would call them. Yeah, I guess it'll distort it in computery. I know what you mean.

Anomalies of auto tune that the weird pitch bends that auto tune does where you think, wait, do you have auto tune in your voice? No, that's me singing. They're just mimicking it. It's really amazing. Art effects. Yeah, all of these changes in how music is made, Well, actually, let me, let me, there's one follow-up question there, which is it sounds, because I recently did an economics podcast, it sounds like a market opportunity, right?

Like if everyone is doing drum machines and auto-tune, then is there going to be sort of a new place for more authentic acoustic, slightly messy and imperfect musicians? Absolutely. And there is plenty of indie music that's out there that's not perfect. and that a lot of people like and that I like to listen to. But it's hard to make generalizations on genres of music or certain pieces. You know, there's things that are perfectly quantized that I love the sound of. But it's kind of when every song is expected to be like this. And it started in the early 2000s with rock music. I think that this is a thing that really helped limit the appeal of rock music was the tuning and the quantizing of it that made rock lose its edge.

Well, this is going to be my very next question following up on the title of one of your music videos. Is rock music dead and why? It's certain types of rock music. very much alive. And progressive metal music is very much alive. And I've made a lot of videos with a lot of the people that are kind of the leaders of the progressive metal movement, which is guys like Tosin Abasi from Animals as Leaders, Tim Henson, who's in Polyphia. Pliny is a guitarist from Australia. He was a fantastic guitarist, Aaron Marshall from intervals. I've had these people on my channel many times.

I talk about a lot of these progressive metal bands, and that's a very vibrant movement. All the people know each other. They all support each other. And I just love it. I think it's incredibly innovative. And they're just reinventing a lot of, you know, from the types of instruments.

There's a lot of extended range instruments, seven strings, eight strings that are used, nine strings. And I find it really refreshing. So it's, so it's, so it's not dead. It's just dead to the, there's no Van Halens anymore. There's no rock bands that are massively big all over the world, are not really, not many that aren't in their 50s. The top 20, uh, whatever list you have on Spotify or whatever is not going to be many recognizable rock and roll bands these days. Correct. And, but I mean, is that mostly technological? because you also seem to suggest that it had some of the effect came from wandering away from the blues-based roots of this music and into something else.

Yeah, I think that when rock lost the blues that people became disinterested in it, when there were no blues-based melodies. And the last, you started seeing blues disappear from rock music in the early 2000s in New Metal. There was a lot of great new metal music. The last people that used that had a lot of blues-based, I mean, you know, people like Jack White with white stripes that used blue, but in general, the last movement of music that was a rock-based that used a lot of blues inflections was grunge. And that's 30 years ago now. So bands like Soundgarden and Pearl Jam and Nirvana and Alson Chains. And they used a lot of blues-based melodies. and blues inflections, a lot of pentatonic riffs, things like that.

So once we moved away from that in the new metal era, I think people started becoming disconnected from them. And that happened with Autotune happened in 2000, right when New Metal got really huge. So you had quantizing, you had Autotune, and you had bluesless melodies. Well, I guess that's what I have no idea with the answer. this is. I'm trying to figure out whether or not there's a connection between these technological changes and to move away from the blues. So I'm willing to buy your hypothesis that moving away from the blues has made rock music either less compelling or pop music less rocky or

something like that. But is that because of the new technologies or is this just things that happen at the same time coincidentally? I'm not sure. Yeah. It could be both. It's an interesting question, though. Why did they coincide? That's a great question. I mean, maybe there's a different spirit to it. I'm just making things up now, speculating. But, you know, when you say the blues, there's a very

specific musical logical meaning to that. I mean, I mean, I mean notes that are bent. I mean notes that are not that are under the pitch, you know, things that are using microtones that. Right, right. But all these are deviations from perfection, right? Correct, yes. Yeah.

And just the words of the blues. It's called perfection. Sure, sure. But blue notes, right, in the broadest sense, sort of are the ones that don't fit in to the scale you're playing. But we also have this picture of like sitting in a garage or in a rundown saloon or at the crossroads and just pluck in with your guitar and a tiny little drum kit. And it's very far removed from sitting in a computerized workstation.

and laying down some beats. So it sounds like there's both a musical logical difference and also a stylistic, spiritual difference between the two approaches. Exactly. Totally, totally right on with that. And with that, what do you think is going to be what happens next? Are you able to predict the future of popular music?

I know that you do these wonderful things where like every so often you check in with the Spotify top 20 and go like, what is going on here? Like you say that. Like the title is always like, I rant about the Spotify top 10, but you often like the songs, actually. I do. And much to people's, most people dismay, I like the songs.

I just put out a video called Jimmy Hendrix wouldn't be famous today. Oh, okay. Just before I came, I put it out a couple hours ago. And I haven't looked at any of the comments, but it's, it's, the video is doing really well right now, which to me leads to, leads me to believe that people, agree with this that Jimmy Hendrix, if he came out today, no one would pay attention. I'd be interesting to see the demographics on the views of that video. Is it just folks in their 50s and 60s? Like, yes, those kids today don't understand real music. No, it probably is a really much like my channel. My biggest demographics is 25 to 34 in my channel. Oh, very interesting.

And this is, so this will be people commenting from, that are probably all different from all different generations. Good. I will check that out. Yeah. So I don't know what they're saying, but from the looks of it, it looks like people are agreeing with my, it wasn't my premise. It was from an interview. I was, I did an interview with a bass player named Jeff Berlin in 2017.

And I was at the beach this weekend with my family. For some reason, this video popped into my head, this thing that he said. And he said, in the same. 70s, if you were a great player, you'd be famous. And that's just not the case anymore. And I started thinking, yeah,

the rise of the famous soloists was really, a lot of it happened in the 70s. The 70s and then the 80s. And then after that, the famous instrumental soloists, you know, even people in

bands, the Eddie Van Halens happened in the 70s, you know, the kind of the bands that had virtuosos in them are gone to a certain degree. Yet some of the greatest virtuosos are here today, but they're just not hugely popular. That's right. I mean, even the grunge bands that you mentioned, they were blues-based, but they were not characterized by amazing virtuosity. I mean, Dave Grohl turns out to be a wonderful musician, but that wasn't the point of run. No, Dave Grohl is actually a virtuoso drummer that people,

didn't realize was a virtual. I did. And I don't mean that, you know, that, oh, I realized he was a great drummer. I could tell he was a phenomenal drummer. The guys were virtuoso singers, as far as I'm concerned, including Kirk Obame. But Chris Cornell was a virtuoso. He's one of the greatest rock singers that ever lived. So the virtuosity went to the vocals in the grunge era. Fair enough. Well, you know, I always like to end up on a hopeful or optimistic note, or at least a useful note. I mean, obviously with you, it's too easy to say people should check out your videos. But, I mean, maybe is there a sales pitch for the music lover on the street to become a bit more knowledgeable about what goes on in the songs, whether it's really music theory or just, you know,

listening for chord changes that resolve in interesting ways? Why should we bother to put in that little bit of extra effort rather than just putting on random on our playlist and getting on with our day? I think it makes, you know, if you know a little bit more about music, it makes it more enjoyable. You can actually appreciate it on a different level if you understand how it's constructed. Just like you said about your teacher that talked about the form of music, the intro, the verse, the pre-chorus, the chorus, the bridge, the solo, the interlude, whatever. And knowing those terms, and then you start listening to songs and you can talk to your friends about them. That's really what music theory is. music theory is just the ability to talk, to put terms to things, you know, and so you can talk about

them while you're not listening to the music. Yeah, I mean, I guess that's a very nice way of putting it, because music is very universal. Everyone can enjoy it. But then to talk to other people about it, you need to be able to put words to what is causing or what is behind that particular sensation you got with that drum field or whatever it is. Yeah, yeah, drum fill. Or if you say, hey, Sean, what do you think about the chorus on that sign? Well, you know, what the chorus is, it's usually the title of the song. Oh, I love that chorus. But if you say, what's a chorus? You know, knowing what a chorus is is, is important in being able to talk about this. It's, if you want to talk about a song, you need to be able to talk about the different

sections and know what they are. So that's music theory, basically. Yeah. No, I like it. That's a, it's a great. It's a communication device. And you've done as much as anyone in recent years to help people understand that. So Rick Biotto, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape podcast. Thanks, John. Appreciate it. What if you could have even more and more and more help to pursue your goals? At LPL Financial, we offer more ways for advisors and their clients to thrive. So what if you could? Paid advertisement. Investing involves risk, including potential asset principal, LPL Financial LLC member FINRA, SIPC.