Rick Beato

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Rick Rubin?

  Tetra Grahamington.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  I played in bands until 99 and then I started producing records after 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' consolidations started happening. And I started producing full-time then, and did that till I started my YouTube channel in 2016.

• 0:46Rick Rubin?

  How did you start a YouTube channel?

• 0:49Speaker 01

  In December of 2015, I did this video with my son Dylan. He's 17 now, but he was 8. He has insanely good perfect pitch. Born with it, but I taught him when he was 3. I used to be a college music professor. And I said, I was like, "Okay Dylan, when you hear these notes together, CEG is a C major chord." "Okay." You know, you hear E, F-sharp, G-sharp, B, that's E add 9. And I taught him all these different chords and everything. So then I would play multiple chords at the same time, up to 4 chords. And Dylan could name them all instantly, even if I played him 12-note chord.

• 1:22Rick Rubin?

  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?

• 1:29Speaker 01

  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. That kids can start to hear then. 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 makes, does these like contemporary classical improvisations. But all really sophisticated music.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  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 a..." 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."

• 2:36Speaker 01

  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, what, what is this Dylan?" 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, "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.

• 3:05Rick Rubin?

  And did he learn the names based on the songs that he knew?

• 3:08Speaker 01

  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 I used to say, "How do you know this?" He goes, "Every note sounds completely different."

• 3:21Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  But I saw a video on YouTube called "The 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 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 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.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  But if you expose a child, let's say, to Mandarin only a few times and within that first nine months, they can hear those sounds of Mandarin.

• 4:09Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  Forever. So I have a theory that all babies can develop perfect pitch up to nine months

• 4:17Rick Rubin?

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 4:41Rick Rubin?

  It seems like something that anybody could learn.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:45Rick Rubin?

  I think if you start with relative pitch, learning relative pitch first, I think we can train ourselves for anything.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:52Rick Rubin?

  It's just finding the method and doing the work to be able to do it.

• 4:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's interesting because 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, 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, some recordings or. And I was a college music professor from 87 to 92. I taught jazz studies in Ithaca College in upstate New York.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  And I also taught, I taught for one year at the New School, subbing 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 a 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.

• 6:14Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  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 to use or anything like that. And 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 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,

• 6:57Speaker 01

  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 and 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 ambience? Even things like acoustics. What makes a room sound good? You know, or what creates the vibe for people to want to record in a certain place? How do you know where to go?

• 7:38Speaker 01

  So it's been my quest in my YouTube channel to answer all these questions by asking people like yourself.

• 7:45Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  All of these things.

• 7:47Rick Rubin?

  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.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  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, the sound engineers, whoever it is, to ask them about specific recordings.

• 8:39Rick Rubin?

  So you started with the video of your son and Perfect Pitch.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  And that thing went insane. It got 80 million views. It was on Facebook and it was just on my personal Facebook.

• 8:50Rick Rubin?

  Wild.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  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 is, was so unique. Cause I played chords, I played chords and I'm like, he's like, C augmented over D, D flat augmented, E add nine over F major. Things that 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 post on social media.

• 9:23Rick Rubin?

  Would he recognize the shape of the chord? Or would he recognize each of the individual notes that made up the chord?

• 9:29Speaker 01

  Both. Yeah, so it's kind of a combination of relative pitch. Where you 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. 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, 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 start picked up the guitar. He's like, OK, show me a couple, couple of things. So like, he never. He listened to things all his friends, you know, they.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  He listened to whatever 17 year olds listened to or 16 year olds. It's like, OK, 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, show me a couple of other things. Show him a couple of 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, really fascinating. My middle daughter, Lennon, has no interest in music. And my youngest, Leila, Lennon's 15 and Leila 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.

• 10:55Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about teaching jazz. That's an interesting concept.

• 11:01Speaker 01

  It's extremely difficult to teach jazz because it's like, how do you teach someone how to speak a language?

• 11:08Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 11:09Speaker 01

  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 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?

• 11:54Speaker 01

  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. 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.

• 12:35Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  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 improvise.

• 12:52Rick Rubin?

  Or painter, just learning the skills, the craft aspect of it first.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  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 are blue collar people. My mom worked in a can factory in upstate New York, Fairport, New York, right up suburb of Rochester.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  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." 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, "Ah, 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 "Cello by Starlight", and all these old, old standards. The fifth tune or the fourth tune on the record is "All The Things You Are", Jerome Kern tune. And it starts playing, and I was like, "I can figure that out." So I start working on it and everything. I work on it all day.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  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 listened to it." 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 from my dad.

• 14:51Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Well, listen to a track from it, from your childhood, just cool to hear.

• 14:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, "All The Things You Are". Virtuoso is the name of the record, 1973.

• 18:56Rick Rubin?

  Okay, had you heard that song before in any form?

• 19:01Speaker 01

  No.

• 19:02Rick Rubin?

  So that's the first time you heard that song?

• 19:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:04Rick Rubin?

  Because that, Joe Pass is taking a lot of liberties with the song.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 19:10Rick Rubin?

  In terms of learning the song, this would be a hard way to learn the song, really.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  Yes, this would be an impossible way to learn the song.

• 19:16Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:17Rick Rubin?

  So you played along with it?

• 19:18Speaker 01

  I played along with it.

• 19:19Rick Rubin?

  And your dad?

• 19:20Speaker 01

  My dad couldn't believe it because it's, I mean technically it's incredibly difficult, even today.

• 19:25Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  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 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 about the form of jazz tunes and things.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  So I, learning that taught me pretty much everything about jazz. Phrasing, swing, basslines, comping, it's all there in that one improvisation.

• 20:23Rick Rubin?

  It's amazing.

• 20:28Rick Rubin?

  After the videos with your son,

• 20:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:32Rick Rubin?

  What happened next?

• 20:33Speaker 01

  So about six months later, I had an intern in my studio and he said, "You should start a YouTube channel."

• 20:41Rick Rubin?

  What year was this?

• 20:43Speaker 01

  It was 2016. So it was June 2nd of 2016, I did my first video.

• 20:49Rick Rubin?

  It's kind of the early days of YouTube now.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean YouTube started in 2005 are the first videos, but really, people didn't start using it until, a lot until probably 2009. There were guitar channels and things like that.

• 21:05Rick Rubin?

  Do you remember the first time you were made aware of YouTube?

• 21:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 21:09Rick Rubin?

  Tell me.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  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 a place you can upload a video and then you just send mom a link." Okay, so I signed up and put up a link there and so that's how I'd share videos.

• 21:41Rick Rubin?

  So you started using it as a user, not as a watcher, right from the beginning?

• 21:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:47Rick Rubin?

  What do you use it for as a user, not as a maker?

• 21:51Speaker 01

  I'd find out and print things that people have put up there. I would watch concerts and I'd 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

• 22:13Speaker 01

  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's like, "I think they will." And I'd had that video six months before with my son Dylan and, you know, the video with 250,000 comments. I mean, it was insane.

• 22:33Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  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. Cause 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 Dweezil Zappa on. And 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. It was like, he put a comment in. I said,

• 23:21Speaker 01

  "That can't be Dweezil Zappa." I only had a couple thousand, you know, a few thousand followers. And I click on it. It's like, "No, that's Dweezil's channel." Then the next day I got an email from him. He's like, "I want to talk to you. Here's my phone number. Can you call me?" So I called him and talked to him. Then the next day Steve I wrote to me.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  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 then, 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 teaching a class? Yeah. And nobody did whiteboard, it's funny because nobody does whiteboard videos. Some people do. Yeah. But I did whiteboard videos. That, they 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.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  Me criticizing Apple devices and everything. Like, "Why have they changed iTunes and it sucks now?" All this stuff. And I just, people went crazy. It got millions of views. So I would, 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, I make videos on AI and I've been invited to testify. These different congressional hearings, I made videos on fair use,

• 25:05Speaker 01

  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,

• 25:22Speaker 01

  you know, the Spotify top 10 and how these things work and how streaming works and how people don't get paid.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  And, and then obviously now it's progressed to, to having interviews with people.

• 25:36Rick Rubin?

  How do you think streaming has changed the way people relate to music?

• 25:42Speaker 01

  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, you know, are not meant to be listened to in that way. I mean, people used to have an album order. That was an important thing, an A-side and a B-side.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  And with streaming, I, 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 a hundred thousand new songs are added to Spotify.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  And at any point, you can interrupt the stream. And I put a glass in there and said, this could be in Led Zeppelin's entire catalog, right here in this glass. Take an eyedropper. This is the, you know, Zeppelin III. And I start naming off the songs in Zeppelin III. And then this is the rest of Zeppelin's catalog, you know, and dump it out. And streaming, music in some ways is too available. It's too easy to obtain.

• 27:14Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, so the scarcity element has been taken away.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 27:17Rick Rubin?

  And the scarcity element made it desirable. You wanted to get it.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 27:22Rick Rubin?

  You had to make effort to get it.

• 27:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 27:25Rick Rubin?

  And because of that, it had value.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  Yes. And, you know, maybe I had a Jimi Hendrix record that my friend didn't have, but he had a Beatles 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 know, 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 listen 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.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  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 raised 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?

• 28:52Speaker 01

  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 of things. And I guess if there's a few clicks here and, you know, but they make it incredibly difficult.

• 29:13Rick Rubin?

  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.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  Impossible.

• 29:20Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  Right. You can go to Wikipedia, but that doesn't give you who the, and a lot of it's incomplete.

• 29:27Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, or wrong.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  Or wrong.

• 29:28Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  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.

• 29:42Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  And.

• 29:43Rick Rubin?

  What did you listen to on the way?

• 29:48Speaker 01

  I listened to a lot of your records. And usually when I, 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, it's all about learning, you know?

• 30:11Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  And I always, 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 the, a song that you produced, it triggers something.

• 30:29Rick Rubin?

  Absolutely.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  So I'm thinking like, what am I going to play, Rick, that I want to know about? And 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.

• 30:44Rick Rubin?

  For sure. For sure.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  So, I don't know how you feel about streaming, what, if you have any of the same things. We're, just for people to know, I'm one year older than you.

• 30:57Rick Rubin?

  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 want to 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.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:43Rick Rubin?

  So I think we listen less, I want to 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.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:24Rick Rubin?

  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.

• 32:43Speaker 01

  That's right. That's the plus side of it.

• 32:46Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  You said something interesting there that 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.

• 33:01Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  As far as I'm concerned.

• 33:03Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  New to me.

• 33:04Rick Rubin?

  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.

• 33:25Speaker 01

  Do you have a, an idea? Like, I really wanna hear this? Or are you on a hunt for things that may be related to something that you know? And you wanna 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. And you say, oh, how does that influence? Do I recognize anything in what West Montgomery played that Charlie Christian played?

• 34:03Rick Rubin?

  I would definitely look for the lineage. And for any artist I liked historically, I would always wanna 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.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  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 it's records recorded, you know, the 1960s, 1970s, 80s, whatever, it 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.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  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?

• 35:10Rick Rubin?

  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.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 35:29Rick Rubin?

  Because that's how it happens.

• 35:30Speaker 01

  That's how it happens.

• 35:31Rick Rubin?

  It's like, 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. A tremendous amount of effort and patience is involved.

• 35:51Rick Rubin?

  But then, something else has to happen.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 35:57Rick Rubin?

  And we are not in control of that other thing.

• 36:02Rick Rubin?

  And that's why sometimes, you know, you'll do thirty, forty, fifty, sixty takes of a song.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:08Rick Rubin?

  It seems insane.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:10Rick Rubin?

  But it's weird when it goes from, everyone's doing the same thing on track fifty-nine as they are on track sixty, but all of a sudden, on track sixty, it comes together. Who knows why? Nobody knows why.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:24Rick Rubin?

  But it does. I need 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.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  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...

• 36:59Speaker 01

  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, in that 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 you know, let's add this thing.

• 37:27Rick Rubin?

  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

• 37:47Rick Rubin?

  he's more alive now than he's ever been. In this moment,

• 37:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:50Rick Rubin?

  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.

• 38:07Speaker 01

  I always loved how you, not every record, but you would have those really upfront, dry vocals, Johnny Cash, or Tom Petty, or...

• 38:19Speaker 01

  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 up front 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?

• 38:59Rick Rubin?

  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.

• 39:37Rick Rubin?

  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 it?

• 40:14Speaker 01

  How often will you have people rewrite lyrics? Does that happen a lot?

• 40:21Rick Rubin?

  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.

• 40:43Speaker 01

  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-

• 40:50Rick Rubin?

  Completely understood.

• 40:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. I watched so many interviews of you. I'm really fascinated. I watched Anderson Cooper interview you. And you're like... And the way that you state things, and he asks you about gear. I don't know anything about the gear. I don't know... 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?

• 41:15Rick Rubin?

  I played guitar in a punk rock band.

• 41:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. You can play power chords.

• 41:19Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, I play rudimentary guitar.

• 41:23Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 41:23Rick Rubin?

  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.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  Right. But you know what reverb is, you know what snare... You know a good snare sound, you know a good kick drum sound, all these things.

• 41:40Rick Rubin?

  I know what I like.

• 41:42Speaker 01

  You know what you like.

• 41:42Rick Rubin?

  I know what I like.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:44Rick Rubin?

  But I don't necessarily know how to do it.

• 41:46Speaker 01

  But ultimately, people come to you for your taste.

• 41:50Rick Rubin?

  Yes, absolutely.

• 41:52Speaker 01

  That's it. That's what the job of a producer is.

• 41:54Rick Rubin?

  That's it.

• 41:54Speaker 01

  Taste.

• 41:55Rick Rubin?

  That's my job.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:57Rick Rubin?

  In my world, the producer is a non-technical function.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  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.

• 42:16Rick Rubin?

  Yes, these lyrics are good enough, these lyrics are not.

• 42:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:19Rick Rubin?

  This drum pattern isn't interesting enough.

• 42:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:23Rick Rubin?

  But it's not because I know how to play drums that I tell you that. It's because my taste is my taste.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  But that, to me, is literally the job of the producer.

• 42:32Rick Rubin?

  But probably nine out of 10 producers don't do that. So it's a question of terms.

• 42:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, 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 Lanois, Brendan O'Brien, Butch Vig. Who else? Alan Parsons? Very few, almost none.

• 43:02Rick Rubin?

  And are they all different?

• 43:03Speaker 01

  They're all different, yeah. Everyone is different.

• 43:05Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  Everyone is completely different.

• 43:06Rick Rubin?

  I would imagine that.

• 43:08Speaker 01

  But taste is the thing that they all agree on ultimately. They all have different, you know, some, Daniel Lanois comes more from a, well, he's a music, 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.

• 43:50Rick Rubin?

  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.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  But definitely the thing that, that I've come to realize after interviewing 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, 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 that 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

• 44:47Speaker 01

  my YouTube channel. If I can give back in my, any small way to society by...

• 44:55Speaker 01

  Having these, 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 want to add to these discussions. To me, it's, 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.

• 45:31Rick Rubin?

  It's historical documentation of how the things that we love were made.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 45:38Rick Rubin?

  And I wish that they existed from the past because they don't always exist. You know, 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.

• 45:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:52Rick Rubin?

  But they sound as good today as they've ever sounded.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  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.

• 46:08Rick Rubin?

  It's one of the miraculous things. If you've ever seen that Beatles Anthology 8 video series, did you ever see that?

• 46:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 46:14Rick Rubin?

  So the fact that there's so much film of them from such a young age is unbelievable.

• 46:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:23Rick Rubin?

  It's miraculous.

• 46:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. 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 of people. And there's a video of it. He puts up the lyrics just on there and he plays it. And it's, 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 is, this little part is going to be the chorus. And then, and then he performs it. And it's unbelievable.

• 46:51Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 46:53Speaker 01

  That somebody had the presence to film that.

• 46:55Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  And capture that moment.

• 46:59Rick Rubin?

  Have you ever seen Neil Young on the BBC from the 70s where he's playing songs from Harvest before the album came out?

• 47:05Speaker 01

  No. Oh, my God.

• 47:07Rick Rubin?

  It's unbelievable.

• 47:09Speaker 01

  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 to hear people. It's another thing to actually see the performances. I mean, it's really amazing. Even I was watching when they announced that Oasis is gonna gonna 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.

• 47:40Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 47:41Speaker 01

  And it just shows you what a great singer he is. And to 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 the shape of the melody is, you know, not all, not everything is 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 and or Long and Winding Road. And and these are incredible alternate takes. And there they are on video and I just, to me, that's just amazing.

• 48:24Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about your recording studio.

• 48:26Speaker 01

  So my studio is, most people don't know, it's in my basement. I built it in back in 2005. I bought a house that had a big basement. It's probably about forty, three hundred square feet or so. It's good size.

• 48:44Speaker 01

  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, that'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 and then like a hangout room. And then there's a far room that's like a rehearsal room that I drum 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.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  So I have everything that I've ever wanted and

• 49:38Speaker 01

  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, you know, Rakhaneevs and Helios and I've got everything that to make records and I'm not making records.

• 49:59Rick Rubin?

  But you choose not to.

• 50:00Speaker 01

  I choose not to.

• 50:01Rick Rubin?

  You're doing something else now.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. But I would love 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.

• 50:21Rick Rubin?

  That sounds like a whole nother channel of just live performances from your studio.

• 50:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. I'd really like to do that. I, um, I did my first kind of artist spotlight thing or something. I had the singer that, uh, her name's Ella Honin 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 musician, but she writes pop songs, but they have, uh, I started to do a cover of Wichita Lineman and she calls them forever songs, songs from that, like the early seventies and stuff. 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.

• 51:11Speaker 01

  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 was like, oh, I actually am going to be in New York. And 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.

• 51:29Rick Rubin?

  Great.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  And so I'd like to do that with bands and things and have people come into my studio and.

• 51:35Rick Rubin?

  Great.

• 51:36Speaker 01

  So that's kind of something in the future that I would, that I want to do.

• 51:40Rick Rubin?

  Sounds fun. And again, it fits in the message of it's spreading music.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 51:45Rick Rubin?

  One way or another, it's spreading music.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:47Rick Rubin?

  Do you remember your first memory of music as a kid?

• 51:51Speaker 01

  Yes. My first memory is my grandfather playing guitar.

• 51:58Speaker 01

  He was um.

• 51:59Rick Rubin?

  An acoustic guitar.

• 52:00Speaker 01

  Acoustic guitar, yeah. It was probably in the mid sixties. 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, came from Italy.

• 52:15Speaker 01

  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, it could be The Star-Spangled Banner or something, or American 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 his fingers.

• 52:39Rick Rubin?

  How old do you think you were?

• 52:39Speaker 01

  Probably three, something like that. And, uh, and, and my Aunt Penny would play the piano. My Aunt Marion played the violin. My Uncle Al was a bass player.

• 52:52Rick Rubin?

  So it was a musical family?

• 52:53Speaker 01

  Yes. They would play after dinner.

• 52:55Rick Rubin?

  Would there be recorded music in the house you grew up in as well or?

• 52:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 52:58Rick Rubin?

  What would that be?

• 52:59Speaker 01

  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 listened to different music. My sisters, my older sister Pat loved the Beatles and the Stones and Led Zeppelin, you know, Jimi Hendrix, all, all different things. Motown and all different genres of music would be playing. Everybody would have their own little cassette players or their little stereo. So we had nine people in a three-bedroom house with one bathroom, but music all the time.

• 53:38Rick Rubin?

  What was the first music that you would say was your music? Not your parents, not your brothers or sisters?

• 53:48Speaker 01

  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?

• 54:00Speaker 01

  Probably Angie by The Stones.

• 54:04Speaker 01

  I bought the single to that. 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 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. There's such a unique guitar part for him. And it sounds amazing. And, but that was one of the first things that I spent money on. I remember in the drugstores used to have a rack. They have the top forty. And you could just buy the forty-five and pull it out and go up. When did you start analyzing it versus just listening to it and enjoying it?

• 54:48Speaker 01

  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.

• 55:01Speaker 01

  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 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 instruments and be in the band. That was the next year. So I remember going with my mom. I got selected and they put, they had the four things, cello, violin and viola.

• 55:43Speaker 01

  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. 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 until sixth grade. Then I, then my orchestra director asked me if I wanted to play the bass. And I moved to bass, upright bass. And then guitar happened.

• 56:10Speaker 01

  Uh, summer of eighth grade, I broke my ankle first week of the summer and I was stuck for thirteen 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. And I 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.

• 56:35Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 56:36Speaker 01

  I start picking, I was like, oh, that sounds like, you know, 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've, you know, figured out how to tune the guitar and everything and, and I was obsessed. That was it. All through high school, I was obsessed. I started playing in bands six months later.

• 57:01Rick Rubin?

  When was the last time you played cello?

• 57:04Speaker 01

  I played cello on a record, I want to say in probably ninety-nine or so. I rented a cello to play.

• 57:11Rick Rubin?

  And what was the experience of going back to it after not playing it for years?

• 57:14Speaker 01

  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. 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 and, but I can sit and I could play any orchestral music. I can still read and I could play bass along with, if I put on, you know, a Bach's Brandenburg Concerto in G, I could, I could sit there and I could pretty much play it, just read and play.

• 57:49Rick Rubin?

  Cool.

• 57:50Speaker 01

  Even though I haven't played since the mid-eighties.

• 57:53Rick Rubin?

  What would you say you've learned through posting videos?

• 58:00Speaker 01

  A lot.

• 58:05Speaker 01

  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 2 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 swipe away. So I typically don't make things that are over 35 seconds long. Which is very funny, if you think about that.

• 58:49Speaker 01

  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 say, and somebody said, "Go until you think it's 30 minutes." I would be within 30 seconds of it, in 30 minutes, yeah. I have a really good sense, if it's uninterrupted, I have a very good sense of those like time increments, like 30 minutes. I also used to have cameras that would shut off after 30 minutes.

• 59:20Rick Rubin?

  So you could start feeling it?

• 59:21Speaker 01

  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. 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.

• 59:43Rick Rubin?

  Up till then, what would it be? Before it was contemporary, give me examples of what it would have been.

• 59:49Speaker 01

  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 the, they do the flyover of the prison when they're all arriving. And I would... I'd have, I'd do a piano reduction on the screen, have it going, and I would talk about the orchestration and I'd show when the 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

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  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 many levels to-

• 1:01:15Rick Rubin?

  So cool.

• 1:01:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, to do that.

• 1:01:17Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:01:33Rick Rubin?

  So when you say not contemporary, you mean not pop music?

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  Nothing. I never made it about a rock song, a pop song, about anything. Never talked about it.

• 1:01:43Rick Rubin?

  So it was all based on classical music, jazz as well?

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  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 multitracks of famous songs.

• 1:02:00Rick Rubin?

  Where would you get the multitracks?

• 1:02:03Speaker 01

  I got them from somebody back in the early 2000s, some guy at a studio-

• 1:02:07Rick Rubin?

  Great.

• 1:02:08Speaker 01

  -gave them to me that, I won't mention where the studio was, but I'd gone to do a, to work on a record, it was something for Geffen, and I walked in and the engineer at the studio was playing the multitrack, it was Smells Like Teen Spirit. It was just Kurt Cobain's voice. I was like, "What is that?" "Oh, it's a multitrack. It 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." He soloed me here, the bass, here, the drums, everything. So I was like, "I need that."

• 1:02:38Speaker 01

  And he's a some.

• 1:02:39Rick Rubin?

  There's probably a whole black market of multi-tracks floating around.

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  Yes. Rick, he had thousands of them.

• 1:02:46Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:03:08Rick Rubin?

  That's unbelievable.

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  Yes, and so. I have a second channel, Rick Beato 2, that I. That I started right at the same time as started my first one. 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.

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  And um. One night I played multi-track of 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. It sounded like a Moog or something. It's a beautiful little, just single note thing, octaves alternating.

• 1:03:50Speaker 01

  And it creates this dissonance 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 dissonant. And. One of my friends was listening. My friend Rhett. He's actually was my intern that got me to start my channel. He goes, 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. And then I did about five videos in a row of breakdowns. I did every little thing she does is Magic the Police. I did Kid Charlamagne. Steely Dan. I had the multi-tracks, all these things and I. And each one I would like I'd play Larry Carlton's solo of Kid Charlamagne and I notated.

• 1:04:35Speaker 01

  The drum part, the 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 a thousand subscribers a day and it never stopped since then. I did 105 episodes. Of it, song breakdowns.

• 1:04:52Rick Rubin?

  Did you continue doing the ones that you were doing prior?

• 1:04:57Speaker 01

  Those kind of videos, the jazz videos and stuff? No, I started to phase those out. I'd 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

• 1:05:41Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:05:54Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:56Speaker 01

  I was the professor there teaching.

• 1:05:59Rick Rubin?

  Great story.

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:06:10Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:11Speaker 01

  And I told it on my channel.

• 1:06:13Rick Rubin?

  Did your family ever see it and respond?

• 1:06:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:16Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about that.

• 1:06:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, they were blown away.

• 1:06:18Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  And I was so embarrassed. I had so much shame about that, Rick, that I hid the letters. And I didn't tell either of my parents about it. But since the track coach got me in as a 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. 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, 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?

• 1:07:05Speaker 01

  Because it's a new year.

• 1:07:08Speaker 01

  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. 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 it's funny that another 18 year old kid is teaching me this stuff to get into, to get into college.

• 1:07:47Rick Rubin?

  Great story.

• 1:07:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:52Rick Rubin?

  How has your relationship to music changed over the course of your life?

• 1:07:59Speaker 01

  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. It 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 I,

• 1:08:44Speaker 01

  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 Tik Tok and then they transfer to Spotify. And in the old days, when things were decided upon by A and R people for good or bad,

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

  people would take chances on things that may have been, you know, strange.

• 1:09:12Speaker 01

  And, 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 Blood, Sugar, Sex, Magic connect with everyone? What 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 did.

• 1:09:37Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:10:00Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:01Speaker 01

  And I, 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 were 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. No, we're not going to take a chance doing a punch-in on that. It's too risky.

• 1:10:46Speaker 01

  You know that that's, that's just the thing.

• 1:10:50Rick Rubin?

  But also, I know that we would make a slave multi-track of 24 tracks just to do a million vocal takes.

• 1:10:57Speaker 01

  Sure, yes.

• 1:10:58Rick Rubin?

  If we needed to.

• 1:10:58Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:10:59Rick Rubin?

  We would do whatever we would need to do for it to be as good as it could be.

• 1:11:02Speaker 01

  Whatever needed to be done, yeah.

• 1:11:03Rick Rubin?

  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.

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:11:15Rick Rubin?

  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.

• 1:11:31Speaker 01

  Yes. So do you think that people have more discretion with that? Or that they, or they've just become rigid because they've been the gritification of music, as I call it. You know, everything has been, you know.

• 1:11:45Rick Rubin?

  I find gridded music less interesting unless it's made by craft work, you know?

• 1:11:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:11:50Rick Rubin?

  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.

• 1:12:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:03Rick Rubin?

  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 eighties tend to record the drums and then the guitars and layer it. And to me, it doesn't sound like music.

• 1:12:27Speaker 01

  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 could 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.

• 1:12:55Rick Rubin?

  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're, if you have a platform that you could turn people on to new things that they wouldn't get to hear otherwise. That'd be beautiful.

• 1:13:33Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:13:44Speaker 01

  If I put out a video, 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 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. 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.

• 1:14:25Rick Rubin?

  How do you do an A/B test? This is all new to me.

• 1:14:28Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:14:59Rick Rubin?

  If you change a thumbnail, let's say you have 10,000 views and you switch the thumbnail.

• 1:15:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:06Rick Rubin?

  Now you're starting at zero again?

• 1:15:08Speaker 01

  No, well, the views are still the same. You still have 10,000. Yeah, yeah, no.

• 1:15:13Rick Rubin?

  Views are cumulative.

• 1:15:14Speaker 01

  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 and 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. And then I had Eric Johnson play a solo that... I called Eric.

• 1:15:59Rick Rubin?

  He would play.

• 1:16:00Speaker 01

  That 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 he would play." And I said, "Just imagine your 15-year-old self playing over 'Stirred Heaven.'" "Okay," I said, "but you have to film it." "Okay, no problem." So, we make this video, and so it's 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.

• 1:16:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:16:57Rick Rubin?

  What do you attribute it to?

• 1:16:58Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:17:09Rick Rubin?

  So the only changes you're talking about are the thumbnail and the headline, but the content remains the same?

• 1:17:17Speaker 01

  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 'Stirred Heaven'?" Most of the people had seen it, and there was 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 like... I think it's good. And 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.

• 1:17:57Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:17:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, and this was years after it had come out.

• 1:18:00Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:18:01Speaker 01

  So just that, at any time, if the algorithm... so 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.

• 1:18:23Rick Rubin?

  Really interesting.

• 1:18:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, so much is communicated through the...

• 1:18:32Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:18:45Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:18:46Speaker 01

  Yes. They know the kind of thumbnails that I will click on. It's really amazing.

• 1:18:53Rick Rubin?

  Fascinating.

• 1:18:53Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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.

• 1:19:22Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, no, it's just interesting.

• 1:19:25Speaker 01

  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. That'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.

• 1:20:05Rick Rubin?

  How often do you change them?

• 1:20:08Speaker 01

  I've changed, sometimes I'll change it five times in 10 minutes.

• 1:20:12Rick Rubin?

  You say you always change them, or no?

• 1:20:15Speaker 01

  No. But I'd say probably-

• 1:20:17Rick Rubin?

  Half of the time?

• 1:20:17Speaker 01

  Half the time. Yeah.

• 1:20:20Rick Rubin?

  And is it based on the feedback you're seeing?

• 1:20:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I have a gut feeling for how well a video should do. And I know some videos are not gonna do well.

• 1:20:29Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, and you're fine with that.

• 1:20:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm fine with that, yeah. I don't make videos for views, I make videos for me.

• 1:20:35Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:35Speaker 01

  I only make, I make videos on things I'm interested in.

• 1:20:38Rick Rubin?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:20:39Speaker 01

  And that seems to have served me well here in, in eight years. And, but I always do this, anytime that I, um, that, 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, 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.

• 1:21:11Rick Rubin?

  In how long?

• 1:21:13Speaker 01

  In three days, so. Yeah, if it's under 400,000 in three or four days, that's really bad. Which is insane, actually.

• 1:21:24Rick Rubin?

  Insane.

• 1:21:25Speaker 01

  Right, that that's a bad video?

• 1:21:27Rick Rubin?

  Insane.

• 1:21:28Speaker 01

  But I will know within the first 12 minutes if a video is doing what it should. I have, I have an idea.

• 1:21:36Rick Rubin?

  Do you post it a certain time of day, or does that not matter?

• 1:21:38Speaker 01

  I post whenever the video is done. I don't do any, I've never done anything that's conventional on YouTube, I just do stuff I feel.

• 1:21:46Rick Rubin?

  You don't do anything to optimize, other than changing the thumbnail and changing the title?

• 1:21:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:51Rick Rubin?

  Do you always change both, or do you might change one?

• 1:21:55Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:22:11Rick Rubin?

  Do you have a bunch of thumbnails ready to go, just in case?

• 1:22:14Speaker 01

  No, I make them, I make them on my phone.

• 1:22:16Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:17Speaker 01

  Which is very, but I'm, I'm so not the typical YouTuber person. I'm like the, the, like the.

• 1:22:24Rick Rubin?

  I don't know that there's a typical.

• 1:22:26Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:22:26Rick Rubin?

  Do you know what I mean? It really is a, uh, it's for everyone, it's so cool.

• 1:22:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I'm like the indie rock YouTuber in that way, that, um, I get, kinda 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.

• 1:22:48Speaker 01

  Somebody sent me an email. "Check out this new song I wrote with AI. I think it's a hit." It's absurd, right? "Check out this new song I wrote using AI." Wait a minute, well, you didn't write it.

• 1:23:04Speaker 01

  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 Leila 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.

• 1:23:48Speaker 01

  And Dylan, everyone got it 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.

• 1:24:16Speaker 01

  And it's not like real musicians are gonna 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 gonna be The Beatles and The Beatles AI, and Led Zeppelin and Led Zeppelin AI," or whatever. And, well, I like The Beatles AI far more than The Beatles, you know.

• 1:24:42Speaker 01

  As absurd as that is, that will be, you know, if they say, I like AI AC/DC, then I'm gonna really.

• 1:24:52Rick Rubin?

  Then we're in trouble.

• 1:24:52Speaker 01

  Then we're in trouble. But I don't think that people necessarily care, except when they go see live, live music. Obviously, you want to have real musicians. But I can see that, I could 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.

• 1:25:17Rick Rubin?

  Did you by any chance see the ABBA show in London?

• 1:25:20Speaker 01

  Uh-uh.

• 1:25:21Rick Rubin?

  Do you know about it?

• 1:25:21Speaker 01

  I do know about it, yeah.

• 1:25:23Rick Rubin?

  If you get a chance, see it. Remarkable.

• 1:25:25Speaker 01

  I interviewed Bjorn when I was in Stockholm.

• 1:25:28Rick Rubin?

  How was that?

• 1:25:28Speaker 01

  Last year. That was great. And we talked a lot about, about AI. A year ago, at the end of July, I was there. I mean, he didn't say what label, but the president of the label had played him stuff that he couldn't believe was AI, that sounded so realistic. And we related it to the, 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, you know, seventy-eight, seventy-nine years old now.

• 1:25:56Rick Rubin?

  Of the interviews you've done, what would you say you've been most surprised by?

• 1:26:06Speaker 01

  I think I'm most surprised by the fact that

• 1:26:16Speaker 01

  the people that are making the music on either side of it, whether they're the performers or the people that are like yourself, that are the producers, they almost never know what's gonna be successful. And I'd say that that's a common thing. They, they don't know, they... I think the people, when they've had hit records, they have more of an idea for something that's gonna be, gonna be successful. And...

• 1:26:47Speaker 01

  That when they listen to music, because I always play stuff in there, they always, doesn't matter,

• 1:26:57Speaker 01

  they hear stuff that even if it's recorded 35 years ago, that still bothers them.

• 1:27:04Rick Rubin?

  That's interesting.

• 1:27:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. Although some of the people will say, "I forgot what I used to hate about this."

• 1:27:09Rick Rubin?

  Oh, that's interesting, too.

• 1:27:12Rick Rubin?

  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.

• 1:27:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's strange to see people that, you know, don't like something in their performance and

• 1:27:36Speaker 01

  and it still bothers them today. Something that's been out, that people have heard a billion times.

• 1:27:41Rick Rubin?

  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.

• 1:28:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:12Rick Rubin?

  I find it heartbreaking. And there are some cases where all you can find are the re-records.

• 1:28:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:28:17Rick Rubin?

  It's just soul-crushing.

• 1:28:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. I also, another thing that bothers me is when you hear things that are remastered on Spotify that,

• 1:28:29Speaker 01

  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...

• 1:28:40Rick Rubin?

  I think everyone feels like every 10 years or so, the technology gets better and you want to, you know, up what's possible.

• 1:28:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, that always bums me out, because, and then you can never get back to the, unless you have the CDs or 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... They just don't sound right. That bums me out.

• 1:29:14Rick Rubin?

  And do you think of yourself as a music critic?

• 1:29:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:29:29Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:30Speaker 01

  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 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 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.

• 1:30:03Rick Rubin?

  That was the first time in a long time, probably, that that was the case.

• 1:30:07Speaker 01

  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 Cypher that does trend analysis based on all these data, based 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 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.

• 1:30:46Rick Rubin?

  It's interesting, in the 70s, country made its way into the pop chart for a window of time, remember?

• 1:30:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, we're kind of back to that, too.

• 1:30:59Speaker 01

  It's funny, some people, some videos I make, there's no commentary on what I say in the video. It's people's posts, 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, 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. So if you read the comments with that in mind, they have a different ring to them.

• 1:31:37Rick Rubin?

  Are certain types of music more popular on your channel? Or is it agnostic as far as the content goes?

• 1:31:44Speaker 01

  Um, people don't like jazz on my channel, even though I-

• 1:31:48Rick Rubin?

  That's interesting.

• 1:31:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, even though my channel started as that.

• 1:31:53Speaker 01

  When I interview a jazz musician, I interviewed Keith Jarrett, I interviewed Ron Carter and Pat Metheny 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.

• 1:32:15Speaker 01

  But that doesn't keep me from doing them.

• 1:32:16Rick Rubin?

  Good.

• 1:32:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't care if people like that, like or 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 prog metal scene, the band Polyphia. Tim Henson is a friend of mine, has been on my channel, if you've ever heard him, 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.

• 1:32:57Rick Rubin?

  How did you interview Jimmy Webb?

• 1:32:57Speaker 01

  I interviewed Jimmy Webb.

• 1:32:58Rick Rubin?

  How was that?

• 1:32:59Speaker 01

  It was amazing.

• 1:33:00Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:33:00Speaker 01

  Oh my God, he's-

• 1:33:02Rick Rubin?

  I'm a fan.

• 1:33:03Speaker 01

  I love Jimmy Webb. And I'd made a video on Wichita Lineman, on the song, it's one of the greatest songs. Bob Dylan called it the greatest song ever written.

• 1:33:11Rick Rubin?

  Wow, I didn't know that.

• 1:33:12Speaker 01

  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 I was like, oh my God, I'd love to interview Jimmy. 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 the, 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.

• 1:33:56Speaker 01

  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, 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, uh, and it's funny that, he goes, I just remembered it being really low, but it's really an important thing, you know? And he's like, I played that on the, on the recording. But that was really fun to talk to him. I mean, all those tunes.

• 1:34:28Rick Rubin?

  Brilliant. It's so original.

• 1:34:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:34:31Rick Rubin?

  There's no one else like Jimmy Webb.

• 1:34:33Speaker 01

  No one like Jimmy Webb.

• 1:34:34Rick Rubin?

  No, really one of a kind writer.

• 1:34:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:37Rick Rubin?

  All time favorite artists.

• 1:34:41Speaker 01

  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, what mood I'm in. And then, um, I'm a massive classical music fan and it's, it goes from Bach to, to Palestrina, to Prokofiev, to, you know, Beethoven, to Mendelssohn, to Schumann.

• 1:35:26Rick Rubin?

  Has that always been the case? Classical music from childhood?

• 1:35:30Speaker 01

  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, 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. Okay, let's go. What's your favorite? Christian Zimmerman, this recording with Bernstein conducting.

• 1:36:15Speaker 01

  Okay, Christian Zimmerman.

• 1:36:19Speaker 01

  I have a video of all five Beethoven piano concertos. And Bernstein, he conducted three of them. And Zimmerman conducted two from the piano, but he plays all five. Incredible. I'm just...

• 1:36:36Speaker 01

  How do I find it here? This is like the... It's the best performance and recording, both. Great.

• 1:39:33Speaker 01

  It's amazing how long the orchestra... The piano is the introduction, then there's this long

• 1:39:40Speaker 01

  exposition of the orchestra. Then the piano enters here.

• 1:40:35Speaker 01

  I love this right here.

• 1:40:58Speaker 01

  There's no...

• 1:41:01Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:41:18Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:18Speaker 01

  And there's... I just can't think of one that is just... This is perfection.

• 1:41:23Rick Rubin?

  So beautiful.

• 1:41:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. I'm big into performances. There's a...

• 1:41:28Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:29Speaker 01

  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 was... It went beyond even the performance. Sometimes if the piano's getting lost in the orchestra and you can't even... Or you're not hearing the inner lines of the obos 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.

• 1:42:11Rick Rubin?

  I love Klaus Ogerman.

• 1:42:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. He did a record called Cityscape that came out in 1982 with Michael Brecker, the saxophonist. And there's a...

• 1:42:22Speaker 01

  The title track to me is absolutely brilliant, but the, but the, 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 unheard. That you can't distinguish what the orchestra is doing because it's just not clear enough in the recording.

• 1:42:49Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, it's a good idea.

• 1:42:50Speaker 01

  So I thought, wanted to do that for, for a video.

• 1:42:53Rick Rubin?

  Be a great one.

• 1:42:54Speaker 01

  It's like.

• 1:42:55Rick Rubin?

  That'd be a great one.

• 1:42:56Speaker 01

  I would call it, I paid $30,000 to hear eight bars of music or something, you know.

• 1:43:00Rick Rubin?

  That's great.

• 1:43:01Speaker 01

  Get in with an orchestra to.

• 1:43:03Rick Rubin?

  Ogerman did the string arrangements on the Sinatra Joe Beam album, which is my favorite Frank Sinatra album.

• 1:43:08Speaker 01

  Oh my God, my favorite too.

• 1:43:10Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:11Speaker 01

  Absolutely brilliant. I, that record.

• 1:43:13Rick Rubin?

  The strings are ridiculous.

• 1:43:15Speaker 01

  Ridiculous. Yeah.

• 1:43:16Rick Rubin?

  So beautiful.

• 1:43:17Speaker 01

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

• 1:43:33Rick Rubin?

  Favorite albums?

• 1:43:38Speaker 01

  John Coltrane, Johnny Hartman. It's one of the best sounding records ever.

• 1:43:46Speaker 01

  That's tough. That changes all the time. Beatles Revolver. That to me is, Revolver and Rubber Soul are just

• 1:43:57Speaker 01

  two of the most brilliant records. And 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?

• 1:44:15Rick Rubin?

  Nobody's done it since.

• 1:44:16Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:44:21Speaker 01

  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,

• 1:45:06Speaker 01

  then 2010 to 2020.

• 1:45:11Speaker 01

  All the videos had, would have millions of views, except 10 to 2010 to 2020. People are in the comments, "I've never even heard any of these songs."

• 1:45:21Speaker 01

  And because they have no shared experiences anymore, because there is no radio, there's no MTV, there's no, there's nothing that people are like, "Oh, I know that song, I've heard it a million times, I've heard it at 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 they're, I don't know if there's even another way to do it other than that. People, 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.

• 1:46:06Speaker 01

  And we talked about popular music, and he talked about the...

• 1:46:11Speaker 01

  I think we're 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, like, a 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 was very little known about the bands.

• 1:46:55Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:47:05Rick Rubin?

  Very little.

• 1:47:07Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:47:27Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:27Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:47:39Rick Rubin?

  He sounded like Darth Vader.

• 1:47:41Speaker 01

  It's funny, you know?

• 1:47:45Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Can you describe what it is about the music that you love that makes you love it?

• 1:47:54Speaker 01

  I would say that I'd 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.

• 1:48:29Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, if you've ever been to a Hi-Fi show, there's a lot of that. Like, Hi-Fi shows have...

• 1:48:36Rick Rubin?

  Incredible sound and not always the best music.

• 1:48:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:48:40Rick Rubin?

  But the sound is ridiculous.

• 1:48:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I have tremendous appreciation for that. And that was, that's long before I was, worked as a producer. I always found records that I loved the sound of, even if I hated the music. Which is funny to say, it's, it's.

• 1:48:57Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. It's a different thing. It's a quality, it is a quality of the, of the piece.

• 1:49:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:05Rick Rubin?

  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?

• 1:49:13Speaker 01

  A lot of times I listen to stuff that my kids listen to.

• 1:49:17Rick Rubin?

  Would you say they have good taste?

• 1:49:20Speaker 01

  They have good taste to them.

• 1:49:23Speaker 01

  It's interesting, cause 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, listens to things. So I, I'll listen to stuff that they listen to, because I like to be informed about what, what they're into. And then I'm constantly searching for new music. So I'm, a lot of times I'm on Spotify.

• 1:50:02Speaker 01

  I, I have Apple Music and Spotify, but I, 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, look for new music on there. So I'm constantly looking for new things.

• 1:50:18Rick Rubin?

  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?

• 1:50:26Speaker 01

  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, that have a hundred thousand 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 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 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 want to connect with their fans go to Instagram.

• 1:51:09Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:51:16Rick Rubin?

  Do you have any trusted sources that you look at for recommendations of new things?

• 1:51:20Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:51:28Rick Rubin?

  Do you listen?

• 1:51:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:30Rick Rubin?

  Some, do you ever find anything that way?

• 1:51:32Speaker 01

  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 do all this stuff. It's a hassle. Now it's like you just literally click one link and you're into a song. I'd drive my 11 year old Leila to school every day and and I'll put on a playlist. You know, whatever genre of music could be, 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? I said, because I'm just trying to see if I find something interesting. Well, why don't you listen to a whole song all the way through?

• 1:52:09Rick Rubin?

  Because you know in 30 seconds whether you want to listen to the rest or not.

• 1:52:12Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. And then after, Rick, after about five songs, she's like, yeah, go to the next song.

• 1:52:21Rick Rubin?

  Training them well.

• 1:52:22Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:52:23Rick Rubin?

  Do you like to be challenged by the things you listen to?

• 1:52:29Speaker 01

  There's an artist named McGee that is an indie rock singer and a guitar player. And it's kind of lofi, lofi 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 lofi 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 I like stuff that's lofi, but it can't be too lofi to where it doesn't sound full.

• 1:53:06Rick Rubin?

  Translate.

• 1:53:09Rick Rubin?

  What do you know about your audience?

• 1:53:13Speaker 01

  My audience, the age range, the biggest group is 25 to 34, but only by a little bit, probably by a percentage point. It's pretty much equal from 25 up to 55. Every demographic is around 20%. So my audience is really varied.

• 1:53:31Rick Rubin?

  And you said earlier that the particular content will skew more towards a certain part of that audience.

• 1:53:39Speaker 01

  That's right. Every video has a completely different audience. Some videos,

• 1:53:46Speaker 01

  depending on

• 1:53:49Speaker 01

  how big it is, will

• 1:53:51Rick Rubin?

  Cross over.

• 1:53:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:53Rick Rubin?

  How often do you post?

• 1:53:55Speaker 01

  Probably three times a week. And 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.

• 1:54:11Rick Rubin?

  Cool.

• 1:54:11Speaker 01

  I will always do that. I always have done it.

• 1:54:13Rick Rubin?

  And you do it as a live stream, but then it lives as a, as a video?

• 1:54:17Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:54:32Speaker 01

  Livestream has its own algorithm. Shorts has its own algorithm.

• 1:54:36Rick Rubin?

  Can you take something from a live stream and make an on-demand video out of it?

• 1:54:41Speaker 01

  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,

• 1:54:58Rick Rubin?

  Your shorts are all made to be shorts?

• 1:55:01Speaker 01

  They're, most of them are made from videos, but, but sometimes I'll do things like, I've interviewed so many people that have played, that have played different roles on, on records. I had one there, um, funny, because I'm Michael O'Martin is a producer, but also played, uh, 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. And Christopher Cross's brother was there in the studio. He goes, "Oh, that's a great intro." And Michael O'Martin was like, "Well, that's not supposed to be there."

• 1:55:46Speaker 01

  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, that's cool, is when you can actually have multiple people that played. Yeah. 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. Yeah. 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,

• 1:56:29Speaker 01

  the memory is, it's something of a combination of what they all remember of, of that. You'll, you'll, you very rarely will find the same story. I interviewed all four people that played on the song Asia, the Steely Dan song Asia. It's Larry Carlton played guitar on the basic track, Steve Gadd on the drums, Chuck Rainey on the bass, and Michael O'Martin on the piano. That was the rhythm section that recorded the basic track. Yet Chuck Rainey swears it was recorded four different times.

• 1:56:57Speaker 01

  Michael O'Martin said there were two takes. There was one take where they started laughing because Steve Gadd does these insane drum fills on it, and they, they screwed up. They made all these mistakes. They couldn't believe what he was playing. So he had to do a second take where they kept it together. And then I interviewed, um, the guy that engineered it, um...

• 1:57:20Speaker 01

  Bill Schneit, Bill Schneit sent me the track of the, 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 Schneit 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.

• 1:57:47Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:47Speaker 01

  And Chuck saying that they played it four times. And this is very funny, right? That, and Larry Carlton, completely different memory of it.

• 1:57:56Rick Rubin?

  Keep in mind also, when you're playing on records every day in the recording studio, different songs, it's impossible to remember.

• 1:58:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:58:04Rick Rubin?

  It does all sort of blend together.

• 1:58:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:06Rick Rubin?

  As you said, sometimes listening to it helps jog your memory. But other than that, it's very difficult.

• 1:58:14Speaker 01

  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 Charlemagne. 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.

• 1:58:33Rick Rubin?

  Never. Why?

• 1:58:34Speaker 01

  Why would they, right? It was fascinating to see their, to see their reaction to it.

• 1:58:41Rick Rubin?

  Absolutely.

• 1:58:42Speaker 01

  Here's, this is an example of a short I did. So it's Daniel Lanois and then Tony Levin, they're talking about the bass part of Sledgehammer, right? And because it has amazing bass sound.

• 1:58:53Rick Rubin?

  I worked on Sledgehammer, I didn't realize that.

• 1:58:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, he produced, he produced the stuff.

• 1:58:56Speaker 02

  Was he playing the bass? Tony Levin playing the bass? Yeah. I was playing a fretless music man with an octave pedal and with a pick. And it was just a massive sound.

• 1:59:03Speaker 01

  I just turned every knob up to 10.

• 1:59:05Speaker 02

  They compressed it more, they had enhanced the low end. That much wasn't coming out of the bass.

• 1:59:10Speaker 01

  Compressed, expanded, and gated. He hit a knob.

• 1:59:14Speaker 01

  It was ridiculous. Yeah.

• 1:59:16Speaker 02

  Working with Peter Gabriel sends you into some alternative universe. Thinking outside the box is the norm.

• 1:59:21Speaker 01

  And that became the basis of the bass sound for that record.

• 1:59:28Speaker 01

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

• 2:00:13Speaker 01

  if I'm playing examples or something and I need to isolate my voice. AI can do that. Yes. I didn't know that. There's a program I use called Lalal.ai that'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 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 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.

• 2:00:56Speaker 01

  I mean, as good as you could get with one microphone, you know, three feet away. Not worse, not worse than the regional recording. 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.

• 2:01:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:01:51Rick Rubin?

  Give me an example of how you imagine that would work.

• 2:01:53Speaker 01

  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 that something that might take you 30 minutes of, you know, I want my drums to sound like a Chad Blake recording, like everlasting, like, you know, like a 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, you know, I want my drums to sound like Andy Wallace's drums on the Bulls on Parade

• 2:02:38Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 2:03:17Rick Rubin?

  Would you call that modeling? Is that what modeling is?

• 2:03:19Speaker 01

  It might, uh, maybe. It's kind of like modeling. Universal Audio is making these microphones now that model different mics, like they have these small diaphragm condensers that kind of have a neutral sound and then use one of their plugins to get a KM84s or something. Or you can change them to AKG451s or other small diaphragm condensers. They have an SM7 mic that looks kind of like that.

• 2:03:48Rick Rubin?

  Can you do it after or you have to do it? So you can record it and then change the sound of the mic?

• 2:03:53Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:03:53Rick Rubin?

  That's really interesting.

• 2:03:54Speaker 01

  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 some, a kid that can't afford to buy these things, this is, to me, it's a great.

• 2:04:20Speaker 01

  I think these are amazing tools. And also, the, 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, a KM84. Now they stopped making them in 1992. And most of them are pretty beat up, you know? I, Neumann actually made me. I went to Neumann in, last year, I did a show in Berlin. And I went over to Neumann to do a little factory tour and stuff. And, um,

• 2:05:03Speaker 01

  one of the guys there 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 KM84s again. And he started laughing and I said, why do you, why are you laughing? He said, because we have enough parts to make 6D match pairs. And so we're gonna do that. And I got one of the match pairs.

• 2:05:25Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 2:05:26Speaker 01

  And these are new old stock. So the bodies, everything, so these are exactly

• 2:05:31Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:32Speaker 01

  brand new KM84s.

• 2:05:34Rick Rubin?

  Incredible.

• 2:05:34Speaker 01

  Which is really cool, you know?

• 2:05:35Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:05:36Speaker 01

  To hear what.

• 2:05:38Rick Rubin?

  Super cool.

• 2:05:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. So then I was like, thinking, Rick, okay, do I use these? Or did 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.

• 2:05:54Rick Rubin?

  Do you like to read? Are you a reader?

• 2:05:57Speaker 01

  I do like to read, but I typically read, I read short form content typically. I'm not a book reader. I have some type of ADD where reading is difficult for me.

• 2:06:12Speaker 01

  That I always compensated for by having an incredibly good memory. But I would, 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.

• 2:06:41Speaker 01

  Perfect way to do it.

• 2:06:42Rick Rubin?

  I listen to a lot of audiobooks as well. I like listening. I like closing my eyes and listening. I probably listen more than read now.

• 2:06:52Speaker 01

  I like it in the author's voice as well.

• 2:06:54Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:55Speaker 01

  Your book sounds great. The audio version sounds amazing because you have a great speaking voice. And

• 2:07:05Speaker 01

  when I'm reading it, it sounds like it's spoken. And when I'm, when I hear it spoken, it just. I think I have a deeper understanding when I'm reading it and listening to you say it.

• 2:07:15Rick Rubin?

  Cool.

• 2:07:15Speaker 01

  So it's a very deep book.

• 2:07:19Rick Rubin?

  Are there any other forms of art? That

• 2:07:27Rick Rubin?

  impact your music listening or bounce off of the way you react to music?

• 2:07:38Speaker 01

  To me, visual art. And understanding of different style periods of art, of visual art. And understanding how they overlap with the musical style periods is really important, you know? The Baroque era in music and the Baroque era in art. Sixteen hundred to seventeen fifty roughly. Some of the eras, impressionistic music and art, that some of them don't exactly overlap. Renaissance music, Renaissance art kind of did, but there are different, there are kind of three separate periods of Renaissance art.

• 2:08:19Speaker 01

  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? And he was also influenced by German philosophers.

• 2:08:58Speaker 01

  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 want to understand.

• 2:09:22Rick Rubin?

  It's definitely helpful to have a, an understanding of the culture. When you go past just the music and see the music in the context of its times or the other art movements that were going on at the time. It is fascinating.

• 2:09:37Speaker 01

  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 premiered. The Fourth Piano Concerto, 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 wintertime and

• 2:10:18Speaker 01

  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, he couldn't perform anymore after that, and he conducted. And 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 the 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 his writing changed.

• 2:11:02Speaker 01

  But those things are important and, just like, I think, literature and visual art, all these are interrelated somehow.

• 2:11:16Rick Rubin?

  When is it helpful not to know versus knowing? In other words, where are the lines of expertise versus innocence?

• 2:11:33Speaker 01

  I think ultimately, it doesn't matter what the genre is, whether you know music or don't 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, 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.

• 2:12:16Speaker 01

  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 Vinnie Caliuta, who's one of my old, old friends. I've known Vinnie for 35 years.

• 2:12:38Speaker 01

  And I said, "Vinnie, 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's just so... He doesn't have to think if he's playing, you know, 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,

• 2:13:13Speaker 01

  you almost need to play like you don't know what you're doing.

• 2:13:42Speaker 03

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