Rick Beato: Greatest Guitarists of All Time, History & Future of Music | Lex Fridman Podcast #492

- The following is a conversation with Rick Beato, legendary

music educator, interviewer, producer, songwriter, and a true

multi-instrument musician, playing guitar, bass, cello, and piano. Rick, with his

incredible YouTube channel, celebrates great musicians and

musical ideas, and helps millions of people, including

me, fall in love with great music all over

again. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support

it, please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can

also find links to contact me, ask questions, give

feedback, and so on. And now, dear friends, here's Rick Beato. You had, I

think, an incredibly fun and diverse beginning to your music

journey. I heard somewhere that one of the things that made you fall in love

with music was listening to guitar solos, some epic guitar solos.

What's an early guitar solo that you remember you connected to spiritually,

musically, where you're like, "Wow, there's magic in this"?

- Well, the first solo that I learned was "Hey Joe." It was actually a good

beginner song, you know, when I first started playing the

guitar, because it has pretty simple chords, right? So it's like E, C, G, D, A.

And I learned the solo, and I figured out this, like, I'll say it's this

pentatonic scale, E minor pentatonic scale though. I didn't know that's what it was called, but

learned this thing, and it's like, "Whoa, he's just in this one shape

here." Now, there was no... You couldn't go look anything up. You

just, if you could figure out the notes, you noticed that there was a little pattern

to it. And then I got so obsessed with it, and I showed

my younger brother John, who started playing guitar right at the same time I did.

So I was 14, he was 11. And I

would play rhythm for him for five minutes while he would solo over

Hey Joe. And then as soon as I'd start soloing, he'd throw the guitar down, then we'd get in a

fight. And so my mom eventually was like, "What is going on here?" And I was

like, "John won't play rhythm."

"John won't play rhythm for me." She's like, "Okay, I'll play rhythm for you.

What, what are the chords?" And—

- That's awesome.

- ... I was like, "Okay, it's like E, C, G, D, A."

And so my mom would literally play rhythm for 20 minutes while I'd play.

- Hashtag parenting.

- That's amazing. When I look back on it now, my mom's been gone for 10

years now. When I look back on it, it's like, "My God, my parents were so cool."

- We should mention that "Hey Joe," and Hendrix in general, is kind of known

for the rhythm not being simple rhythm, just the chords that you mentioned.

It's what you do with those chords. It's almost improvisation, the rhythm side.

- He did all those really cool chord fragments, riffs, and things like that,

that's just part of his... That's the Hendrix style.

- What do you think? I mean, many people put Hendrix as the greatest guitarist of all time.

What do you think is part of that?

- You know, I make lists.

- You do. If you somehow don't know who Rick Beato is,

go on YouTube right now and watch your excellent

interviews with musicians, watch your breakdown analysis of different songs,

and watch your top 20 lists, where you're

very opinionated, sometimes very openly critical about certain

kinds of songs. It's fun. Opinions are fun.

- But they do change, Lex, from day to day.

- Yeah, exactly.

- You know, like I... But when, anytime I do a list, if I do 20, I like to do

20 because that gives me some leeway to throw in. I have to throw in

something that is so weird that people, you

know... So, something that a lot of people won't know,

just to have it on there, so I can at least introduce a per- you know,

I'll put somebody like a- Allan Holdsworth, who's a famous fusion guitar

player. I'll throw in one of his solos or something. Just some, some

oddball solo in there, just so that people, as they're listening down the list, will get

exposed to something they would not necessarily get exposed to.

- Yeah, a lot of variety. But Hendrix... Did you show up here today, Rick,

try to tell me that Hendrix is not up there? I just am getting that vibe right now.

- No, I'm not. I, but I don't want to say greatest, you

know... You, you can say, well, there, there are people that inspired Jimi Hendrix.

Charlie Christian, older guitar players. Charlie Christian, Django Reinhardt

were the first two really big, and probably, and Andrés

Segovia were, were three of the giants of the

20th century, as far as guitar influences for most of the

players that were to follow.

- So here, going to Perplexity, Django Reinhardt was, of course, a jazz guitarist

and composer, active mainly in France, and is widely regarded as one of the

greatest guitarists in jazz history.

- So, Django was... Well, there's a huge movement

right now, Gypsy Jazz Movement, as they call it-

... that is kind of built around this style of

music that he played back in the early 20th century. One of the things

about Django is that he was in a fire,

and he had two of his third and fourth finger, so

his ring finger and pinky were essentially melted together. He had

no use of them. Although he could use them while he was chording, but a lot of

these incredibly fast lines, he's just playing with two fingers. And it's amazing.

- That... What is that? So that's Gypsy Jazz.

- That's Gypsy Jazz, yeah.

Him, Stéphane Grappelli was a violinist that played with him a lot.

- How much of this is improvisation?

- Everything he's doing there is improvised.

- It feels so free. And fun like swing, and then at least you said

pre-bebop. So bebop was a kind of jazz that was also influential

on you in your own life journey. And it's this

complicated, legendary kind of jazz that was very influential on the music that

followed. So what was bebop?

- Well, after the big bands were happening in

the, you know, from the '20s through the '40s,

Small, people would go out and play in small groups that they

would tour with. And Charlie Parker, who's really kind of the, one of the

main figures of early bebop, really developed the language of

it. Usually, the music that they're playing over are standard chord progressions-

... that they would use as vehicles to improvise

over. A lot of them were AA, BA form. And Charlie Parker

created this language of improvisation that

was far more sophisticated than the swing players

of the big band era. You know, think of people like Benny

Goodman of that era. They would have really fast tempo

songs, angular lines, chromaticism, things like that, chromatic notes.

- Chromatic notes are just notes next to each other on-

- Next to each other, yeah

- ... on the keyboard.

- I like to think of it as connecting notes.

- Connecting. You're putting in more notes than are supposed to be there and so

doing, creating some interesting texture.

- Yeah, so that is one of the most difficult

styles to master, because all these things are a language.

Blues playing, they're all just languages, right? It's like, just like you'd learn

any type of language. My dad loved

bebop. Now, when I was a little kid and he's listening to these bebop

records, whether it's Charlie Parker or Dizzy Gillespie

or Oscar Peterson, Joe Pass, great jazz guitar

player, I'm just hearing this stuff. I don't know any different. My dad was not a musician, but for

some reason, he liked incredibly sophisticated-

... music that was very technical. And,

I just heard it and just was like, "Oh, yeah, okay, cool." And not realizing that

it was developing my ear, because I really, bebop is one of the hardest

to improvise in that style, in that language of bebop. It's

very difficult to do. And hearing it as a kid is one of the things

that I think enables you, just like languages, enables you to learn it

as opposed to somebody that's never been exposed to it and tries to learn it as a teenager.

So I think it's very similar to learning languages, which kinda

is like my theory on perfect pitch, that every child is born with

perfect pitch. And they start to lose the ability around nine months-

... when people become culturally bound listeners,

when babies do. They start out as citizens of the

world, you know? They can, they have the the neural

pathways to hear the sounds, the phonemes of all 6,500 languages spoken on Earth.

But then around nine months, they begin to lose that ability and

they, when they become these culturally bound listeners, there's a

great YouTube video with this woman, Patricia Kuhl. She's a language researcher.

And I watched this, The linguistic genius of babies.

I saw this in 2010, this lecture that she did, like a TED

Talk, and she talks about this, that kids, they did a, an

experiment. They exposed kids to Mandarin three times a week for

25-minute sessions, just a

person speaking Mandarin to these babies. And they were able

to recognize the sounds, the phonemes of that language even later on.

And when I realized that my son Dylan had perfect

pitch, I thought, "Why does Dylan have perfect pitch but no one

in my family had ever had perfect pitch?" And I thought, "Well, it must be

because of the things I exposed to him

prenatally and then in the first nine months of his life."

'Cause that's the only way I could explain it.

- We're gonna return to Joe Pass. We gotta go to Dylan. You mentioned Dylan. I guess

that's in part one of the origin stories of

you putting out videos into the world, is the early videos you

did with Dylan, a set of videos on his perfect pitch. And for people who don't

know, maybe you can speak to what perfect pitch means.

- It's the ability to identify any note without a reference tone. So you can play,

it doesn't matter how quickly they are, that a person with perfect pitch

can hear a note and immediately identify it. Or a collection of notes.

- And taking a tangent upon a tangent, you also have a course on ear training.

- Yes, but my course is for relative pitch-

- Relative pitch

- ... not to be confused with perfect pitch.

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

useful-

- Yes

- ... for musicians?

- Yes.

- Can you explain the difference between the two?

- Relative pitch is basically learning how to identify pitches relative to

a stated tonic or something that you've heard, or just relative

to each other. If you hear a note and then you hear another note after

it, you can recognize, let's say, it's a minor third interval. So if you're on

the note A, the next note would be C. So once you're given a reference note,

you can use relative pitch to identify the

relative nature from one pitch to another.

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

- Chords, yup.

- ... and so that if you develop it to any degree

relative pitch, you can understand, you can hear the music better.

- Yes.

- Um, what does it take since we're taking a tangent on a tangent, what's

what does it take to train your ear? What's a TL;DR

on the course before people go out and sign up?

- It's just practice basically. You start with intervals.

Typically, with small intervals like minor second, major second. So minor second would

be a half-step, major second would be a whole-step.

- Are you listening to the tone one after the other or two of them together?

- Both. So played separately it's called melodic intervals, right, like a melody?

And harmonic intervals are played like a harmony, together. So you have to be able to

identify them both, both ways.

- What's an early journey? Like, we'll give people a preview of what they should...

Like, what does that look like? What does practice look like?

- Well, my course, it will play you an interval, and then you

identify it by clicking on whether it's, you know, a major third, or minor

third, or major sixth, or minor sixth, or perfect fifth, or tritone, whatever it is.

And it will teach you gradually, over time, how to recognize all the intervals.

- So you listen to a melodic interval or a harmonic interval. How quickly

does the ear in the various age groups that we humans are