Fortunes of Failure | The Road Taken

an interesting thing happened a couple weeks ago i got an email from a guy i'm not going to mention his name but he's produced my old band's major label record now when i moved to atlanta in 1994 one of the purposes was to start a band and create music find people to play with that i could create music with and hopefully go out and tour maybe get a record deal and go out and tour and record because i loved recording even though i had no experience in it at the time so anyways this guy that produced our record the label really suggested that he was the one to produce it and when you're a new band you really have no choice right so and we had made a record on our own already that was an excellent independent record that easily could have been put out as it is or just remixed and put out but they wanted us to make a new record because that's how labels are so we work with this producer and he had some personal issues that started happening right on the fourth or fifth day of the project and eventually that led him into not showing up probably you know i'd say a week into the project or so he'd call lino i'm not going to be there until noon well then i'm not going to be there until 4. i'm not going to be there till seven and then the day would go by and he'd never come in and we had to cut the basic tracks which most major label bands did this is 1999 and uh the bass player and drummer went home so just me and the singer out in los angeles at these studios all these studios were recorded we were two different studios and they were over two thousand dollars a day for studio time now our singer mark and i didn't really have any experience as engineers we knew how to arrange things we had been in studios because we'd recorded a ton of demos up till that point and i had produced a few things on my own but never as an engineer so eventually three months into this thing one of the guys from the label came and he had not heard any roughs or anything and the producer got fired now typically what happens is that your band gets dropped and that's it so all those years me moving here uh in 94 searching for people to play with finding a band writing songs making a hundred demos getting signed at 36 getting to make my first major label record and our producer gets fired and typically the band gets dropped then but they didn't drop our band we were on this label london sire records what they did is they hired somebody to come in and try and salvage the record his name was kevin shirley who's a great engineer producer and mixer kevin does a lot of records with joe bonamassa for example but he had worked with black crows and aerosmith back then so kevin finishes the record took about a month to mix it and fix it as best he could and eventually the record came out and we got dropped a few weeks after because all these mergers start happening okay which then led me because of that experience because that horrible experience of not knowing how to engineer and being basically held hostage by a producer engineer that never showed up and when he did show up many times he would come in and he would just erase the stuff that we had recorded on our own with one of the assistant engineers and i never wanted to be in that position again where i was beholden to someone else just because i didn't know how to move faders or what a preamp was or what a microphone was right so i started teaching myself producing well a couple weeks ago he wrote to me out of the blue now i haven't talked to him since 1999. and he said uh i'd love to talk to you um you know talk about phone sent me his number i said great give me a call he called and so it's been 21 years right so uh or is it 22 years 21 years a long time first thing he did was apologize for what happened and i said you don't need to apologize because had it turned out any other way my life wouldn't be the same i mean none of the same decisions would have been made i wouldn't have met my wife most likely maybe i would have i wouldn't have my kids i wouldn't be here on youtube making these videos if it weren't for the fact that he had these issues going on in his life that made him get fired from our gig and what i thought was a terrible thing that happened my one chance in the major label band was ruined by someone else that i had no control over but it made me develop the skills as a producer it made me eventually because of those skills as a producer take those skills and start this youtube channel but it really goes back to another point in my life on a story that i told very early on in my channel about six months into my channel called fortunes of hard work and that story was about me not getting into college for music now some people that watch this channel know this story but many people do not know when i was in high school it was probably about march of my senior year and uh maybe maybe february and i didn't know what i wanted to do i knew i wanted to go to school for music so um but i didn't know how you did that so i picked two colleges to audition for ithaca college and fredonia state university in upstate new york and both of them had very similar requirements ithaca college i wanted to be in the jazz program um so what you had to do is learn three classical guitar pieces from three different eras could be the baroque era the romantic era the renaissance era and you had to play the segovia scales andre segovia is one of the most famous classical guitarists of all time really the inventor of the modern classical guitar so i went to my guitar teacher at the local music store glenn it was a great jazz guitar player and i said glenn this is what i need to do for college to get in okay no problem he grabs the mel bait mel baits simplified versions of pieces and he didn't read the part about three different style periods so it was three bach pieces but they were simplified pieces so i go to my first audition at fredonia state and i go in totally nervous right 17 year old kid and the guitar professor's not there the violin professor's there he doesn't know anything about guitar in him this big reel-to-reel tape record right so he says he looks on the thing he says okay well play me with three pieces and i play him in three pieces and he looks at it he says well these aren't actually from the different style periods they're they're all this they're all from the same style period oh oh well play the segovia scales now he didn't know the segovia scales and i didn't know the segovia skills i didn't even know what that was and my teacher glenn didn't know i said do you know what the segovia scales are and he said i think they're just three active major minor scales and so he says well just play a three active g major scale so i played a three active g major scale now this is on tape so how would you know whether i was playing the correct fingerings this is really about the fingering combinations right so i figured okay yeah no problems adw scales i get mental notes so go via scales next week is my next audition and i looked up what the segovia scales were and i started practicing them it's like okay i think i can remember i can remember this so i go to the college and i go into the office office number 13 my dad drives me down i'm in a three-piece suit any of you that follow me on instagram know these ridiculous outfits that i wore back then and what i looked like i probably had a mustache or something right so um i go into this thing i'm so nervous and the professor there steve was uh he was in a really intense mood he was an intense guy great guy one of he was one of the most important people in my life musically ever steve brown oh my god taught me so many things first time meeting him i'm there nervous i got my classic guitar i'll play the first piece he's like what's that arrangement i said oh that's a mel bay prelude in d minor he said well that's not that's not even the right those aren't the right notes that's not the right prelude okay what else do you have so i start another piece another black piece he says well that's from the same style period did you look at the the requirements for the audition i said yeah what i don't but i didn't know what they meant he said well this means three different style periods you know renaissance classical romantic 20th century okay well what other piece did you learn so i played him this uh i had a piece that i learned the scarlotti piece actually that i learned off a record julian bream record he says what's that and i said it's a piece i learned off a record it's a scarletty piece this is one of the ones that is a fourth piece that i knew and he says how did you learn that do you have the music i said no i just learned it off the record like what else do you do you want to know a classical guitar piece you just listen to the record and learn it he's like well those fingerings are totally messed up i don't know that arrangement can you play the segovia scale so i kind of hacked my way through in my class guitar and i'm basically drenched in sweat i said well i'm really auditioning for the jazz program okay um can you play a jazz standard let's play something together now my mind goes blank i'm so nervous my dad's waiting outside the office thinking okay what's going on here i can't think of any standards that i had learned with my guitar teacher glenn it's just my my i was so terrified so steve said how about a blues and i said okay and he says what he and i said a no no jazz player plays an a and steve just looks at me like eight and he goes over the piano he starts plucking out an a blues on the piano right and i'm trying to to to solo over it and it's a disaster so he kind of chuckles to himself and then comes back over okay well you'll get your notification in the mail and i said to him you know i have a really good year i'm a really fast learner yeah you'll get your notification in the mail so two weeks go by and the same day i get a letter from fredonia state university in ithaca college i was like oh my god here they are i intercept them at the mailbox i open the first one from ithaca college you've been rejected and i am crushed the second letter i open up and i've been rejected also from fredonia state and in that letter was a letter from the track coach saying rick you got rejected from the music school so you can't come for music but if you want to come and have a different major and run on the track team then you can get in so i said i wrote back and i said yeah i'll come as a history major and i went and i got a scholarship as a for running track now if you watch my fortunes of hard work video i tell the rest of the story about what happened because it's a very long involved story but i was devastated and i lied to my family about getting into college for music i ended up going to fredonia state for one semester a freshman guitarist phil sasso taught me six pieces or so so i could re-audition six weeks later to get back into ithaca my parents like why after re-auditioning you just auditioned and got in um just because it's a new school year well i audition and i get into ithaca and i realized that i was a much better player than pretty much any of the guitar players that were there but in the first week of school i went to the base teacher there because i played bass in high school and i played for him and he said why do you want to be a guitar major you need to be a bass major and i played first chair in the orchestra of my high school so i switched my major and he said that had i auditioned as a base major i would have gotten in really either place and i was literally devastated when i got those two rejection letters i almost quit playing i really almost quit playing but six years later i was a professor in the same office office number 13. i had a desk in there steve put a second desk in and hired me to be a professor at ithaca college where i didn't get in because i couldn't play what the audition requirements required me to do now you never realize what's going to happen in your life how these things can open up new doors that you never would have imagined had i not had that experience of being completely humiliated i never would have had the fortitude the intensity to really buckle down and learn what i needed to learn over the next six to eight months to improve my playing so that i could get into college learn how to play classical guitar learn these three pieces from three different style periods so you never know what doors are going to be opened had steve not rejected me i wouldn't be here in front of this camera had our producer not had these issues that kept him from coming to the studio and our band you know might have done something probably not maybe i wouldn't have my wife and children and be here talking to you as well so that's my story for today i hope you guys get something from it but it's an important story that i told early on on my channel that i think a lot of people don't know and i thought it was an important one to tell today thanks for watching

Channel: Rick Beato

Views: 552,930

Keywords: rick beato, everything music, rick, beato, music, music theory, music production, education, road not taken, the road less traveled, Music College, berklee college of music, Rejected, Guitar, Motivational, Inspirational, College Audition, Audition, Classical Guitar, Jazz Guitar, Bach, Practice, Life Story, failure, motivational stories, inspirational stories, robert frost the road not taken, ithaca college, Steve Brown, Coping with failure, Fate, Destiny

Id: gs7Z7LaIivE

Length: 15min 35sec (935 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 10 2021