Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin - Rick Beato

Episode Date: February 26, 2025

Rick Beato is a musician, producer, and audio engineer whose deep passion for music has made him one of the most respected educators in the industry. A multi-instrumentalist with a background in jazz and classical music, he has produced and engineered countless records across genres, working with artists like Shinedown, Needtobreathe, and Parmalee. As the owner of Black Dog Sound Studios and the creator of a YouTube channel with 4.8 million subscribers, Beato has built a global community of music lovers. His channel demystifies everything from music theory and songwriting to iconic song breakdowns, making even the most complex musical concepts accessible and inspiring to all. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: LMNT Electrolytes https://drinklmnt.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Athletic Nicotine https://www.athleticnicotine.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Squarespace https://squarespace.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

Tetragrammaton. I played in bands until 99 and then I started producing records after I was, I was in a band that got dropped, a band called Billionaire that was on London Sire then Universal and got dropped and when all the labels, consolidation started happening and started producing full time then, did that until I started my YouTube channel in 2016. How did you start a YouTube channel? In December of 2015, I did this video with my son Dylan. He's 17 now, but he was eight.

He has insanely good perfect pitch. Born with it, but I taught him when he was three. I used to be a college music professor, and I was like, okay, Dylan, when you hear these notes together, C, E, G be a college music professor, and I said, I was like, okay Dylan, when you hear these notes together, C, E, G is a C major chord, okay. You know, you hear E, F sharp, G sharp, B, that's E add nine.

I taught him all these different chords and everything. So then I would play multiple chords at the same time, up to four chords, and Dylan could name them all instantly, even if I played him 12 note chord. Wow. Do you think it's because it was an inborn thing or do you think it's because you started teaching him at the age that you taught him?

So I played, I started making playlists when Dylan was 15 weeks in utero. Because I read in what you can expect when you're expecting the book for parents, you know, and that kids can start to hear them. So I started playing what I call this, in retrospect, was high-information music. Bach, well-tempered clavier. I have a Turkish friend that's an amazing pianist that does these contemporary classical

improvisations, but all really sophisticated music. After he was born, I kept doing it every day. I'd spend about an hour with him and I'd dance around and do stuff like that with him for the first year and a half or so. And then my wife got pregnant with our second daughter, Lennon, or with our second child, Lennon, and we didn't do that with her.

And I'd never said a note name or anything to Dylan. And when he was three and a half, we're driving in the car and I was just like, hey Dylan, sing a Star Wars theme. And he sings it and I was like, that sounds like it's, I don't have perfect pitch but I've got great relative pitch. Sounds like it's the right key and I check in my phone. Sing the Superman theme.

And he's like, that's in the right key. And every song I asked him, he sang in the exact key. So I turned my car around and go back to my house and hit the note B flat. And I said, what is this, Dylan? He goes, Star Wars, instantly. Star Wars starts on a big B flat major chord. And then I hit the note G and he goes, Superman.

I hit the note C and he's like, so this is the Excavator song or some kid's tune. And then I taught him all 12 note names. I realized he had perfect pitch. And did he learn the names based on the songs that he knew? No, he just, he knew the note. He already had perfect pitch. And then it was just adding the names to the notes.

He knew every notes. And after he said, how do you know this? He goes, every note sounds completely different. But I saw a video on YouTube called The Linguistic Genius of Babies. There's a woman, Patricia Kuhl. And so she had this theory. It's pretty much proven out that babies have this ability in the first nine months of their lives where they can hear the sounds of all 6,500 languages on earth. So they have all the synapses available and their ears can detect these things, the 2,200 different phonemes. And starting at nine months, they

begin to lose the ability and then they become culturally bound listeners. So they can only hear the sounds of the languages spoken in the household. But if you expose a child, let's say, to Mandarin, only a few times within that first nine months, they can hear those sounds of Mandarin forever. So I have a theory that all babies can develop perfect pitch up to nine months of age if they have a certain threshold of this high-information music played for them

that goes through all the different they hear all 12 notes statistically I guess you would say above the you know the background sounds that they hear so they they hear enough of this music that they begin to recognize that these pitches are unique and have their own sound to them. It seems like something that anybody could learn. Yeah. I think if you start with relative pitch learning relative pitch first, I think we can train to them. It seems like something that anybody could learn. I think if you start with relative pitch, learning relative pitch first, I think we can train ourselves for anything.

It's just finding the method and doing the work to be able to do it. Yeah. It's interesting because when I meet people with perfect pitch, there's so many different levels of that. And relative pitch is far faster. So people that have good relative pitch, they're not confused if things are not in tune or not, you know, because so many old recordings are out of pitch. Things that I didn't realize when I was listening to them, you know, they'd, I'm sure you've done this where it's like, oh, I want the tempo a little faster.

If you're on tape, I'll just speed up the tape machine. You must have done that in some recordings. Or, and I was a college music professor from 87 to 92. I taught jazz studies at Ithaca College in upstate New York, and I also taught, I taught for one year at the new school. Something for a friend of mine, I taught, I just taught one day a week

there. But I used to teach ear training and teach intervals to people and how to do that. And that was very, it was interesting to teach people, especially kids that were music students, some of which found it extremely difficult to learn these things. And so the strategies that you use for them are different than you'd use for a child. People that never learned to listen, it's really fascinating because when I started producing, I had no technical skills, even though I'd been recording in studios

and things like that, played on records, but I never knew what mics used or anything like that. And it's like, well, what is a good snare sound? What is a good bass drum sound? You know, like things like that. And well, it depends on what the song is. And I always studied records, but there's a difference between what are these sounds

and how do you get the sounds? What are the microphones that you use on them? How do you make a snare drum? How do you make a bass drum? And I always found that coming from a person that learned by ear at first as a musician playing guitar and then learned what I was doing in music school and then going back to learning by ear and by asking questions with people about how do you actually do this,

how do you get microphones in phase, how do you get, you know, what makes this record punchy? Why would you use reverb on something? Why would you not use reverb on something? How do you create ambience? Even things like acoustics. What do you create ambience? Even things like acoustics. What makes a room sound good?

Or what creates the vibe for people to want to record in a certain place? How do you know where to go? So it's been my quest in my YouTube channel to answer all these questions by asking people like yourself, all of these things. It's great. And there probably are no right answers. There are probably a lot of answers

that are interesting and helpful, but there isn't one right way to do any of it. Right. I'm fascinated by when I watch you interviewed. I'm fascinated by your philosophy and just your thoughts on creativity. I've been reading your book, but I'm really a student of,

I've studied records that you've produced for years. And to be able to, for me to be able to ask the people from the producers to the actual musicians to the sound engineers, whoever it is, to ask them about specific recordings. So you started with the video of your son and Perfect Pitch. And that thing went insane.

It got 80 million views. It was on Facebook. And it was just on my personal Facebook. Wild. Yeah, so, and people wrote to me, musicians from all over the world wrote to me, how is it possible? It's one thing to have Perfect Pitch,

but Dylan's Perfect Pitch was so unique. Because I played chord, I played chord, and he's like, C augmented over D flat augmented, E add nine over F major, things that your jazz musicians or modern classical musicians would, even with perfect pitch, could not identify like that.

And to me, I saw what the power, I never posted on social media. Would he recognize the shape of the chord, or would he recognize each of the individual notes that made up the court both? Yeah, so it's kind of a combination of relative pitch Well, here's it as a sound and then he can pick out every note and he can sing every note no matter what the spacing is So I would do things where I'd play these most dissonant chords and he would and one of the I did like four videos and one of the videos he wrote on us on a whiteboard thing I had with the staff. He'd write the notes out and sing them. And Dylan was never interested in music. He took piano lessons for a few years and he quit. He never went to practice. And then last year

he said just turned 17. Last year he picked up the guitar. He's like, okay, show me a couple things. So he never, he listened to things all his friends. You know, he listened to whatever 17 year olds listen to or 16 year olds. He's like, okay, show me something on guitar. So I show him an E minor chord. I show him a D chord.

Then the next day he comes and says, show me a couple other things. So I show him a couple other chords and stuff, how to strum. And then he comes down the next day, he's like, I learned Stairway to Heaven. What? So, and now he's improvising and stuff. And it's really fascinating. My middle daughter, Lennon, has no interest in music.

And my youngest, Lennon's 15 and Laila is 11 and she plays drums and she'll play the piano and just all stuff on their own. All the kids learn stuff on their own. Not interested in structured lessons. Tell me about teaching jazz. That's an interesting concept. It's extremely difficult to teach jazz because it's like how do you teach someone

how to speak a language? Yeah. And typically jazz is taught to me, most jazz musicians learn by learning solos. So just like you'd learn a language, you learn a phrase, then you learn another phrase. And then you learn about how chords work together in progressions, and then you learn another phrase. And then you learn about how chords work together in progressions, and then you learn how to improvise

over those progressions. The most common progressions in jazz would be like a two, five, one, so if you're in the key of C, it'd be D minor, G major, C major. Usually you use sevenths in jazz, D minor seven, G seven, C major seven. And then you teach people, and it's almost impossible to teach them, Rick, about how do you play a melody over a set of chord changes.

And most people will just run scales, and that just doesn't sound melodic. And then you teach them that, well, you play the notes of the chord, and that really describes them. So it's D minor seven is D, F, A, C. But then you're just playing arpeggios and that doesn't sound musical. So it's like, how do you actually make music and also make the changes? Making the changes are playing things that sound good over each chord because you have things that are happening vertically, the chords that move along, and then you have the melody which moves horizontally.

And you have to teach people to, you can't really teach them, how do you play a phrase? It's like playing blues. And you really kind of need to start with just developing motifs. It's the same way if you're a rapper and you're just writing a phrase, coming up with some type of a hook line.

It's like any songwriting is done in the exact same way that you would learn to do it first. Or painter, just learning the skills, the craft aspect of it first. Right, yeah. But teaching jazz is, I'm not sure that it can be taught. Because very few of my students were able to actually learn to improvise well.

And I'd hate to think that it's on me as a teacher that I wasn't able to teach them that, but I learned jazz because my dad listened to jazz records. And he said to me, my dad worked for the railroad. He was a very, you know, both my parents were blue collar people. My mom worked in a can factory in upstate New York, Fairport, New York, right out suburb of Rochester.

My dad, when I was in 10th grade, I started playing guitar when I was 14, but he bought me this record, Joe Pass, it was a record called Virtuoso. It's just solo guitar, all jazz standards. And he's like, if you ever learned to play like this, you've accomplished something with your life. My dad said very few things, but that's one of the things that he said. So I just left the thing sitting in front of the stereo for months. And one day I'm like, oh, let me open it up and put it on. My dad listened to jazz all the time. So I put it on and it starts with Night and Day and then Celebi Starlight and all these

old standards. The fifth tune or the fourth tune on the record was all the things you are, Jerome Kern tune. And it starts playing. I was like, I can figure that out. So I start working on it and everything. I work on it all day and my dad comes home from work. I was like, check this out and I start playing along with it. My dad said, how did you do that?

I said, just listen to it. I figured out the chords, the single note lines and the bass walking and everything. I just listened to it. His response, he just shook his head. He's like, wow. That to me was the ultimate praise for my dad. Yeah.

Let's listen to a track from it, from your childhood. Just cool to hear. Yeah, all the things you are. It's Virtuoso's, name of the record, 1973. I'm gonna be a good boy. I'm gonna go with the blues. I'm gonna go with the blues. I'm gonna go with the blues. I'm gonna go with the blues. I'm gonna go with the blues. I'm gonna go with the blues. I'm gonna go with the blues.

I'm gonna go with the blues. I'm gonna go with the blues. I'm gonna go with the blues. I'm gonna go with the blues. I'm gonna go with the blues. I'm gonna go with the blues. I'm gonna do it. So do I'm gonna go ahead and play it. I'm gonna be a good boy. So Okay, had you heard that song before in any form? No.

So that's the first time you heard that song, because that, Joe Pass is taking a lot of liberties with the song. Yes. In terms of learning the song, this would be a hard way to learn the song, really. Yes, this would be an impossible way to learn the song. Yeah. Yeah. So you played along with it.

I played along with it. And your dad? My dad couldn't believe it, because it's, I mean, technically, it's incredibly difficult, even today Yes, and to be able to figure it out by ear. That was the thing with no lessons figure out all those chord voicings and The essence of jazz is pretty much in that one improvisation once I heard that Rick and I and then I started to take some guitar lessons some jazz guitar

lessons with a guy in my neighborhood that owned a music store. And he taught me the chords and kind of how the song worked and how the simple melody went and then explained to me how the improvisation, how Joe was improvising over the chord progression. And he would just keep cycling through. And about the form of jazz tunes and things. So I, learning that taught me pretty much everything about jazz, phrasing, swing, bass lines, comping. It's all there in that one improvisation.

It's amazing. It's all there in that one improvisation. It's amazing. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] LMNT, Element Electrolytes. Have you ever felt dehydrated after an intense workout or a long day in the sun? Do you want to maximize your endurance and feel your best? Add Element Electrolytes to your daily routine.

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that powers your nervous system so you can perform at your very best. Element electrolytes are sugar-free, keto-friendly, and great tasting. Minerals are the stuff of life. So visit drinklmnt.com slash tetra and stay salty with Element Electrolyte, LMNT. After the videos with your son, what happened next? So about six months later, I had an intern in my studio and he said, you should start a YouTube channel. What year was this? It was 2016.

So it was June 2nd of 2016. I did my first video. It's kind of the early days of YouTube now. Yeah, I mean YouTube started in 2005, were the first videos, but really, people didn't start using it until, a lot until probably 2009. There were guitar channels and things out there.

Do you remember the first time you were made aware of YouTube? Yes. Tell me. My brother, one of my older brothers, from a family of seven, my oldest brother, Mike, I was trying to send a video to my mom of my kids, and it was in 2006. I was like, how do you send a video to someone? You know, there were huge files at the time.

He's like, go to YouTube. I said, what is that? It's just a place you can upload a video and then you just send mom a link. Okay, so I sign up and put up a link there and so that's how I'd share videos. So you started using it as a user, not as a watcher, right from the beginning. What do you use it for as a user, not as a watcher, right from the beginning. Yeah. What do you use it for as a user, not as a maker? I find out-of-print things that people have put up there. I watch concerts, and I watch a lot of interviews on there.

I was a YouTube user for years, though, before it even occurred to me to upload a video there. So I was very familiar with the platform, but as far as when I started, you know, I was like, okay, what kind of videos am I gonna make? So this intern's like, you should be a YouTuber. I was like, nobody's gonna watch a white haired guy on YouTube.

He said, I think they will. And I had had that video six months before with my son Dylan, and you know, a video with 250,000 comments. I mean, it was insane. And even though I was a rock producer, that's what I did for a living, I'm gonna make videos,

go back to what I used to do when I was teaching college. I'm gonna make these really kind of sophisticated music theory videos and improvisation and ear training and all that kind of stuff. So I did that, because there was nothing like that on YouTube at the time. There was nothing from advanced musicians. And about four months later, it's funny,

because I just had Dweezil Zappa on. Dweezil's the first musician to reach out to me. I had about 4,000 subscribers. And he told the story of that he discovered my channel because I was explaining things that he always wondered about. And so he wrote to me out of the blue. I was like, he put a comment in.

I said, I can't be Dweezil Zappa. I only had a couple thousand, few thousand followers. And I click on it. It's like, no, that's Dweezil's channel. Then the next day I get an email from him. He's like, I wanna talk to you. Here's my phone number, can you call me? So I called him and I talked to him.

Then the next day, Steve Vai wrote to me. Then I started, I did some interviews, just Skype interviews at the beginning. But most of my videos were, they were about all different types of things, that all educational, nothing about contemporary music at all. And length, typically? Oh, however long they needed to be.

I had videos that were 45 minutes long. I did whiteboard videos on things, explaining stuff. Like a class, like teaching a class. Yeah, and nobody would do whiteboard, it's funny because nobody does whiteboard videos. Some people do, but I did whiteboard videos. There were some of my videos, but then I'd make videos like on how Apple ruined iTunes and things like that.

I'd not realizing that people were, people freaked out about this. Me criticizing Apple devices and everything. Like why have they changed iTunes and it sucks now and all this stuff and they just, people went crazy, got millions of views. So I would even venture out beyond things like that, but just anything that came to mind.

I made videos. Always music-based though. Yes, always music-based, yeah. I never have mentioned anything other than music on my channel. I don't get into politics, contemporary, nothing. It's only music. But I make videos on AI, and I've been invited to testify.

These different congressional hearings, I make videos on fair use, practices on YouTube, and content ID policies and things like that. So always trying to be where modern technology is and also where the business of music is in addition to commentary on the Spotify top 10 and how these things work and how streaming works and how people don't get paid. And then obviously now it's progressed to having interviews with people. How do you think streaming has changed

the way people relate to music? So I think that the availability of having anything at your fingertips in a way devalues music, at least in my opinion from growing up and actually going out and buying records and having a physical representation of someone's art, including the album cover, the credits is a completely different experience than being able to make a playlist that don't necessarily go together, things that are not meant to be listened to in that way. People used to have an album order. That was an important thing, an A side and a B side.

And with streaming, I made a video recently that I talked about. I turned on the faucet in my kitchen and I said, this is basically Spotify, let's say. And just the water keeps going and just keeps going on indefinitely. Every day, 100,000 new songs are added to Spotify. And at any point, you can interrupt the stream. And I put a glass in there and said, this could be Led Zeppelin's entire catalog,

right here in this glass. Take an eyedropper. This is Zeppelin 3, and I start naming off the songs as Zeppelin 3, and then this is the rest of Zeppelin's catalog. Dump it out. Music in some ways is too available. It's too easy to obtain.

And the scarcity element has been taken away. And the scarcity element made it desirable. You wanted to get it. You had to make effort to get it. And because of that, it had value. Yes. And maybe I had a Jimi Hendrix record that my friend didn't have,

but he had a Edels record that I didn't have. And we would trade the things, or we'd go over and make a cassette copy of it, or whatever you would do, and you'd carry the record over to someone's house. I mean you literally would physically carry the physical record and now on your phone there's people listening to music on their phone and everything is available for you there between Spotify or Apple Music or Tidal or whatever you listen to and YouTube you

pretty much have everything that's ever been recorded. It's hard to wrap your head around, but it's how much is it worth? Well, it's worth whatever YouTube premium is if you have that, or Spotify, 16 bucks a month or whatever they raise the price to. And there's a complete disconnect between even who makes the records. Like who are the people that made the records? If I want to know who the engineer was on one of your records, and let's say Tom Petty Wildflowers.

Now, there's different engineers on there. I know Jim Scott engineered some of it. I don't know who mixed the record. You can't even find these things out. If you try to go to, it's like, where do you go? Do you go to allmusic.com? Where do you go to find out who the people are that contributed to the sound of that record, which is an amazing sounding record?

And that's been lost. And you sure, you can look at the credits on the Spotify. It lists a couple things. And I guess if there's a few clicks here and you know, but they make it incredibly difficult. I tried to look something up the other day. I was listening to it and wondering what the layers before it were impossible to find.

Impossible. Right. You can go to Wikipedia, but that doesn't give you who's a and a lot of it's incomplete. Yeah, or wrong. Or wrong. Or wrong, right? And to me that something has been lost there with streaming. Now, the fact that you can carry this stuff with you

and listen to it in the car, we listen to music on the way here today. Yeah. And- What did you listen to on the way? I listened to a lot of your records. And usually when the music I listen to is when I'm preparing to do an interview with someone, I go back and I listen to, I think about records that I've listened to in the past

and what I want to ask the person about. Because to me, it's all about learning, you know? Yeah. And I'm always hoping, Rick, that the person that I interview remembers. Because a lot of stuff happened years ago, and you don't always remember exactly what you do. But if I play you a song that you produced,

it triggers something. Absolutely. So I'm thinking like, what am I going to play Rick that I want to know about? There's so many things and I'm thinking like, I hope that Rick remembers these things. But when you hear something, it does trigger a feeling.

For sure. I don't know how you feel about streaming, if you have any of the same things. We're just for people to know I'm one year older than you. I see the pluses and the minuses. I love being able to be anywhere in the world and have any piece of music that I wanna hear available to me at that time

without the preparation, without having to order it, without having to find a shop that would have that disc. I love the availability. I know that in the past, I would listen to albums more often and for a longer period of time. And now, even when a new album comes out that I'm excited about, it has a very short shelf life. Not because it's not great,

but it's the nature of this conveyor belt moving by with more stuff. Yeah. So I think we listen less, I wanna say less deeply, but maybe that's not right, because you can listen deeply one time. I guess we just put less time and effort into listening now. Now maybe that's a good thing.

I don't know, you know, it's like I can see both sides. I know the joy that I had of listening in childhood, and it's different now. For the way I like to listen, streaming works well for me because I like to hear new things. I don't necessarily like to hear new today's music, but I like to hear things new to me. So I listen to a lot of 60s psychedelic music

that I've never heard before, for example. I listen to a lot of classical and a lot of jazz that I didn't grow up listening to. And I like having it available, and I like being able to go down a rabbit hole and continue forever, which you couldn't do back in the vinyl days. That's right. That's the plus side of it. Yeah.

You said something interesting there that's new to you. And when people talk about what they've heard, That's right. That's the plus side of it. You said something interesting there that's new to you. And when people talk about, oh, what is new music? They think it's music that's coming out in 2024. No, new music is something that you haven't heard, as far as I'm concerned, new to me. But that's what's most exciting to me is I'm not so interested in listening back

to things I listened to before, unless there's a reason or a particular memory comes up and I'm curious about something. But for the most part, I listen to things I haven't listened to before, and they tend to be old things, not new things. Do you have an idea, like, I really want to hear this, or are you on a hunt for things that may be related

to something that you know, and you want to know what the influence of one thing is on something else? Like, I'll give you a guitar reference. This is a jazz guitar reference. Well, West Montgomery was influenced by Charlie Christian. Now, if people like West Montgomery, well, who's Charlie Christian? And then you go and start listening to that.

You say, oh, how does that influence, do I recognize anything in what West Montgomery played that Charlie Christian played? I would definitely look for the lineage. And for any artist I liked historically, I would always want to know all of the artists that they liked. And that was usually how I found the things to like.

I guess you'd say, in a way, the artists you liked were a trusted source. I like to say that I think a lot of people, including myself, when I didn't understand how records were made, when you think about it, if records recorded, you know, the 1960s, 1970s, 80s, whatever, was recorded on tape, and that tape started

as a blank piece of plastic or whatever it's made out of, you know. And then the music was recorded. And the things don't magically appear. Songs are written, they're recorded. Sometimes they're recorded over months, sometimes over years. And demystifying that has been one of the things that I like to do on my YouTube channel. It's like, how is music actually?

I'll say it's interesting to know as much as you can, and it's completely mystical. And the more you know about it, the more you realize it is magic, and it does just appear. That's right. Because that's how it happens. That's how it happens. It really is unbelievable. I've seen it happen enough times where your jaw drops and it's not because you're good

that it happens. It happens because it happens. It happens because it happens. A tremendous amount of effort and patience is involved. But then something else has to happen. And we are not in control of that other thing. And that's why sometimes you'll do 30, 40, 50, 60 takes of a song. Seems insane. But it's weird when it goes from everyone's doing the same thing on track 59 as they are on track 60,

but all of a sudden on track 60, it comes together. Who knows why? Nobody knows why. But it does. And you have to remain patient enough to recognize that when it happens, if you want it too bad, it might never happen. You have to really let go and just see what happens.

I like to say that music is time travel. A lot of the times the musicians are not with us anymore, yet when you're listening to their performance, it's happening right then as soon as you play it. Just like, there's no recordings of Beethoven playing, but there is these, the music that was in his mind. Any orchestra can play. Just put it up and you can perform it.

And that's the amazing thing about music. And it's time travel too, and the performances don't have to happen all at once. You have overdubs and things like that that happen later on that you listen to, and let's add this thing. I had that experience the day Tom Petty passed away. I was out at dinner in Santa Monica

with friends who were in town and the Tom Petty song came on in the restaurant. And I remember feeling the energy in the song and feeling like he's more alive now than he's ever been. In this moment, he is more alive than he has ever been. It was incredible. And it was just like put in my face. You know, I wasn't looking for that story.

It was given to me in that moment. Remarkable. I always loved how you, not every record, but you would have those really upfront dry vocals, Johnny Cash or Tom Petty, and the intimacy, that thing just jumps out. And I always wondered why that presentation like that, what appeals to you about that?

Because to me that's brilliant and it gives a depth to the music, especially when you hear the band that has this beautiful, maybe natural room sound, if it's the chili peppers or something, and you hear that natural room sound, then you hear that upfront voice, kind of like spatially how the band would be

with Anthony would be out front, then the band would be behind him. Do you think about that? Is that why you want the thing, or are you looking for the emotion of it? I think usually when we add things to vocals, it makes them... I'll use the word blurry.

It's not the right word, but it smears them in a way. And there's something about the clarity of the voice that really speaks to me. To hear every enunciation, every click and pop, it feels more personal and more real. I'm not looking for a theatrical presentation. I'm looking for much more documentary, a feeling of reality of somebody sharing their truth. And that goes to the writing as well. It's like, it's, the sound is part of it,

but it's also in the lyrics. Like if I hear lyrics that I don't believe the person saying those lyrics, that'll be a comment I make often in the studios. Like, I don't really believe this. Do you believe this? Do you mean this? And if you do mean it, why don't I believe this? Do you believe this? Do you mean this? And if you do mean it, why don't

I believe it? How often will you have people rewrite lyrics? Does that happen a lot? It depends case by case. Some people really are gifted lyricists, and it's unbelievable. And then other ones, they're in the ballpark, but can use help. It's helpful to them when I can point out, this part isn't as good as the rest,

but it really is case by case. Now I'm gonna ask you something that I would, because I'm struggling to not ask you questions here, and this is very, I'm not- Completely understood. Yeah. I watched so many interviews of you. I'm really fascinated. I watched Anderson Cooper interview you,

and the way that you state things, and he asked you about gear. I don't know anything about the gear. I don't know anything about music. I don't know anything about the gear. I don't know anything about music. I don't really play instruments. But that's not true, totally, right? Rick, you started playing guitar. You played some guitar, right?

I played guitar in a punk rock band. Yeah. You can play power chords. Yeah, I play rudimentary guitar. Okay. I'll play you an old recording of something where you can hear me playing the instruments and you'll understand I'm not a studio musician.

Right. But you know what reverb is, you know a good snare sound, you know a good kick drum sound, all these things. I know what I like. You know what you like. I know what I like. Yeah. But I don't necessarily know how to do it.

But ultimately people come to you for your taste. Yes, absolutely. That's it. That's what the job of a producer is. That's it. Taste. That's my job. Yeah.

In my world, the producer is a non-technical function. Yeah. I find that, to me, that is what the job of a producer is. And everybody kind of comes to it in their own way, but ultimately this is a good performance, that's not a good performance, this is a good vibe, that's not a good vibe. Yes, these lyrics are good enough, these lyrics are not.

This drum pattern isn't interesting enough, but it's not because I know how to play drums that I tell you that, it's because my taste is my taste. But that to me is literally the job of the producer. But probably nine out of 10 producers don't do that. So it's a question of terms. Yeah. Through interviewing producers, I think it's really important.

I only interview people that I'm interested in I've done very few Producer interviews I've interviewed Daniel Ennui Brendan O'Brien butch Fig Who else Alan Parsons? Very few almost none are they all different. They're all different. Yeah, everyone is different. Yeah, everyone is completely different They're all different. Everyone is different. Everyone is completely different. I would imagine that.

But taste is the thing that they all agree on, ultimately. They all have different, you know, Daniel Anwar comes more from, well, he's a great musician, great songwriter, but he had his own studio. So he comes at it from, as a, originally, kind of as a studio owner. He and his brother

produce things together. Alan Parsons, you know, he worked at Abbey Road Studios. He came at it through that way. But you know, when I interviewed Brendan, he was, you know, he credits you as like he would not be have done the stuff he did without you. You basically helped him with his career. And the same, he helped me with mine. He is a great engineer, he's a great guitar player, sonically brought a lot to the table,

and that was the nature of our relationship and it was great. But definitely the thing that I've come to realize after interviewing these producers is that it's the thing that I knew. It's the taste that people come to them for. Whether it's George Martin, even though I never met George Martin, that's something that I don't know has been really talked about enough.

It's like George Martin's contributions because I don't think the people understand what a producer does. And if there's anything that I can contribute in explaining this through interviews with people, I think that first person accounts of people that made classic records like yourself is the most valuable thing I can do

with the millions of people that follow my YouTube channel. If I can give back in any small way to society by having these accounts, what was it like to be in the room then? How did you do this? How are these records made? And then whatever thoughts that you have on contemporary music, whatever it is

that you wanna add to these discussions. To me, it's my, I wouldn't say duty, but it's incredibly important to me to be able to put this information out there for people. And they can do with it what they want. But these first-person accounts, I think, in the future will be when the history of music is written. It's historical documentation of how the things

that we love were made. Yes. And I wish that they existed from the past, because they don't always exist. I would love to see footage from the 1950s of Little Richard in the recording studio, how those records were made. I've never heard anyone talk about it.

Right. But they sound as good today as they've ever sounded. What's amazing is that bands like the Beatles actually filmed in the studio. I mean, we're lucky that we have the footage that we have, that some people were thought to do that. It's one of the miraculous things if you've ever seen that Beatles anthology 8 video series. Did you ever see that? Oh, yeah.

Yes. Amazing. The fact that there's so much film of them from such a young age is unbelievable. It's miraculous. I just saw a video, I've seen it before, of Elton John writing Tiny Dancer, that he just had written it and he was playing it for a couple people.

And there's a video of it. He puts up the lyrics on there and he plays it. And he hasn't even recorded it yet. I just wrote this the other day, Bernie gave me the lyrics and I thought, and this is the verse and this little part is gonna be the chorus and then he performs it. It's unbelievable that somebody had the presence to

film that and capture that moment. Have you ever seen Neil Young on the BBC from the 70s, where he's playing songs from Harvest before the album came out? No. Oh my God. It's unbelievable. That's the stuff that, like everything is out there like that, which is unbelievable that you can actually pull it up.

And having the visual part, it's one thing to hear people. It's another thing to actually see the performances. I mean, it's really amazing. Even when they announced that Oasis is going get back together and then I saw some video come up and it was Liam singing Champagne Supernova, just a take in the studio. And it was an amazing take. It's not the take on the record. And it just shows you what a great singer he is.

And to hear an alternate take that is from that same time period when it's recorded, you know it's recorded within that, probably on that day even. And you can see the shape of the melody is, you know, not everything is quite there, but it was an amazing take. Easily could have been the take of the record and stuff. Or McCartney singing, let It Be from the Get Back video or Long and Winding Road.

And these are incredible alternate takes and there they are on video. And I just, to me, that's just amazing. In a world of artificial highs and harsh stimulants, there is something different, something clean, something precise. Athletic nicotine. Not the primitive products found behind convenience store counters. Not the aggressive buzz that leaves you jittery, but a careful calibration of clean Energy and Focused Clarity. Athletic Nicotine, the lowest dose tobacco-free nicotine available. Made entirely in the USA.

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athletic nicotine offers the lift you've been looking for. Learn more at athleticnicotine.com slash tetra and experience next level performance with athletic nicotine. Warning, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical. Tell me about your recording studio. So my studio is, most people don't know, it's in my basement. I built it back in 2005.

I bought a house that had a big basement. It's probably about 4,300 square feet or so. It's a good size. And the whole basement is a studio. So it's got a control room. It's got an iso booth, the floating floor, both of those. And then I have a live, one live room. The room that people see on my videos

is used to be my live room. Now it's my YouTube set. I mean, it's what it is. It's basically a set. And then I have another room next to that that I track drums and has a fireplace and stuff. And then like a hangout room. And then there's a far room that's like a rehearsal room

that I have drums set up, and I'll go in and jam with my kids and stuff, and my daughter Layla will play drums, and my son Dylan will play guitar, and I'll play bass. Or my daughter Lennon will play bass, and I'll play second guitar and stuff. So that's our jam room and rehearsal space. So I have everything that I've ever wanted and I don't use it now because I don't really produce anything except for stuff that I make in videos.

But in my control room I have my racconives and helios and I've got everything to make records, and I'm not making records. But you choose not to. I choose not to. You're doing something else now. Yeah, but I would love to record performances, and when I interview people that come to my studio, and many times people that are touring through town

will come to my studios, and so we use it in that way. people that come to my studio, and many times people that are touring through town will come to my studios. And so we use it in that way. And most people play when I'm... That sounds like a whole other channel of just live performances from your studio. Yeah, I'd really like to do that. I did my first kind of artist spotlight thing or something.

I had this singer that her name is Ella Hone and Ford. She's from England. And I started following her on Instagram. She only had about 45,000 followers, but beautiful songwriter. And was originally a jazz musician, but she writes pop songs. But they have, I started to do a cover of Wichita Lineman,

and she calls them forever songs, songs from the early 70s and stuff. She writes these modern songs that sound like forever songs, that have beautiful melody shapes and incredible chord progressions and things like that. So I did an episode with her. She happened to be in New York when I was there a couple of weeks ago and I had talked to her on the phone

and she's like, oh, it's too bad you're not going to be in New York. Then I said, oh, I actually am going to be in New York. So I had her come by the studio where I was doing another interview and I talked to her and she played a couple of songs. I made a video of it. Great. So I'd like to do that with bands and things and have people come into my studio. Great.

So that's kind of something in the future that I want to do. Sounds fun. And again, it fits in the message of it's spreading music. Right. One way or another, it's spreading music. Yeah. Do you remember your first memory of music as a kid? Yes. My first memory is my grandfather playing guitar.

He was an acoustic guitar. Acoustic guitar, yeah. It was probably in the mid-60s. And we'd go over to my grandparents' house. He was from Italy. He was from Sicily. He and my grandmother, all my grandparents came from Italy. He was from Sicily. He and my grandmother, all my grandparents came from Italy. And he would play his acoustic guitar and he'd kind of play a lot of traditional songs, either Italian folk music or, you know, could be the Star Spangled Banner or something, or American folk music he would play. And he would play chords and melody at the same time.

And I would sit right in front of his guitar and watch him play. And I was mesmerized by watching his fingers. How old do you think you were? Probably three, something like that. And my Aunt Penny would play the piano. My Aunt Marion played the violin. My Uncle Al was a bass player.

So it was a musical family. Yes, they would play after dinner. Would they be recorded music in the house you grew up in as well? Yes. What would that be? My dad listened to jazz. My mom listened to classical music.

So and then I've, you know, so I have five older siblings and one younger sibling, and they all listen to different music. My sisters, my oldest sister Pat, loved the Beatles and the Stones, and Led Zeppelin, you know, Jimi Hendrix, all different things. Motown and all different genres of music would be playing.

Everybody would have their own little cassette players or their little stereos. So we had nine people in a three-bedroom house with one bathroom, but music all the time. What was the first music that you would say was your music? Not your parents, not your brothers or sisters? When I think about my music,

I think about what did I buy? Like what did my mom give me? 25 cents for to go to the drugstore and buy a single Probably Angie by the stones About the single to that and I To this day. It's one of my favorite songs. It just means so much to me. And I always think it's like, I don't know of a song that's like that.

To me, it's such a unique song. Something about it is just the lyrics. Keith Richards never played a guitar. There's such a unique guitar part for him. And it sounds amazing. But that was one of the first things I spent money on. I remember in the drug stores, you used to have a rack, they have the top 40, and you could just buy the 45

and pull it out and go up and pay for it. When did you start analyzing it versus just listening to it and enjoying it? Oh, I never analyzed it until I started, probably until I took guitar lessons in my teens or so. Everything I learned was by ear. That's the thing is I think people think that I learned I'm a theory guy. Most of the names for things I learned for the most part in college,

like what things were. So all my learning was done by ear. All the guitar stuff I learned, I started on bass, or I started on cello when I was in third grade. I took this musical aptitude test called the C-Short test that they had in second or third grade. They gave it to all the students and the people with the best ears

got to play string instruments and then the next group got to play wind instruments and be in the band. That was the next year. So I remember going with my mom. I got selected, and they had the four things, cello, violin, and viola, and not bass yet, because you weren't big enough to play bass when you're in third grade or so. And I got to pick one instrument.

And as soon as I heard the cello, I was like, I want to play that. So I started taking cello lessons. And I did that pick one instrument. And as soon as I heard the cello, I was like, I wanna play that. So I started taking cello lessons. And I did that until sixth grade. Then my orchestra director asked me if I wanted to play the bass. And I moved to bass, to upright bass. And then guitar happened. The summer of eighth grade, I broke my ankle

first week of the summer and I was stuck for 13 weeks in a cast, couldn't do anything and there was a guitar sitting in the corner that my brother got from a buddy of his and a little chord book, Mel Bay chord book. It was just like, pick up the guitar, look at the chords and start.

And since I already played the cello and the bass, I didn't go through that period of calluses or anything. I start picking up, I was like, oh, that sounds like first chord of this song, or that sounds like Led Zeppelin, that sounds like Boston, or that sounds like Queen. And then I started being able to pick things off records pretty immediately.

Once I figured out how to tune the guitar and everything and I was obsessed. That was it. All through high school, I was obsessed. I started playing in bands six months later. When was the last time you played cello? I played cello on a record, I want to say, in probably 99 or so. I rented a cello to play. What was the experience of going back to it after not playing it for years? It was weird.

But I could play it. I knew the notes I wanted to play and I knew where they were. It was fun. I'd like to get another cello. I have a bass. I have an upright bass at my studio, but it's not a great one. I'd like to get a nicer one so I could play. But I can sit and I could play any orchestral music.

I can still read and I could play bass along with that. If I put on, you know, Bach, Brandenburg Concerto in G, I could sit there and I could pretty much play it, just read and play. Even though I haven't played since the mid-'80s. What would you say you've learned through posting videos? A lot.

There's many layers of that, too. Videos that people would watch in 2016 are not videos that they watch in 2024. The attention span of people has gotten shorter. And I've had about two billion views between YouTube and Instagram. And you have analytics of these things and you can see how long people watch.

People, like short form content, for example, 35 seconds is about all people have the attention span to watch. People, like short form content, for example, 35 seconds is about all people have the attention span to watch. So any short over 35 seconds, Rick, people, they swipe away. So I typically don't make things that are over 35 seconds long, which is very funny if you think about that. It's not like I try to make them that long. I just know how long 35 seconds is.

So if I were to sit and make a video with you and somebody said, go until you think it's 30 minutes, I would be within 30 seconds of it, within 30 minutes. Yeah. I have a really good sense. If it's uninterrupted, I have a very good sense of if it's uninterrupted, I have a very good sense of those time increments, like 30 minutes.

I also used to have cameras that would shut off after 30 minutes. So you could start feeling it. You could start feeling it, yeah. It's like, I think it's about time, and then beep, the thing would go off. But the types of topics of videos are wildly different. The topics of videos are wildly different. I mean, I didn't make any content about contemporary music until I'd had 200,000 followers on

my channel, subscribers on my YouTube channel. Up till then, what would it be? Before it was contemporary, give me examples of what it would have been. I would do things like a breakdown of the string parts of the Shawshank Redemption, Thomas Newman. You know, here's this scene, and I would do a recreation where I would play all the parts that the orchestra would play.

Take one scene, the original scene, where they do the flyover of the prison when they're all arriving. And I would, I'd do a piano reduction on the screen, have it going, and I would talk about the orchestration and I show when Hadley, the evil guard, Byron Hadley comes on the screen and he goes to this really ominous kind of sounds. And I would say why he did this. And then I interviewed Thomas Newman later on and we talked about all these wonderful

film scores he did, American Beauty and Shawshank Redemption 1917, Finding Nemo, and to get to ask him about those things and talk to him about why did you choose these things and the very beginning of the video he plays the American beauty theme on the piano, the wonderful piano, mysterious introduction. And I hear it and I said, did you play it on this piano? And he goes, yeah, I think I did, because it was at the village.

Because I'm sitting there and he's playing it. It's like, that sounds exactly like it's like on the same piano. He says, yeah, it was on this piano. Which is really amazing, because on the same piano. It says, yeah, it was on this piano, which is really amazing, because on many levels to... So cool. Yeah, to do that.

And the idea that early videos, I would do that or talk about modes of the double harmonic major scale or something, and I would do a little example. I'd write an orchestral piece based on each one and talk about that. That's the stuff that Dweezil loved. So when you say not contemporary,

you mean not pop music. Nothing, I never made it about a rock song, a pop song, about anything, never talked about it. So it was all based on classical music jazz as well? Yes, classical music and jazz. And then one day, it was like the 28th of January of 2018, I started a series called What Makes This Song Great? And I started doing breakdowns using multi-tracks

of famous songs. Where would you get the multi-tracks? I got them from somebody back in the early 2000s. Some guy at a studio gave them to me that I won't mention where the studio was, but I had gone to work on, to work on a record. It was something for Geffen. And I walked in and the engineer at the studio

was playing the multi-track of Smells Like Teen Spirit. It was just Kurt Cobain's voice. I was like, what is that? Oh, it's a multi-track to Smells Like Teen Spirit. Where'd you get it from? I can't tell you. I was like, well, solo some of the other tracks. You solo me or the bass or the drums and everything.

So I was like, I need that. And he says- There's probably a whole black market of multi-tracks floating around. Yes. Rick, he had thousands of them on a hard drive. And I convinced him. I traded him two samples, a bass drum sample and a snare sample. I had two samples I traded.

When I told him whose samples I had, it's a mixer's samples, and he traded me the like 2,500 songs for a kick and a snare that last each of them that long. That's unbelievable. Yes, and so I have a second channel, Rick Beato II, that I started right at the same time I started my first one. And I would go on at 10 o'clock at night

on that second channel. I only had a few hundred subscribers. And I would try new material on there, kind of like a comedian would. And I never would label the things. A lot of times I would take the videos down. And one night, I played multi-track of all the small things by Blink-182.

In the layers of everything, Roger Manning plays this octave keyboard part that becomes a dissonance, sound like a moog or something. It's a beautiful little just single note thing, octaves alternating. Do-do-do-do-do-do-do. It creates this dissonance on the three chords in the chorus, and that really makes this tension

of the chorus with the harmonies, it makes it happen. It creates this flat nine interval, it's very dissonant. And one of my friends was listening, my friend Rhett. He actually was my intern that got me to start my channel. He goes, you should make a video like that for the main channel. I was like, yeah, call it what makes this song great.

So the next day I did a breakdown of that song. Then I did about five videos in a row of breakdowns. I did every little thing she does, this is Magic and the Police, I did Kid Charlemagne, Steely Dan, I had the multi-tracks, all these things. Each one, I would play Larry Carlton's solo of Kid Charlemagne, and I notated the drum part

that Bernard Purdy plays on it, and Chuck Rainey's bass part, and the keyboard part. And it then just blew up. And I started getting 1,000 subscribers a day, and it never stopped since then. I did 105 episodes of it, song breakdowns. Did you continue doing the ones that you were doing prior? Those kind of videos, the jazz videos and stuff?

No, I started to phase those out. I had always told stories on my YouTube channel right at the beginning. I told a story about not getting into college for music when I first auditioned. I failed the audition at two colleges. And I lied to my family about it, and I said I got in. And the only reason I got into college was because I was really good in track, and I

got a scholarship to go to school. And I was a history major for one semester, and I re-auditioned at Ithaca College, where I'd gotten rejected. and I got in. This freshman guitar player taught me how to play the classical guitar pieces that you needed to play properly to get into the college. Some freshman taught me, and I went and re-auditioned and got in, and then six years later, I was teaching there.

I'd got my master's degree, I went back to Ithaca College, so in the same room that I failed the audition, I was the professor there teaching. Great story. So I told that story and I'd never told any of my siblings, because I forgot about it. My parents were deceased at that time. And I said, this is a story I've never told

even to anyone in my family. And I told it on my channel. Did your family ever see it and respond? Yeah. Tell me about that. Yeah, they were blown away. Yeah. And I was so embarrassed. I had so much shame about that, Rick,

that I hid the letters and I didn't tell either my parents about it. But since the track coach got me in as history major, I went there to Fredonia State University first semester. I went to the guitar teacher and she would not take me on as a student. I said, I really want to re-audition and become a guitar major. She's like, I don't have time to teach you.

So then I had this guy in my dorm that was a great classical guitar player, freshman and he taught, he goes, I can teach you these things to get in. And he taught me how to play proper classical guitar in like five weeks to re-audition back at Ithaca. My dad's like, why are you re-auditioning if you just got in, but last time? Because it's the new year. And I lied about it because I was embarrassed.

And that was a real pivotal thing. It really made me question the shame of that. I knew I was really talented, but I just didn't have any training in that. My guitar teacher at the time didn't know anything about classical guitar so I couldn't pass the audition. They didn't want to know about your aptitude, your abilities. It was like, can you play these three pieces in three different style periods?

I don't even know what three style periods are. It's funny that another 18-year-old kid is teaching me this stuff to get into college. It's a great story. Yeah. Yeah. So much of today's life happens on the web. Squarespace is your home base for building your dream presence in an online world. Designing a website is easy, using one of Squarespace's best in class templates.

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Whether you're just starting out or already managing a successful brand, Squarespace makes it easy to create and customize a beautiful website. Visit squarespace.com slash Tetra and get started today. How has your relationship to music changed over the course of your life? I don't know if it has. I have the same feelings, Rick. Anytime I listen to a song, if I've heard it a million times, it never changes. It always does the same thing to me. I never get sick of things I've heard,

and I always want to listen to new music. And I want to see if I can get that same feeling that I had. It's tough. It becomes more difficult. The older you get, the more music you consume, becomes more difficult. And I find that when I ask people that are my age that question, it's hard to hear things as new.

It's hard to do new things for people. I think things are very difficult. And especially now, I think people's tastes and that's one of the things about streaming, since everything's based on numbers, it's usually things of the least common denominator that are the things at the top of the charts, and they're things that blow up in TikTok,

and then they transfer to Spotify. And in the old days, when things were decided upon by A&R people for for good or bad, people would take chances on things that may have been, you know, strange. And music was what got pushed, got determined by the people that ran record labels. Ultimately, things would either connect with people or they wouldn't. Why did Blood, Sugar, Sex, Magic connect with everyone?

What it was it about that record that, I don't know that you can say that it's a particular thing. It just did. The songs just connected with people. But trying to find something like that, like is there another blood sugar sex magic that's being created today?

I haven't heard it. Maybe there is, maybe I haven't listened to enough things. But music is not made in the same way it was then. And I said in the same video, I said that music is too easy to just consume and it's too easy to make as well. It's just too easy to fix things, to fix performances. And I think the people, not everyone, but people can go overboard with these things. Instead of getting performances, they will do 80 takes of a vocal and comp it together, you know? And, yeah, comping has always existed in music.

But when you're recording on tape, sometimes you just had to live with the imperfections because you didn't want to go in and try and fix one little thing that somebody might have been bugged by. Now, we're not going to take a chance doing a punch-in on that. It's too risky. You know that that's just the thing. But also, I know that we would make a slave multi-track of 24 tracks just to do a million vocal takes if we needed to. We would do whatever we would need to do for it to be as good as it could be.

Yeah. Exactly. We would do whatever we would need to do for it to be as good as it could be. I wouldn't say that we settled off. You mentioned earlier we hear things in old records that are out of tune now, but at the time that we heard it originally, we didn't know it was out of tune. But now because we live in a world that's so quantized, everyone can hear when it's out of tune because so much of the music we hear is so quantized and put in tune that when anything is outside of that, it becomes more obvious. Yes. So do you think that people have more discretion with that or that they've just become rigid because they've been the gridification of music as I call it. You know, everything has been, you know.

I find gridded music less interesting unless it's made by Kraftwerk. You know, like I really like electronic music, so it's not like I'm against gridded music. But in terms of live music that's gridded, it starts feeling soulless to me. Yeah. I feel the same way about things that are recorded in order

as opposed to a band playing together, which is unusual because most even existing rock bands who maybe started in the 80s tend to record the drums and then the guitars and layer it. And to me, it doesn't sound like music. Right. It's hard to find things that connect with me in the same way, at least in stuff that I hear

when I do my Spotify top 10. Now that's the, you know, you can say that's least common denominator music voted on by the masses based on spins, period. But there is amazing music out there being made by people every day. Absolutely. I almost feel like I would love you to do,

in addition to the Spotify Top 10, another, I don't know if top 10 is the right word, but it's 10 songs that are worthy of attention. And those would be more like the songs that the A&R people of the past with good taste might have said, this is different, but we really think this is great. And that could be real service to the artistic community

if you have a platform that you could turn people on to new things that they wouldn't get to hear otherwise. It'd be beautiful. One of my friends says that people say things that are aspirational, but then they vote, I say this, that they vote with their attention. If I put out a video, within 12 minutes, I know how well the video's doing. Because I have so many people that watch my channel,

you have massive amounts of data, and that will, you know from doing this, it's like, oh, this video is not performing well. I might change one word in the title and then all of a sudden it doubles in views. I mean, it's amazing the psychology of the viewer that the title or the thumbnail you change, you do an A-B test with the thumbnail and a different thumbnail will all of a sudden create, make the video blow up.

How do you do an A-B test? This is all new to me. I will just, well, now you can actually, in YouTube you can do it, but I don't do it that way. I just will literally change the thumbnail out, and I'll watch, because it gives you minute-by-minute analytics on it. And I look at it, and it's usually noticeable. Sometimes it gets worse. Then I go back to

the other video and it goes back to the same. I can show you screenshots of videos that just literally double in views and then explode just by changing one thing. If you change a thumbnail, let's say you have 10,000 views and you switch the thumbnail. Now you're starting at zero again? No. Well, the views are still the same. You still have 10,000. Views are cumulative.

I had a video that I did probably like three, four years ago. It's one of my favorite videos. I did a remake of the solo of Stairway to Heaven. So I brought in a friend of mine to track the drums. I said, listen, I called my friend Jack. I'm like, hey, I need you to come over and play exactly what John Bonham played in the solo section. He's like, what do you mean?

I said, every fill the same. So we tracked along with the record and everything so it'd have the same feel. And then I played all the other parts. I played Jimmy Page's guitar parts, the keyboard part that John Paul Jones played and everything. Then I did me, I played what I thought Peter Frampton would have played. If he played the solo, then I had my friend,

Phil X play what he thought Eddie Van Halen would have played. Then I had Eric Johnson played a solo that I called Eric. He would play. He would play. I said, Eric, would you mind playing on this video? He's like, what do you want to do? I said, I want you to play on play. He would play. I said, Eric, would you mind playing on this video? And he's like, what do you want to do? I said, I want you to play on Stairway to Heaven. He goes, what do you mean?

I said, like, what you would play. And I said, just imagine your 15-year-old self playing over Stairway to Heaven. OK. I said, but you have to film it. OK, no problem. So we make this video. And so the first part of the video is creating the backing track and then I play my Peter Frampton Phil does his Eddie Van Halen thing

He's got a Van Halen guitar and he basically combined different elements of Van Halen solos and does this incredible solo And then Eric played his solo over it. We put it out and then Eddie Van Halen died the next day But that video We put it out and then Eddie Van Halen died the next day. But that video, to me, is one of my favorite videos that I've done. And every, once a year, it just blows up in views. And it'll get a million views in a month or so. What do you attribute it to? I don't know.

It just, somebody will watch it and it just connects with people and they share it with people. So they continue to get views every day forever. All the videos do really. So the only changes you're talking about are the thumbnail and the headline, but the content remains the same. Yeah. Well, that particular video, okay, so I missed this part of it.

I was doing a show in England, in London, where I did a few shows. Live Nation asked me if I wanted to do some live shows. So I was doing the show in London, and I said that, I said, how many watched this video that I did on Sturway to Heaven? Most of the people had seen it. There's probably about 600 people there. And I said, if anyone has a better title and thumbnail, because I think that the title and thumbnail is not, I don't think it's good. So some guy that works with Brian May came, wrote me,

he does archiving for Queen, and he wrote me and he suggested a different title and video. So I changed it and then it blew up again. Wow. Yeah, and this was years after it could come out. Wow. So just that, at any time, if the algorithms, every single video has its own algorithm.

So anytime you change anything in it, the algorithm recognizes it, and it'll send it out to new people. And sometimes it will blow up. Even a video that had millions of views, it got even more. Really interesting. Yeah.

So, so much is communicated through the, I don't know, the advertising. You know, Netflix, when you go on there, will show different thumbnails to different people. I will click on it, and if my kids click on the same videos, they'll have different thumbnails. Wow. Yes. They know the kind of thumbnails that I will click on. It's really amazing.

Fascinating. Yeah. And so if I'm not in the thumbnail, people don't know it's my video and they'll bypass it many times. I'm pretty much always in the thumbnails of my videos. I have to be, then people know it's a Rick Beato video. So that's a thing that once my channel got to a certain size, a million followers or so, after that, I pretty much have to be on the thumbnail so people know it's my video. It's really weird.

Yeah, no, it's just interesting. This is a video where I changed the thumbnail or title, and that's a minute-by-minute view. And as you can see, right there is where the change happened, and all of a sudden the views doubled. And what's different about this is that in real time, Rick, you can actually change the trajectory of your video. It's like re-releasing a single, but you don't lose any of the plays that you had.

Yeah, this is another video here. So it's over the course of an hour, same kind of a thing. But it's so noticeable. You just instantly, within a minute, know that it worked. And sometimes it goes down. How often do you change them? Sometimes I'll change it five times in 10 minutes. Did you say you always change them or no?

No. But I'd say probably- Half of the time? Half the time, yeah. And is it based on the feedback you're seeing? Yeah, I have a gut feeling for how well a video should do and I know some videos are not gonna do well. Yeah, and you're fine with that. Yeah, fine with that, yeah. I don't make videos for views, I make videos for me.

Yeah. I only make videos on things I'm interested in and that seems to have served me well here in eight years but I always do this anytime that I, and that seems to have served me well here in eight years. But I always do this anytime that I, that's a video that's had a thumbnail or title change and you can see the trend and then immediately jumps up and like that.

And then once you have, once YouTube realizes that it's a hit, then it starts pushing it out to bigger audiences. But if you have a video that does badly, for me, a video that does badly is something under 400,000 views, which I... In how long? In three days or so. Yeah, if it's under 400,000 in three or four days, that's really bad bad Which is insane actually insane right that that's a bad video

But I will know within the first 12 minutes if a video is doing what it should I've I have an idea Do you post at a certain time of day or does that matter? I post whenever the video is done. I Don't do any I've never never done anything that's conventional on YouTube. I just do stuff I feel. You don't do anything to optimize other than changing the thumbnail and changing the title. Yeah.

Do you always change both or do you might change one? That's, usually I'll change the title first and then if that doesn't work, then I'll change the thumbnail. But I've literally changed the title and thumbnail five times in the first hour. Do you have a bunch of thumbnails ready to go just in case? No, I make them on my phone.

Which is very... I'm so not the typical YouTuber person. I'm like the- I don't know that there's a typical. Right. Do you know what I mean? It really is a, it's for everyone. It's so cool. Yeah, but I'm like the indie rock YouTuber in that way

that I kind of just go on feel, you know? But it's always making videos on things I'm interested in. Only interview people that I am a fan of. And somebody sent me an email. Check out this new song I wrote with AI. I think it's a hit. That's absurd, right? Check out this new song I wrote using AI.

Wait a minute, well you didn't write it. So I click on it and stuff, and it's absurd. So this will be the, I'll make a video about this, about the absurdity of that. But two of my kids can recognize an AI song immediately if something's completely generative. My son Dylan was like, oh, that's AI. Why are you listening to AI, my 11-year-old Lalo will say. But Dylan always recognized, I'm like, what are you hearing?

He goes, I hear there's some weird thing that is coming in and out. He's hearing an artifact in the reverb, actually, of the voice, typically. And yet I'll play it for his friends. He'll have some of his friends over. This is last year when they were in 10th grade. I played 10 tracks.

Five were AI generated and five were humans. And Dylan, everyone got right things he had never heard before. But his friends, they couldn't tell. But Dylan got it right every time. But Dylan said to me, he's like, you know, six months from now, it'll probably be where I won't be able to recognize. Wow. Billy Corgan was the first person to bring this up to me when I interviewed him about a year and a half ago. He said that people will listen to AI music and like it.

There will be things that they like. And I agreed with him. And it's not like real musicians are going to go away, but I think that there will be AI songs that people like and they know it's AI and they don't care. And I said in the future, it's going to be the Beatles and the Beatles' AI and Led Zeppelin and Led Zeppelin AI or whatever. And why I like the Beatles' AI, I'm far more than the Beatles, you know. As absurd as that is, that will be, you know, if they say I like AI, AC, DC, then I'm going to really...

Then we're in trouble. Then we're in trouble. But I don't think that people necessarily care, except when they go see live music. Obviously, you want to have real musicians, but I can see that, I can see a thing where people prompt from the audience and you have speakers up there and it plays different types of music and there's people on stage that are improvising and they just improvise to what they hear.

And that would be a cool use of AI. Did you by any chance see the ABBA show in London? Do you know about it? I do know about it, yeah. If you get a chance, see it. Remarkable. I interviewed Bjorn when I was in Stockholm last year. That was great. We talked a lot about AI. A year ago, the end of July, I was there.

He didn't say what label, but President of the Labeled played him stuff that he couldn't believe was AI that sounded so realistic. We related it to the ABBA show using the holograms and things like that. And he's very pro technology and stuff, which is really cool for a guy that's 78, 79 years old now. Yeah. Of the interviews you've done,

what would you say you've been most surprised by? What would you say you've been most surprised by? I think I'm most surprised by the fact that the people that are making the music on either side of it, whether they're the performance or the people that are like yourself that are the producers, they almost never know what's going to be successful. And I'd say that that's a common thing. They don't know. I think the people, when they've had hit records, they have more of an idea for something that's going to be successful. And that when they listen to music,

because I always play stuff in there, they always doesn't matter. They hear stuff that even if it's recorded 35 years ago, that still bothers them. That's interesting. Yeah. Although some of the people will say, even if it's recorded 35 years ago, that still bothers them. That's interesting. Yeah. Although some of the people will say, I forgot what I used to hate about this.

Oh, that's interesting too. I don't think I would have that feeling. I think I would maybe say, I hear what I would do different today, but I certainly wouldn't change that. Because that was a document of that moment in time. That was true in that moment in time. Yeah, it's strange to see people that, you know,

don't like something in their performance and it still bothers them today. Something that's been out, people have heard a billion times. Yeah, yeah. For a lot of old music, music made in the 60s, there are these re-records that the artists did later on, usually to do with rights issues,

and it really bums me out. It bums me out to hear a re-record of a record. There's some magic thing that happens in the original recording that makes that thing that thing. If you want to do another version of it, do a new version of it, but don't do a re-record. I find it heartbreaking. And there are some cases where all you

can find in the re-records is just soul-crushing. Yeah. Another thing that bothers me is when you hear things that are remastered on Spotify, where they'll add a lot of top-end, or whatever they do to records to, I don't know if the labels do it to extend the copyright on the music or whatever.

I have no idea why they do it, but. I think everyone feels like every 10 years or so, the technology gets better and you wanna, you know, up what's possible. Yeah, that always bums me out. And then you can never get back to the, unless you have the CDs or the LP, you can't find those old versions of the songs

to even do a comparison between them. And there's records that I really love the sound of, but I can't listen to on the streaming platforms because they just don't sound right. That bums me out. Do you think of yourself as a music critic? That's a great question. Yes. Not an intentional one.

I just try to be honest with what I think. I don't care what people... It's my opinion. When I listen to the Spotify Top 10, I do it every four months, because that's usually when there's a turnover and there's all new songs. And I say it while I listen to it

so that you don't have to. But I think that's important for people. That's a responsibility on my part. I have a big channel to let people know what is popular today. And there's been a real trend towards having guitars in music. I just did one last week, and every song that was in the top 10 has guitars in it.

And that wasn't the case a year ago. That was the first time in a long time, probably, that that was in the top 10 has guitars in it. And that wasn't the case a year ago. That was the first time in a long time, probably, that that was the case. Yeah. And I think some people thought I was criticizing the fact that there's no hip hop in it, but there's a, I had done a video recently that showed the trend in,

there's a thing called Chart Cipher that does trend analysis based on all these data, based on a bunch of different charts. And they show that country music has been rising, which you notice there's more country songs that are in the pop charts over the last year. And you're seeing these trends play out, but they'll show the trends over the last five years.

They'll talk about lyrical content, what types of lyrics are more popular now. It's really fascinating actually to- five years. They'll talk about lyrical content, what types of lyrics are more popular now. It's really fascinating actually. It's interesting. In the 70s, country made its way into the pop chart for a window of time. Remember? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're kind of back to that too. It's funny, some videos I make, there's no commentary on what I say in the video. It's people's post, their own experiences.

I always say that the comments are really about the people writing them more than they are about what I'm saying in the video. It's a reflection on that. And I think that's the thing about social media is that I tell other people I know that do YouTube or whatever, don't take the comments personally because the people are really writing about themselves.

So if you read the comments with that in mind, they have a different ring to them. Are certain types of music more popular on your channel or is it agnostic as far as the content goes? People don't like jazz on my channel, even though I- That's interesting. Yeah, even though my channel started as that. When I interview a jazz musician,

I interviewed Keith Jarrett, I interviewed Ron Carter and Pat Matheny and Brad Meldow. I've interviewed a lot of the jazz legends. Those interviews do really well but if I were to make a video on Anything related to jazz they just don't do well But that doesn't keep me from doing them good. Yeah, I don't care if people like that

Not you know, but yeah that jazz does worse than anything, but every single video has its own algorithm. If I interview somebody, like somebody from a prog metal scene, the band Polyphia, Tim Henson is a friend of mine, has been on my channel a few times, great guitar player, young kid. That's 18 to 24 or 25 to 34. That's the demographic, that's how old he is,

and that's the people that watch that video. And people that are in the older demographics don't watch that. If I have an interview with Jimmy Webb, people that know who Jimmy Webb is will watch that video that of that age. I interviewed Jimmy Webb. How was that?

That was amazing. Wow. Oh my God, he's... I'm a fan. I love Jimmy Webb. And I'd made a video on Wichita Lineman and the song. It's one of the greatest songs. Bob Dylan called it the greatest song ever written.

Wow, I didn't know that. And to me that song sounds as great today as it did when I heard it in 1968 when it came out. And Jimmy's wife wrote to me and I was like, oh my God, I god, I love to interview so I went up to the power station in New York and interviewed him there and we talked about that it was funny because he said that Glenn Campbell had recorded the track and Jimmy's like, you know, I wish that that I had this idea for this part and you had this organ Like electric organ or something and he played it for Glenn. He's like, oh, we need to put that on the song.

And he said the thing weighed 500 pounds. So Glenn called this moving company to come over and move this organ to the studio. And Jimmy's like, it's really low in the mix. And so then we played the song and it's like, it's actually the loudest thing in the mix. He goes, oh, just in my mind, it was low in the mix, but it's when they're doing the B flat to C chord

and the little post-chorus interlude thing. And it's funny that he goes, I just remembered it being really low, but it's really an important thing. And he's like, I played that on the recording. But that was really fun to talk to him. I mean, all those tunes, MacArthur Park, Alastair.

It's so original. Yes. There's no one else like Jimmy Webb. No one like Jimmy Webb. No, really one of a kind writer. Yeah. All time favorite artists. Beatles, The Stones, Zeppelin, Miles, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, West Montgomery,

Queen, Peter Frampton, I love Tom Petty, I love Nirvana, I love, you know, there's so many different things, it really depends on what mood I'm in. And then I'm a massive classical music fan, and it goes from Bach to Palestrina to Prokofiev to, you know, Beethoven to Mendsohn, to Schumann. Has that always been the case, classical music from childhood?

Yeah, and I still listen to classical music all the time and listen to a lot of modern classical music. I'm equally versed since my undergrad is in classical bass and my master's degree was in jazz studies and then I was a rock musician. Before that, I'm kind of an expert in multiple genres. Great. So I know every recording, not every recording, but of Beethoven's fourth piano concerto,

which is, to me, one of the greatest piano concertos ever written. And I'm so particular about the recordings. Let's go. What's your favorite? Christian Zimmerman, this recording with Bernstein conducting. OK, Christian Zimmerman.

I have a video of all five Beethoven piano concertos. And Bernstein, he conducted three of them. Zimmerman conducted two from the piano, but he plays all five. I'm just going to find it here. This is like the, it's the best performance and recording both. Great. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"]. The The The The The The It's amazing how long the orchestra, the piano is the introduction, then there's this long exposition of the orchestra. Then the piano enters here. So I love this right here. There's no recording that's...

First of all, it's on video, too. And this was done, I think, in 1985. And the orchestra and the piano are perfectly balanced. And the piano performance is just so musical. And I've listened to every recording. And there's... I just can't think of one that is just... This is perfection. So beautiful.

Yeah. I'm big into performances. There's a... Yeah. I didn't understand, Rick, why I liked certain things until I learned about engineering and learned more about the recording process.

And then it started to make sense to me why I liked that it went beyond even the performance. Sometimes if the piano is getting lost in the orchestra and you can't even, or you're not hearing the inner lines of the oboes and the clarinets that are sitting right behind the piano, because it's not mic'd properly, you know, and you're missing the internal parts

of the orchestra. I didn't understand that before I knew about how orchestras are recorded. There's a piece that jazz arranger Klaus Ogerman did. I love Klaus Ogerman. Yeah, he did a record called Cityscape that came out in 1982 with Michael Brecker, the saxophonist, and there's a...

The title track, to me, is absolutely brilliant. But there are some inner lines in there that I can't hear. And I went so far as to tracking down where the score is, because Klaus died in 2016, Mike Brecker died in 2009. And I wanted to hire an orchestra just to hear this eight bars that is un... that you can't distinguish what the orchestra's doing because it's just not clear enough in the recording.

Yeah, good idea. I thought I wanted to do that for a video. That'd be a great one. It's like... That'd be a great one. I would call it, I paid $30,000 to hear eight bars of music or something, you know. That's great.

Get in with an orchestra to do that. Ogerman did string arrangements on the Sinatra Jo Jobim album, which is my favorite Frank Sinatra album. Oh my God, my favorite, too. Absolutely brilliant. That record is- The strings are ridiculous. Ridiculous.

Yes. So beautiful. And that's when I first heard it. My dad loved that record and loved Jobeam and loved Frank Sinatra, and I heard those arrangements, and they just blew me away. Even when I was a kid, I just knew, I was like, this is amazing.

The favorite albums? John Coltrane, Johnny Hartman. It's one of the best sounding records ever. That's tough. That changes all the time. Beatles Revolver, that to me is – Revolver and Rubber Soul are just two of the most brilliant records that made pretty much back to back. I still can't even fathom how those guys came up with song after song after song after song like that. How do you just – how do you do that? Nobody's done it since. I don't know if music can occupy that place in the culture anymore.

I've made videos about this that I think kids are so connected to the screens that it's very difficult for music that it doesn't have video associated with it to penetrate into culture in the same way. And I also think that there's very little shared music experiences anymore, since everybody has suggested things through algorithms that people are siloed into different things. I did a video on, I did a series of videos on top

one-hit wonders of different decades, 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, then 2010 to 2020. All the videos would have millions of views, 2010 to 2020. People are in the comments, I've never even heard any of these songs. And because they'd have no shared experiences anymore, because there is no radio. There's no MTV. There's nothing that people are like, oh, I know that song. I've heard it a million times.

I've heard it in the grocery store. I've heard it on TV. I've heard it here and there. The labels have outsourced the promotion of records to TikTok, essentially. And I just don't think that there, I don't know if there's even another way to do it other than that. Kids will listen to a 15 second clip and they'll use it

and these things will blow up and get millions of streams and songs get big because of that. I talked to Max Martin, I didn't interview Max, but I got together with him, had a great conversation with him for a couple hours when I was in Stockholm last year, and we talked about popular music, and he talked about the,

I think we were talking about Blinding Lights, the weekend song that's the most streamed song on Spotify ever, or at the time it was, I don't know if it still is, and that part of the song blew up on TikTok and it became this giant song. I think it's an amazing pop song, really, really incredibly well-written pop song.

But how TikTok shapes the way that people interact with music and it's through videos. It's the songs related to videos. And I don't know if people can even take in music in the same way unless they, because we used to listen with our imagination. There's very little known about the bands. You know, you didn't know about,

did you know about Marvin Gaye? Did you know about Led Zeppelin? Did you know about, what did you know about these people? Nothing. Very little. I lived in Rochester. Very few people came through Rochester. It was like a secondary city.

And I didn't have money to go to concerts as a kid. And so your only experience is the album cover and the music and the song you heard on the radio. And then everything else you imagined. What were these people like? What are these songs about? You didn't even care what the people were like. I remember the first time I heard Eddie Van Halen speak, I thought, that's what Eddie

Van Halen sounds like. That's not what I imagined Eddie Van Halen sounded like in California. You thought he sounded like Darth Vader. It's funny. Can you describe what it is about the music that you love that makes you love it? I would say that I love different things about different types of music. Some music I listen to because I just love the melody or love the lyrics.

Some music I listen to because I love the sound of it. There are records that I love the sound of it but I don't like the music. That I've listened to many times. I'll listen to records because they sound amazing. And that's, maybe that's my producer brain, but I can't believe how fat the low end is. If you've ever been to a hi-fi show, there's a lot of that.

Hi-fi shows have incredible sound and not always the best music. But the sound is ridiculous. Yeah. So I have tremendous appreciation for that. And that's long before I worked as a producer. I always found records that I love the sound of, even if I hated the music, which is funny to say. Yeah. It's a different thing.

It's a quality. It is a quality of the piece. Yeah. What are your music-listening habits like, not work-related? Or is there music that you listen to that's not work-related for you now? A lot of times, I listen to stuff that my kids listen to. Would you say they have good taste? They have good taste to them.

It's interesting, because my kids don't typically... my 11-year-old daughter doesn't listen to stuff that 11-year-old girls listen to typically, except for Billie Eilish. She loves Billie Eilish, but then she'll listen to the police or she has really varied tastes. And I don't know how she finds stuff. She just goes on Spotify and makes her own playlists and listens to things. So I'll listen to stuff that they listen to because I like to be informed about what they're into. And then I'm constantly searching for new music.

So a lot of times I'm on Spotify. I have Apple Music and Spotify, but I find that my experience on Spotify, just the way that the thing is laid out, I just prefer it. It's easier to make playlists, and I'll look for new music on there. So I'm constantly looking for new things.

When you say looking for new things, like what would be a marching order you would give yourself in terms of looking for a new thing? Would it be a genre? What would it be? No, it could be anything. Sometimes I'll go down and look through indie rock bands. I like to look for things that have 100,000 or a few monthly listeners.

I know that sounds weird, but I like to see if there's something that's kind of unknown and that's, that I think is really good. Or a lot of times I'll go on Instagram because that's where most musicians post. I say that Instagram is the musician's platform and musicians don't really post on TikTok. I mean, some do, but most don't. People that want to advertise for their gigs

or wanna connect with their fans go to Instagram. So I find a lot of artists through that, at least playing parts of songs, and then I'll go to Spotify and see if I can find them on there. And listen to music. Do you have any trusted sources that you look at for recommendations of new things?

I have people that send me hundreds of emails a day with things, and they'll usually include YouTube links or Spotify links and all. Do you listen? Yeah. Do you ever find anything that way? Once in a while I do. It's so easy though, Rick, to click on something to,

it's not like if in the old days if somebody would send me a CD, you have to open it up. You have to go, this stuff is a hassle. Now it's like you just literally click one link and you're into a song. I drive my 11-year-old Layla to school every day and I'll put on a playlist, you know, whatever genre music could be, rap, whatever,

and she'll be like, and I'll listen to 30 seconds of each song. She's like, why do you do that? Said, because I'm just trying to see if I find something interesting. Well, why don't you listen to the whole song all the way through? Because you know in 30 seconds

whether you want to listen to the rest or not. Exactly. All right. Exactly. And then after, Rick, after about five songs, she's like, yeah, go to the next song. Ah, training them well. That's right.

Do you like to be challenged by the things you listen to? There's an artist named McGee that is an indie rock singer, and a guitar player, and it's kind of lo-fi, lo-fi guitar rock. And what he's playing is really beautiful, the odd kind of chord progressions and stuff. And I'm listening to it on my phone and it sounds cool and then I put it in my car and it's like,

God, this is too lo-fi to enjoy in the car. So I can only listen through speakers. It's kind of a weird thing, right? And that's the challenge is I like stuff that's lo-fi, but it can't be's lo-fi, but it can't be too lo-fi to where it doesn't sound full. Yeah, it will translate.

Yeah. What do you know about your audience? My audience, the age range, the biggest group is 25 to 34, but only by a little bit, probably by percentage point. That's pretty much equal from 25 up to 55. Every demographic is around 20%. So my audience is really varied.

And you said earlier that the particular content will skew more towards a certain part of that audience. That's right. Every video has a completely different audience. Some videos, depending on how big it is, will... Cross over. Yeah. How often do you post?

Probably three times a week. No, I post more than that because I post a short almost every single day. But I mean, I post a long form video three times, well, two long form videos a week and a live stream once a week. My live streams are typically music teaching related. Cool. I will always do that, I always have done it.

And you do it as a live stream, but then it lives as a video. Live streams have a different algorithm that are associated with them. Some of my live streams will get millions of views, but most of them have a very short shelf life because YouTube will push videos on demand, they call a regular upload. Livestream has its own algorithm, Shorts has its own algorithm. Can you take something from a live stream and make an on-demand video out of it?

Yeah, I don't do that usually because it's just as easy for me to film a video than to do that than take parts. But a lot of people, a lot of podcasters will take parts, they'll do live streams, they'll do long form videos and they'll make their shorts based on them and make clips and things like that. I mean, I... Your shorts are all made to be shorts? Most of them are made from videos,

but sometimes I'll do things like, I've interviewed so many people that have played, that have played different roles on records. I had one there, funny, because Michael O'Mardy, and he's a producer, but also played, was a session piano player, played a lot of the Steely Dan records. And I had him and Christopher Cross

talking about the song Sailing, and I'm going back and forth between them. The song starts with strings, but that was actually a mistake. The two tape machines didn't link up, and the string part that was on the second machine played first. Christopher Cross's brother was there in the studio,

he goes, oh, that's a great intro. Michael Martin was like, well, that's not supposed to be there. And there's like, well, we should make it like that. And so they actually changed the arrangement based on the thing playing incorrectly. But I made a short of that, where I put these two different people that were on there together. So that's cool is when you can actually have multiple people that played that are from the same group that you've interviewed. I interviewed all three of the police separately. Cool.

And so I've had videos of them talking about Roxanne or something like that from each of their different perspectives. And they have very different opinions. And when you interview people, it's better to interview them separately. Absolutely. I think that the memory is something of a combination of what they all remember of that.

You very rarely will find the same story. I interviewed all four people that played on the song Asia, the Steely Man song Asia. It's Larry Carlton played guitar on the basic track, Steve Gad on the drums, Chuck Rainey on the bass, and Michael Amartyan on the piano. That was the rhythm section that recorded the basic track. Yet Chuck Rainey swears it was recorded four different times. Michael Amartyan said there were two takes.

There was one take where they started laughing because Steve Gad does these insane drum fills on it and they screwed up. They made all these mistakes. We couldn't believe what he was playing. So you had to do a second take where they kept it together. And then I interviewed a guy that engineered it, Bill Schnee. Bill Schnee sent me the track that somebody made. His assistant engineer did a dub that he wasn't supposed to do of the basic tracks, and Bill had it. And he sent it to me. It's amazing to hear, and I included it in the Bill Schnee interview, but I made a short where it's got the different people, Steve Gad talking about it. He doesn't remember anything from the session.

He can't even remember it. And Chuck saying that they played it four times. And this is very funny, right? And Larry Carlton, completely different memory. Keep in mind also when you're playing on records every day in the recording studio, different songs, it's impossible to remember. Right. It does all sort of blend together. Yeah.

As you said, sometimes listening to it helps jog your memory. But other than that, it's very difficult. I interviewed Bernard Purdy, and I played him just the drum, the solo drum track of Kid Charlemagne. He never heard it. And I played Chuck Rainey, the solo bass part of Kid Charlamagne, and he had never heard it before. And it was fascinating because they never came in for playbacks. They never listened to their parts by themselves.

Never. Why? Why would they? Why would they, right? It was fascinating to see their reaction to it. Absolutely. Here's an example of a short I did. So it's Daniel Anwar and then Tony Levin. They're talking about the bass part of Sledgehammer, right? Because it has an amazing bass sound. I didn't realize that.

Yeah, he produced the songs. Tony Levin playing the bass. I was playing a frontless music man with an octave pedal and with a pick. And it was just a massive sound. I just turned every knob up to 10. They compressed it more, they had enhanced the low end. That much wasn't coming out of the bass.

It compressed, expanded and gated. He hit an open... It was ridiculous. Yeah. Working with Peter Gabriel sends you into some alternative universe. Thinking outside the box is the norm. And that became the basis of the bass sound for that record. Now, the fact that I've been able to interview people that,

now I just need to interview Peter Gabriel and then you can put these things together. But that's fascinating to me because that's such a unique bass sound on that. Absolutely. It's funny to go back and forth and hearing them talk, it's almost like they're having a conversation. Yeah, it's great. So cool.

Yeah, that's really fun. What are the new technologies used in music that you're most excited about? Honestly, AI. There's things I use, AI tools that I use all the time now. Like what? To separate the vocal. If I have bleed in my microphone, if I'm playing examples or something and I need to isolate my voice.

AI can do that. Yes. I didn't know that. Yeah. There's a program we use called lalal.ai. It's an online thing and you put it in, and you can separate the music from it. I did a video when the Beatles, they put the new song out with John Lennon and stuff.

So I showed how you can use these AI tools to separate a piano and voice. So I sang and played piano the first verse of the new Beatles song and then I separated it. You can't hear any artifacts in my voice of the new Beatles song. And then I separated it. And you can't hear any artifacts in my voice of the piano. And you can't hear my voice in the piano. And it was just recorded with one microphone. Wow.

It sounded like a good recording of your voice. Good recording of my voice. I mean, as good as you could get with one microphone, you know, three feet away. But you couldn't hear it. Not worse than in regional recording. No, my voice is pretty bad. But there are definitely some AI tools now that are,

to me, that are exciting. And I think people think of me as being anti-technology. I'm extremely pro-techno, I mean, whatever the technologies are available, I am trying these things out. I've tried a lot of the AI programs. I like to see what is out there and what people are using. And I think that there's a lot of opportunities for AI in mixing records, things like that, that I think people will rely on

more in the future. Give me an example of how you imagine that would work. Maybe you can, you have drums recorded, let's say, and then you're like, well, what if we did the drums and with this kind of a sound, and you can radically change it just instantly using the drum performance. Something that might take you 30 minutes of, I want my drums to sound like a Chad Blake recording,

like the Black Keys or something. I want something that sounds like that, and all of a sudden it'll change the bass drum to be like a Chad Blake kind of bass drum and distortion on the snare. Or I want my drums to sound like Andy Wallace's drums on the Bulls on Parade or something that he mixed, the Rage tune, and that will change the drum set

to be in a room like that. Or you don't know how it feels. I want the drums to have that kind of a sound, and it'll just change them. It'll create that room sound, you know? And get the balances just right, the EQs and everything to sound really, really fat. So I think that there's some,

I think that that's a good use of AI to aid people. I think that AI, or maybe show you some possibilities that you might not think of. Would you call that modeling? Is that what modeling is? It might, yeah, maybe. It's kind of like modeling.

Universe Audio is making these microphones now that model different mics. They have these small diaphragm condensers that kind of have a neutral sound and then use one of their plugins to get a KM84 or something. Or you can change them to AKG451s or other small diaphragm condensers. They have an SM7 mic that looks like that. Can you do it after or you have to do it? Yes. So you can record it and then change the sound of the mic.

Yes. That's really interesting. Yeah. So those are, to me, really interesting technologies, those modeling. that's definitely modeling technologies. Now, I own these microphones as well. So for me, the need to do that is not as great as someone, but a kid that can't afford to buy these things, to me it's a great, I think these are amazing tools. And also, for people to kind of get familiar with at least a close facsimile of what these microphones that people like us have been lucky enough to be able to use in studios

that are not even really hardly available nowadays. You know, like a KM84, now they stopped making them in 1992, and most of them are pretty beat up, you know? Neumann actually made me, I went to Neumann, and last year I did a show in Berlin, and I went over to Neumann to do a little factory tour and stuff, and one of the guys there said, is there any mic that you'd like to wish that we would make? I said, yeah, I wish you'd make the KM84s again.

And he started laughing. And I said, why are you laughing? He said, because we have enough parts to make 60 match pairs. And so we're going to do that. And I got one of the match pairs. And so we're going to do that. And I got one of the matched pairs. And these are new old stocks, so the bodies, everything. These are exactly brand new KM84s. Which is really cool, you know? To hear what... Super cool. Yeah. So then I was like, thinking, Rick, okay, do I use these?

I drop one. So I'm so careful now every time that I use them that I, I don't dent them or something. Or do you like to read? Are you a reader? I do like to read, but I typically read, I read short form content. Typically. I'm not a book reader. I read short-form content typically. I'm not a book reader. I have some type of ADD, or reading is difficult for me, that I always compensated for by having an incredibly good memory.

But when I was a kid, it was undiagnosed, but I would read a paragraph, and then I'd forget everything I read. And when I bought your book, I had to buy the audio version along with the book, because I had to listen to you speak it, and then I read it at the same time, and that, to me, is the perfect way to do it. I listen to a lot of audio books as well.

I like listening. I like closing my eyes and listening. I probably listen more than read now. I like it in the author's voice as well. Your book sounds great. The audio version sounds amazing because you have a great speaking voice. And when I'm reading it, it sounds like it's spoken.

And when I hear it's spoken, it just... I think I have a deeper understanding when I'm reading it and listening to you say it. Cool. So it's a very deep book. Are there any other forms of art that... Are there any other forms of art, of visual art, and understanding how they overlap with the musical style periods is really important.

The Baroque era in music and the Baroque era in art was 1600 to 1750, roughly. Some of the eras, Impressionistic music and art, some of them don't exactly overlap. Renaissance music, Renaissance art kind of did, but there are kind of three separate periods of Renaissance art. I'd like to know how history and art and music all relate to one another. Did the French Revolution or the American Revolution affect composers? Did they even know about it?

Who was... Mozart lived from 1756 to 1791. The French Revolution started in 1789, Beethoven 1770 to 1827. What was happening? He was obviously a fan of Napoleon at first, right? And he was also influenced by German philosophers. Those things to me are interesting. I don't know if they're important to other people, but there are movements of art, of writing, of music that overlap one another,

and of historical events. And I believe that those things are all interrelated, and that's something that I wanna understand. It's definitely helpful to have an understanding of the culture when you go past just the music and see the music in the context of its times and the other art movements that were going on at the time. It is fascinating. I don't know though how much people knew.

People didn't readily have, they didn't have scores available and you couldn't listen to music if you were Beethoven. And you just could experience it through reading it, either through playing it or through just looking at the score and the people, Beethoven when he was deaf, the thing I like about that fourth piano concerto, that was the last piano concerto he performed. It was a concert December 22nd, 1808, he performed a concert where he performed. It was a concert December 22nd 1808. He performed a concert where he premiered the fourth piano concerto, the fifth symphony, the sixth symphony. All these pieces

a six hour concert and it was to me probably one of the greatest concerts of all time but it was in the winter time in Germany and it was the last time I believe that he performed with an orchestra because his hearing had gotten so bad that he couldn't perform anymore after that and he conducted. There's a beauty in when he was losing his hearing, I'm totally on a tangent here, his pieces to me opened up again and he started writing for extended ranges in the music when he was completely, or when they think he was completely deaf. His late string quartets used full range of the instruments as opposed to some of the pieces that, you know, he lost his hearing from the top down.

It's interesting to see how as he got more and more deaf, how was writing changed. But those things are important and just like I think literature and visual art, all these are interrelated somehow. When is it helpful not to know versus knowing? In other words, where are the lines of expertise versus innocence? I think ultimately doesn't matter what the genre is, whether you know music or don't know understand what you're doing. To me the best musicians play instinctually even if they know everything that they're playing it's still always based on how they're feeling at the time. So even though I know every note if I'mising, I know all the notes I'm playing, I don't

think about it. It doesn't occur to me. And I think that most players, the greatest ones, are just play intuitively. So it doesn't matter whether they have the training or not. I think that intuition is the biggest part of, the most important part of music. And just being in the moment is really incredibly important. I interviewed Vinny Caliuta, who's one of my old, old friends. I've known Vinny for 35 years.

And I said, Vinny, talk about flow. It's the first thing I said to him. He goes, thought is the enemy of flow. And he just improvised that because that's what Vinnie does as a drummer. He doesn't have to think if he's playing in 27-4 or whatever. He doesn't think about that. Yeah, he might think about it for a split second and then it's just all feel. He doesn't have to think about it. And ultimately, it's just

whether you know what you're doing or you don't know, you almost need to play like you don't know what you're doing. acoustic guitar plays softly Tetragrammaton is a podcast. Tetragrammaton is a website. Tetragrammaton is a whole world of knowledge. What may fall within the sphere of tetragrammaton? Counterculture? Tetragrammaton. Sacred geometry? Tetragrammaton. Counterculture Tetragrammaton. Sacred geometry Tetragrammaton.

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