[Music] tetron I was traveling around the United States in 1994 trying to find a new place to live and I was traveling through and I stopped to have lunch with my old college roommate Doug Sandberg who uh is a lawyer there and I just uh had lunch with him and he got me a gig
playing bass with a band some friends that night and I never left had you always played in bands yeah pretty much until I played in bands until 99 and then I started producing records after I was I was in a band that got dropped band called billionaire that got that
was on London sire than University and got dropped and uh when all the labels consolidation started happening and uh started producing full time then did that till 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 just to show a friend who who um uh asked me could you make a my son Dylan he's 17 now but he was eight he has insanely good Perfect Pitch where I born with it born with it but um I taught him when he was three I used to
be a college music professor and I said I was like okay Dylan when you hear these notes together ceg it's a C major chord okay uh you know you hear e FP G sharp B that's e add N 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 Dyan could name them all instantly even if I played them 12 note chord wow and um do you think 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'm started making
playlist when Dylan was 15 weeks in Udo 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 then so I started playing what I call this in retrospect was high information music Bach well-tempered
clav um I have a Turkish friend that's an amazing pianist that make does these like contemporary classical improvisations but all really sophisticated music and I did that for the first 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 them 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 never said a note name or anything to Dylan and
when he was three and a half we're driving in the guitar and I was just like hey Dylan sing a um Star Wars theme and he sings it I was like that sounds like it's I don't have perfect pitch I've got great relative pitch sounds like it's the right key and I check in
my phone and sing the Superman theme it's like that's in the right key and every song I asked him he's sang in the exact key so I turn my car around and go back to my house and go down the studio I hit the note B flat and I said what what what is this dyl and 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 the excavator song or some kids tune and then I taught him all 12 note names I realized he had perfect pit and
he learn the names based on the songs that he knew no he just he knew the note he already had Perfect Pitch MH and then it was just adding the names to the notes he knew every notes and after I used say how do you know this he goes every note sounds completely different
yeah but I saw a video on YouTube called um the L linguistic genius of babies there's a woman Patricia cool 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're um they can
she calls them um citizens of the world where they can hear the sounds of all 6,500 languages on Earth so they have all the synapses available and their ears can can detect these things the 2200 different phonemes and starting at 9 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 a mandarin only a few times in within that first nine months they can hear those sounds of Mandarin
wow forever so I have a theory that all babies can develop Perfect Pitch up to 9 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 they hear a um all 12
notes um 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 when I meet people with perfect pitch they
there's so many different levels of that and relative pitch is far faster so people that that have good relative pitch um are able to 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 I'm sure you've done this where it's like oh I want the temple a little faster if you're on tape I'll just speed up the tape machine you must have done that in some some recordings or and I um and I found since well I when I was a
college music I was a college music Professor from 87 to 92 I taught Jazz studies in Etha College in Upstate New York and I also taught I taught for one year at the new school um subbing for a friend of mine I taught I just taught one day a week there um but
I used to teach um used to do ear training and teach intervals to people and how to do that and that was very was interesting to um 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 um are different than you'd use for a child people that never learned to listen yeah 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 use or anything like that it's like what is a good snare sound what is a good bass drum sound you know like things like that and all it depends on what the song is and um I studied records all the I always studied records
and um 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 you know how do you create ambients and um even things like Acoustics what what makes a room s sound good these these things that you know or what what creates the vibe for people to
want to record in a certain place how do you know where to go so it's my been my quest in my YouTube channel to answer all these questions by asking people like yourself yeah 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 so you 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 musicans 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 is so was so unique cuz I played chord I play a chord and I'm like he's like uh C augmented over d d flat augmented
E9 over F major and he would things that your Jazz musicians or modern classical musicians would even with perfect pitch could not identify yeah like that uh and to me I saw with the power I never post recognize the shape of the chord or would he Rec recognize each of
the individual notes that made up the chord both both yeah so it's kind of a combination of relative pitch where he hears it as a sound and then he can pick out every note and he can sing every note no matter what the spacing is wild so I would do things where I'd play the
most dissonant chords and he would and one of the I did like four videos and one of the videos he wrote on a with a on a whiteboard thing I had with a 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 start picked up the guitar he's like okay show me a couple couple things like he never he listened to things all his friends you know they he listen to
whatever 17year olds listen to or 16y olds he's like okay show me something on guitar so I show him an e- minor chord I show him a d chord and then the next day he comes show me a couple other things so 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 it's the Unspeakable mystery the representation of a Soundwave from which everything Springs tetr grittin is an online collection of curated material is it a library or a gallery a museum an oracle we hope to find
out tell me about te teaching Jazz it's extremely difficult to teach Jazz because um that is what you taught though I taught Jazz yeah okay so so tell me teaching jazz is really 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 how to improvise over those progressions the most common
progressions in jazz would be like a 251 so if you're in the QFC it'd be D minor G major C major usually use Sev Jazz D Minor 7 G7 C major 7 and then you teach people and it's almost impossible to teach him 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 7 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 Cor because you have things that are happening vertically the chords that move along 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 yeah and and you really kind of need to start with just developing motifs I'm not sure that it can be taught because um 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 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
there's 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 and that's like my dad said very few things but that's one of the things that he said and um so I just
left the thing sitting in front of the stereo for months and one day I'm like H let me open it up and put it on my dad listened to Jazz all the time so I put it on and starts starts with night and day and then cell By Starlight and all these old
old St standards the fifth tune or fourth tune on the bre was all the things you are Jerome Kar tune and um 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 so I just listened to it I figured out the chords the line single note lines and the Bas walking and everything I just listened to it that's his response he just shook his head he's like wow he was never you know
that to me was the ultimate praise for my dad 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 M and every the essence of jazz is pretty much in that one improvisation once I heard that Rick I was able able to and I and then I started to take some guitar lessons some jazz guitar lessons with a guy in my
neighborhood and um that owned a music store and he taught me the chords and kind of the 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 and about the form of jazz tunes and things so I learning that taught me pretty much everything about jazz phrasing swing baselines comping it's all there in that one improvisation it's amazing so let's go back to um after the videos with your son yeah what
happened next so about six months later I had an intern in my studio and he said you should start a YouTube channel I was like what year was this this it was 2016 so it was Jan June 2nd of 2016 I did my first video and he's like oh I was like nobody's going to watch it quite in the
early days of YouTube now yeah I mean YouTube started and people started it started in 2006 2005 or the First videos but really people didn't start using it until a lot until probably 2009 out of print music videos that you never knew never imagined
existed everything is on YouTube I mean it's really incredible it's I say it's where people go to learn things it's really more than a platform mhm and what do you use it for as a user not as a maker uh kind of like you I find out of print things that people have put up
there I will watch concerts I will um always looking for live performances and I watch a lot of interviews on there um I'm I was a YouTube user for for years though before I it even occurred to me me to upload a video there so I was very
familiar with the platform but as far as when I started what uh you know I was like okay what kind of videos am I going to make so this interns like you should be a YouTuber I was like nobody's going to watch a white-haired guy on YouTube I think they will and i' had had
that video six months before with my son Dylan that and you know a video with 250,000 comments I mean it was insane yeah even though I was a rock producer that's what I did for a living I'm going to make videos go back to what I used to
do and I was teaching college I'm going to 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 that there was nothing like that on YouTube at the time there's nothing from Advanced
musicians and about four months later it's funny because I just had dzel Zapp on I haven't even released the video last weekend he was in Atlanta and DWI was the first musician that reached 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 I was like he put a comment in I said that can't be dzel zpp I only had a couple thousand you know few thousand followers and I click on it's like no that's
Diesel's Channel then the next day I got an email from him he's like I wanted talk to you here's my phone number can you call me so I called him talked to him then the next day Steve VI wrote to me then um uh I then I started I did some interviews just SK Skype interviews at
the beginning but most of my videos were they were about all different types of things then nothing about contemporary typically educational yeah all educational yeah yeah all educational nothing about contemporary music at all and length typically oh however they long they needed to be I
had a lot I had videos that were 45 minutes long I did whiteboard videos on things explaining stuff I did like a class like teing class it's funny because nobody does whiteboard videos some people do yeah um but I did whiteboard videos that they were some of
my videos but then I'd make videos like on um I made a video about Apple versus you or about how how Apple ruined iTunes and and things like that but I'm not realizing that people were there were people freaked out about this me criticizing Apple devices and everything
like why have they changed iTunes and it sucks now all this stuff and it just people went crazy it got millions of views it's and uh um so I would I would even venture out Beyond things like that but just anything that came to mind and I made videos always always music based yes
always music based yeah I never have mentioned anything other than music on my channel I don't get into politics contemporary with nothing it's only music but I I make videos on AI and I've been invited to testify these different Congressional hearings I
made made videos on fair use um practice on YouTube and um the content ID policies and things like that so always trying to um in in my trying to to be where modern technology is and also where the business of music is in addition to commentary on you know the Spotify top 10 and how
these things work and how streaming works and how people uh don't get paid and um and then obviously now it's progressed to to having interviews with people how do you think streaming has changed the way people relate to music so I think that um the
availability of having anything at your fingertips in a way D values 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 um is a completely different experience
than be able to make a playlist that don't necessarily go together things that you know are um and are not meant to be listened to in that way I mean people used to have an album or that was an important thing an aside and a bside and with
streaming I I made a video recently that I talked about I turn 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 said this could be in Led Zeppelin's entire catalog right here in this glass take an eye dropper this is the you know um Zeppelin 3 and I start naming off the songs in Zeppelin 3 and every and then this is the rest of
Zeppelin's catalog you know dump it out and streaming music in some ways is too available it's too easy to to obtain yeah so the the scarcity element has been taken away yes and the scarc City element made it desirable you wanted to get it yes there was you had to go you
had to make effort to get it yes and because of that it had value yes and you know maybe I had uh you a Jimmy Hendrick record that my friend didn't have but he had a uh he had a um eatles 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 uh and these things you know you carry the record over to someone's house I mean you literally would physically carry carry the physical record and Now on your phone there people listen to
music on their phone and um and everything is available for you there between Spotify or apple music or title 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 um it the there's a complete disconnect between um 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 wildf flowers 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 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 to me that something has been lost there that um with with streaming I like to say um that a I think a lot of people um including myself when I didn't
understand how records were made when you think about it if it's 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 these tra the music was recorded
and the things don't magically appear songs are written they're recorded sometimes they're recorded over 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 the more you know
about it the more you realize it is Magic and it does just appear 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 um uh that's the amazing thing about music and and it's time travel too and
that the performances don't have to happen all at once you have overdubs and things like that that that happen later on that you listen to and let's add this thing 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 yeah um I've 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 lenois Brendan O'Brien Butch Vig um um who else alen Parsons um very few almost n are they all different they're all different yeah everyone is different yeah everyone is completely I would have imag that but taste is the thing that they
all agree on ultimately they all have different you know some Daniel lwal comes more from a well he's he's a mus great musician great songwriter but he had his own studio so he comes at it from as a originally kind of as a studio um owner he and his brother produce
things together and um Allan Parsons you know he worked at ABY Road Studios he came at it through that way but but definitely the thing that that um I've come to realize after interviewing uh these producers is that is 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 um 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 to me that that is a um I I think the 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 my any small way way to society by having these these accounts what was it like to be in the room then how did you do this how are these records made what what and then whatever thoughts that you have on contemporary music
whatever it is that you want to add to to these discussions to me it's it's my um I wouldn't say duty but it's incredibly important to me to be able to put this information out there for people or 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 tell me about your recording studio so my studio is um is most people don't know it's in my
basement and um I built it in back in 2005 the house that I I bought I bought a house that had a big basement it's probably about 4300 square feet or so it's good size and the whole basement is a studio so it's got a control room it's got an ISO Booth with a 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 that's what it is it's basically a set and then I have another room next to that that's a u that I track drums and has a fireplace and
stuff and and then like a hangout room and then there's an 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 my daughter Le will play drums and my son Dylan play guitar and I'll play bass or my daughter lennin will
play bass and I'll play second guitar and stuff so it's our Jam room and rehearsal space so I have um everything that I've ever wanted and I don't use it now that that because I don't really produce anything except for stuff that I make in videos but in
my control room I have my you know rones and Helios and I've got everything that to make records and I'm not making records but you you choose not to I choose not to you're doing something else now yeah but I would love to to record performances and you know when I
interview people that come to my studio and many times people that are touring through town will come to my Studios and um and so we use it in that way and people most people play in you know when I'm uh uh that sounds like a whole another channel of just live
performances from your studio yeah I'd really like to do that I um I did my first kind of um artist Spotlight thing or something had the singer that her name is Ella hon and Ford she's from um from England and I started following on Instagram she only had about 45,000
followers but beautiful songwriter and uh was originally a jazz musici but she writes pop songs but they have she calls them um I started do a cover of witch lineman and she calls them forever songs songs from that like the early 70s and stuff and and she writes these modern
songs that are sound like forever songs that have beautiful Melody shapes and incredible chord progressions and things like that and and so I did an episode with her she happened to be in New York um when I was there a couple weeks ago and I 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 was like oh I actually am going to be in New York and uh so I had her come by the studio where I was doing another interview and I talked to her and she played a couple songs and I made a video
of it great and so I'd like to do that with bands and things and have people come into my studio and great so that's kind of something in the future that I would that I want to do you remember your first memory of music as a kid yes my um first memory is my
grandfather playing guitar 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 all my grandparents came from Came From Italy um and he would play his acus 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 americ folk music he would play and he'd 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 fingers think you were probably three something like that and and my mom's uh my Aunt Penny would play the piano my Aunt Marion played the violin my Uncle Al was a bass player would they be recorded music in the house you grew up in as well or no yes
what would that be my dad listened to Jazz my mom listen to classical music so and then I have you know so I have four older sibl no five older siblings and one younger sibling and they all listen to different music my sisters my oldest sister Pat loved the
Beetles and the stones and and you know I had Led Zeppelin you know Jimmy Hendrick all all different things um mtown and um all different genr of Music would be playing everybody have their own little cassette players or their little stereo so we had nine people in a
three-bedroom house with one bathroom and but music all the time what was the first music that you would say was your music not your parents not your your brothers or sisters probably um Angie by the Stones I bought the single to that mhm and I to this day it's one of my
favorite songs it just great song it just means so much to me and and uh um and I 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 the Keith Richards never played a guitar
this such a unique guitar part for him and it sounds amazing and but that was one of the first things I spent money on I remember in the drug stores used to have a rack they have the top 40 and you could just buy the 45 and pull it out and go up when did you start analyzing
it versus just listening to it and enjoying it oh I never analyzed it till I started probably till I took guitar lessons in my teens or so everything I Learned was by ear that's the thing is I think I think people think that I learned I'm a theory
guy most the names for things I learned for the most part in college like what things were so all my learning was done by ear I um all the guitar stuff I learned I started on bass or started on cello when I was in third grade I took this musical aptitude test called The Seashore test
that they had in second or third grade they gave it to all the students and the people with with the best ears got to play string instruments and then the next group got to play wind struments and be in the band that was the next year so I remember going with my mom I
got selected and they play they had the four things cello violin and Viola and not bass yet because you weren't big enough to play bass when you in third grade or so and I got to pick what instrument as soon as I heard the cello I was like I want to play that so I
started taking cello lessons and um I did that until sixth grade then I um then my Orchestra director asked asked me if I wanted to play the bass and I moved to Bas to Upright Bas and then um guitar happened uh 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 melb chord book I was just like pick up the guitar look at the chords start and since I
already played the cello in the bass I could I had didn't need I didn't go through that period of calluses or anything I start picking up like oh that sounds like you know first chord of this song or that sounds like Le 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 you know figured out how to tune the guitar and everything and and uh and I was obsessed that was it for for 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 it was um but I could play it I could um I knew the
notes I wanted to play and I knew where they were um but it was uh it was fun I'd like to get another Jello what would you say you've learned through posting videos a lot [Music] um there's many layers of that too is the attention span videos that people
would watch in 2016 are not videos that they watch in 2024 the attention span of people has gotten shorter 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 so any short over 35 seconds Rick people they won't watch those the last they're 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 to and and I just have it I just know 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 I said and somebody said go until you think it's 30 minutes I I would be within 30 seconds
of it 30 minutes yeah the the topics of videos are wildly different I mean I didn't make any content about contemporary music until I'd had two 100,000 followers on my channel subscribers on my YouTube channel and up till then what would it be before it was
contemporary give me examples of what it would have been um I would do things like um a breakdown of the string parts of the Sha Shank Redemption Thomas Newman I you know here's this scene and I would do a recreation where I would uh play all the parts that the orchestra would
play take one scene the stoic um the the original scene where the they do the fly over of the prison when they're all arriving and I would I'd have i' do a piano reduction on the screen have it going and I would talk about the orchestration and I show when the uh the
Hadley the the the evil guard Byron Hadley comes on the screen and he go 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
Shashank Redemption 1917 Finding Nemo uh and to get to ask him about those things and talk to him about why did you choose these things and and he starts out and he played the very beginning of the video he plays the American Beauty theme on the piano the
wonderful piano mysterious uh uh introduction and I 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 and he recorded the he recorded it there cuz it sounded exactly like because I'm sitting there
and he's playing it like that sounds exactly like it's like on the same piano he says yeah it was on this piano which is really amazing cuz on many levels to so cool yeah 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 and talk about that that's the stuff that dzel loved so when you say not contemporary you mean not not pop music no 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 c 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 multitracks of famous
songs where would you get the multitracks I got them from somebody back in the early 2000s some guy at a studio I won't mention where the studio was but I'd gone to do a um to to work on a record it was something for geffin and I walked walked in and the engineer
at the studio was playing the multi track it smells like teen spirit it was just Kurt Cain's voice I was like what is that oh it's a multi track to Smells team spirit where didd you get it from I can't tell you I was like we solo some of the other tracks you solo me or the
bass for the drums and everything so I was like I need that Rick he had thousands of them wow on a hard drive and I convinced him I traded him two samples and he traded me the like 2500 songs for a kick and a SN that last each of them that long that's unbelievable yes and so
I was like I i' I have a second Channel Rick Bato 2 that I would um that I started right at the same time I started my first one I would go on at 10:00 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 um I would one night I played multitrack of um All the Small Things by Blink 182 and there's a in the layers of everything that Roger Manning plays this
octave keyboard part that becomes a dissonance sound like a MOG or something it's beautiful little just single note thing octaves alternating and it creates this dissonance it's on on the 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 distant and one of my friends was listening my friend rat he's actually was my intern that got me to start my channel he goes you should do that as you should make a series like that you
should make a video like that for the main Channel and 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 did was magic the
police I did um kid Charlamagne Steely Dan I had the multitracks all these things and I and each one I would like I'd play Larry Carlton's solo of Kid Charlemagne and I notated uh the drum part the Bernard pry plays on it and Chuck rainy's base part I notated him on
the screen just for you know for and the keyboard part and the thing just blew up all these and I started getting a th000 subscribers a day and it never stopped since then I did 105 episodes of it song breakdowns and then I started telling sto I i' had always told
stories on my um 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 cuz I was
really good in track and I got a scholarship to go to to school um and I was a history major from one semester and I re auditioned at itha College where I'd gotten rejected and I got in because 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 audition and got in and then six years later I was teaching there I'd got my Master's Degree I went back to itha college so in the same room that I
failed the audition yeah I was the professor there teaching so um 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 yeah and I
told it on 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 letter and I didn't tell either of my parents about it but since the track coach got
me in as history major I went there to to fonia 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 and 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 uh he taught me how to 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 uh because it's a new year and I lied about it because I was embarrassed and um and that was a real pivotal thing it really made me um question my um the the shame of that cuz I was I had
I knew I was really talented but I just didn't have any training in that and my guitar teacher at the time didn't know anything about classical guitar so I couldn't pass the audition and 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 so how has your relationship to music changed over the course of your life I don't know if it has I um I'd love um I have the same feelings Rick
anytime I listen to a song If if I've heard it a million times it never changes always does the same thing to me I never get sick of things I've heard and I always want to listen to new mu new music um and I want to see if I can get that same feeling that I had it's tough
that's one of the things about streaming since everything's based on numbers it's usually things that the least common denominator that are the things at the top of the charts and they're things that blow up in Tik Tock and then they transfer to Spotify and in the old days when things
were decided upon by anr people for for good or bad people would take chances on things that may have been you know strange and um 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 you know why did the blood sugar Sex Magic connect with everyone what what it was it about that record that like you I don't know that you can say that it's a particular thing right it just just did yeah the songs just connected with people um
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 yeah I I said in the same video
I said that music is too easy consume to consume and it it's too 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 uh 80 takes of a vocal and compet together you know and yeah comping has always existed in music but when you were recording on tape sometimes you just had live with the imperfections cuz he didn't want to go in and try and fix one little thing that
somebody might have been bugged by no we're not going to take a chance doing a punch in on that it's too risky you know that that's yeah that's just the thing but also I know that we would you know make a slave multi-track of 24 tracks just to do a million vocal takes if we
needed to like exct we would do whatever we would need to do for good as it could be yeah um people 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 mhm um if I put out a video
and uh within 12 minutes I know how well the video is doing because I have so many people that watch my channel you have massive amounts of data and that will you you know from 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 and Views I mean it's amazing the psychology of the viewer that the title or the thumbnail you change you do an AB test with the thumbnail and a different thumbnail will all of a sudden create make the video
blow up I had a video that I did it's um probably like three four years ago it's one of my favorite videos I did a remake of the good solo of Stairway to Heaven so I brought in a friend of mine to truck the drums I said listen I called my friend Jack I'm like
hey learn I need you to come over and play exactly what John bonam played in the solo section I like what do you mean I said every feel the same so we tracked along with the record and everything so it have the same feel and then I played
all the other parts right I played Jimmy Pages guitar parts a keyboard part that John Paul Jones played and everything and I 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 and then I had Eric Johnson played a solo that I called Eric he would play that he would play I said Eric would you mind playing on this video and he's like what 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 what you would play and I said just imagine your 15-year-old self playing over ster with heaven okay I said but you have to film it okay no problem so we make this video and um so it's the first part of the video is creating the the backing track
and then I play my Peter Frampton Phil does his um does his Eddie Van Halen thing he's got 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 and but that video to me is one of my favorite videos that I've done it um and every once every once a year it just blows up in views and it'll 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 that and then it so they continue to get views every day forever all the videos do really can can you describe what it is about the music that you love that makes you love it I would say that
I 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's 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 listen I'll listen to records because they sound amazing and that's maybe that's my producer brain what are your music listening Habits Like not work rated or is there music that you listen to that's not work rated for you now um a lot of times I listen to stuff
that my kids listen to I'm constantly searching for new music so I'm I'm a lot of times I'm on Spotify I I have apple music and Spotify but I I find that that my experience on Spotify just the way that the thing is laid out I just prefer it that um it's
easier to make playlists and um and I'll look look for new music on there so I'm constantly looking for new things I try to find stuff that is not when you say looking for new things like what would be a a marching order you would give yourself
in terms of looking for a new thing um I like would it be a genre would it be a a what would it be no it could be anything like sometimes I'll go down and look at look through indie rock bands I like to look for things that are um that have 100,000 or 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 is um that I think is really good or a lot of times I'll go on Instagram because that's where most M Music musician post I say that that Instagram is the musicians platform and
musicians don't really post on Tik Tok I mean some do but most don't people that want to advertise for their gigs or want to connect with their fans go to Instagram and um 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 list 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 MH with things and they'll usually include YouTube links or Spotify links
and I'll do you listen yeah some do you ever find anything that way once in a while I do it's so easy though Rick to click on something to that that it's not like if in the old days if somebody would send me a CD you have to open it up you have this stuff as a hassle now
it's like you just literally click one link and you're into a song um do you like to be challenged by the things he Listen to I I was there's a guy there's an artist named McGee that um is a indie rock artist mg M MK period GE that um is a singer and a guitar
player and it's kind of lowii um Loi guitar rock and um and what he's playing and 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 lfi to
enjoy in the car so I would only I can only listen to it through speakers it's kind of a weird thing right and that's the challenge is is um I like stuff that's lowii but it can't be too lowy to where it doesn't sound translate yeah of the interviews you've done what
um 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 um they almost never know what's going
to be successful and I'd say that that's a common thing they they don't know they I think that people when they've had hit records they have more of an idea for something that's going to be a 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 do you think of yourself as a music critic that's a great question yes I oh not an intentional one
I just try to be honest with what I think I don't care what people this it's my opinion yeah 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 well I listen to it see 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 uh there's been a real Trend towards um having guitars and music in the last 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 was the case yeah and and I think some people thought I was criticizing the fact that there's no hip hop in it but there's a um I had done a
video recently that showed the trend in um uh there's a thing called chart Cipher um that does um Trend analysis based on all these data based on the on a bunch of different charts and they show you know 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 um and you're you're I'm 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 uh I also have found that um um it's funny some people 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 a thing about social media is that you know people that take the thing I said you know 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 in many cases it's not that I don't appreciate if somebody like something or whatever but you know when somebody writes something that's that may not be um that disagrees with you or whatever um they um many times they're writing about
themselves and 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 is it a tic as far as the content goes um people don't like jazz on my channel even though I that's interesting
yeah even though my channel started is that um when I interview a jazz musician I interviewed Keith Jared I interviewed Ron Carter and Pat maeni and um Brad mdow I've interviewed a lot of the great you know Jazz Legends um those interviews do really well but if I were to
make a video on um 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 like or not you know um but yeah that jazz does worse than anything but every single video has its own algorithm
every uh um if I interview somebody like uh one of the somebody from Prague metal scene the band um pfia um Tim Henson is a friend of mine that's been on my channel a few times great guitar play young kid um 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 uh interview with Jimmy Webb people that know who Jimmy Webb is will watch that video that of that AG I interviewed Jimmy Web how was that that
was amazing wow oh my God he's I'm a fan I love Jimmy Webb and um I'd made a video on Witcher lineman on 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 um 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 and uh I was like oh my God I love to interview jimy 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 um Glenn Campbell had recorded the track and Jimmy's like you know I wish that they I had this idea for this part and he 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 lb 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 I 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 the it was low in the mix but it's um it's when they're doing the be flat the SE cord and um and the little post chorus interlude thing and uh and it's funny that he goes I just remembered it being really low but it's really a important thing you know and
he's like I played that on on the on the recording all-time favorite artists Beatles the stones Zeppelin Queen Peter Frampton um I love all I love Tom Petty I love Nirvana I love you know there's so many different things it really depends on what what mood I'm in
and then um I'm a massive classical music fan and it's it goes from B to to palestrina to prfv to you know Beethoven to Mendelson Schuman 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 um I'm equally versed since my undergrad is in classical base and my Master's Degree was in jazz studies and then I was and then I was a rock musician before that I'm kind of an expert in multiple genres great so um I know the different
I know every recording not every recording but of of Beethoven's fourth piano conero which is to me one of the greatest piano caneros ever written and is first 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 perform 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 that is just this is perfection um favorite albums John colr Johnny Hartman it's one of the best sounding records
ever um that's tough that changes all the time Beatles revolver that to me is revolver and Rubber Soul are just um two of the most brilliant records and made pretty much back to back 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 I don't know if music can occupy that place in the culture anymore um I've made videos about this that I think kids are so um connected to the screens that it's very difficult for music that it doesn't have video
associated with it can to penetrate into culture in the same way and I also think that um that there is 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 um one hit wonders of different decades 70s 80s 90s 2000s then 2010 to 2020 all the videos had would have millions of views sep 10 to 2010 to 2020 people are in the comments I've never even heard any of these songs and because they have no shared
experiences anymore because there is no radio there's no MTV there's no there's 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 and and
um and now people rely on these the the labels have outsourced the um promotion of Records to Tik Tock essentially which is and I just don't think that there I don't know if there's even another way to do it other than that people kids will listen to a 15sec clip
and they'll use it and these things will blow up and get millions of streams and songs get big because of that um I talked to I talked to Max Martin I didn't interview Max but 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 pop popular music and he talked about the um I think we're talking about blinding lights the uh weekend song that's the most stream song on Spotify ever and um or at the time it was I don't know if it still is um and
that the song like a part of the song blew up on Tik Tock and and it became this giant song I think it's an amazing pop song really really incredibly well-written pop song and um but how Tik Tock shapes the way that people interact with music and and it's through videos it's the songs
related to videos and 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 little known about the bands you know you didn't know about did you know about Marvin Gay did
you know about Leed Zeppelin did you know about what did you know about these people very little I never 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 um and so your only experience is
the album cover and the 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 yeah what are the new technologies used in music that you're most excited about honestly AI because there are things that um
there's things that I use AI tools that I use all the time now like what um to separate the vocal um from if I have bleed my microphone uh if I'm playing examples or something and I need to isolate my voice so I'll I will um I'll you there's a program I use
called la. a that's um it's online thing and you put it in and you can remove the um you can separate the music from it I did a video when the Beatles the they put the new song out with John Lennon and stuff and so I showed how the AI you can use these AI tools to separate a
piano and voice so I sang and played piano the first verse of the new Beatle song and then I separated it and you can't hear any artifacts in the my voice of 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 it as good of as you could get with one microphone you know yeah three feet away yeah but you could worse not worse than the original recording my voice is pretty bad but um there's um there's a lot of opportunities for AI in mixing records
things like that maybe um that uh I think people will rely on more in the future give me an example of how you imagine that would work maybe you can uh you have drums recorded let's say and then you're like well what if we did the drums in uh with this kind of a
sound and you can radically change it just instantly um using the drum performance that that uh something that might take you 30 minutes of you know I want my drums to sound like a Chad Blake recording like um Everlasting like you know like a 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 like a Chad Blake kind of bass drum and distortion on the snare or um you know I want my drums to sound like Andy Wallace's drums on the you know Bulls on Parade or
something that he mixed the rage rage tune and uh that will change the drum set to be in a room like that or um 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 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 universal audio is making these microphones now that model different mics like um uh they have these small diaphragm
condensers that kind of have a neutral sound and then use one of their plugins to um to get a km 84s or something or you can change them to AKG 451s or other small diaphragm condensers they have an sm7 mic that looks you do after or you have to do it 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 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 some a kid that can't afford to buy these things this is a to me it's a great um I think these are amazing tools and also the for people to kind of get familiar with at least a close fact simile 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 a km84 now they stop making him in 1992 and most of them are pretty beat up you know I nyman actually made me I went to nyman in last year I did a show in
Berlin and I went over to noyman to do a little factory tour and stuff and um one of the guys here said um is there any mic that you'd like to you know wish that we would make I said yeah I wish you'd make the km 84s again and he started laughing and I said what why do
you why you laugh 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 wow and they um and these are new old stocks so the bodies everything these are exactly yeah brand new km 84s Inc which is
really cool yeah yeah yeah to hear what super cool yeah are there any other forms of art that impact your music listening or bounce off of the way you react to music I believe that um to me visual art um and understanding of different style periods
of art of visual art and understanding how they overlap with the musical style periods is really important so I'm you know the baroke era in music and the baroke era in art was 1600 to 1750 roughly some of the some of the eras impressionistic music and art that some of them don't exactly
overlap um renaissance music Renaissance art kind of did but they're different there're kind of three separate um uh periods of Renaissance Art and um 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 you know who was Mozart lived from 1756 to 1791 you know the French Revolution started in 1789 Beethoven 1770 to 1827 what was happening he was obviously a fan of Napoleon at first right the uh um
and 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 there are um movements of art of writing of music that overlap one another and of historical events and I believe that
those things are all inter related and I I don't know though how much people knew people didn't readily have didn't have they weren't 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 I like about that fourth piano conero that was the last piano conero he performed it was a concert December 22nd 1808 he performed a
concert where he premiered the sixth piano the fourth piano conero The Fifth Symphony the sixth Symphony all these pieces it was 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 in Germany and um he it
was the last time I believe that he performed with an orchestra because his hearing had gotten so bad that he couldn't he couldn't perform anymore after that and he conducted and um but that um there's a beauty in when he was 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 EX full range of the instruments as opposed to some of the pieces that you
know he led lost his hearing from the top down it's interesting to see how his as as he got more and more deaf how his his writing changed when is it better not to know how to play an instrument to to play that instrument where 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'm improvising I know all the notes I'm playing it 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 um is incredibly important I I I interviewed Vinnie Cuda who's one of my old old friends I've known Vinnie Vinnie for 35 years
and I said Vinnie talk about flow it's the first thing I said to him he goes thought is the enemy of flow that and he just improvised that cuz that's what Vinnie does as a drummer he's just so he doesn't have to think if he's playing you know in 274 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 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 [Music] t [Music]