How I Sold 2,000,000 Records

you know when i do these top 10 spotify countdowns people always are saying well what have you done it's like well i used to produce records actually for a living right up until 2016. i've had a couple platinum records couple gold records maybe three gold records or so i never talk about them though but i was thinking about this the other day about my first platinum record i had and i went and looked it up on uh wikipedia and i'm basically not even listed as part of the of producing the record i didn't produce the entire record but i'm not listed at all on wikipedia except in the songwriting credits on it back in 2002 i had this a r guy named steve roberts and stevo call me up and say hey i've got this singer that i want you to go write a couple songs with now just for a little background i started producing full time in 1999 and i would produce a lot of bands that would get record deals but most the record deals would happen and they would use another producer a bigger name producer so i would basically create the demo or the sound of the band then someone else would get to produce it okay and i was just like okay well that's just the way it is i you know it would bum me out and stuff but what are you gonna do about it that some bigger name person that had success would get to produce the records i all had a publishing deal because my band billionaire had gotten signed to a publishing deal or i'd gotten signed to a publishing deal originally in 1992 way way back with polygram and then i got signed to another publishing deal anyways this guy stevo calls me up and he's like i've got this guy brent smith he was in a band called drive that we had signed that we dropped on atlantic records but i reassigned him because he's a phenomenal singer and i said uh well can you send me something no this is really early internet but he sent me a couple mp3s of of some stuff and some demos and i was like man guys got a phenomenal voice he said well he's living down in jacksonville he's crashing at uh actually at ronnie van zandt's wife's house i was like what why well the guitar player that he's been jamming with one of the guitar players is married to his daughter and uh ronnie vanzant's wife loves brent and loves his voice and thinks he's great and letting him crash in her guest house there on the beach i was like okay i'll drive down there so i pack up my acoustic guitar my honda civic i drive down to jacksonville so i meet brent and he's got long hair down to here he's got a goatee incredibly nice guy he says yeah brent my name is brent smith the most boring name in rock and roll and i was like i just thought that was kind of funny right so i walk into this place you stay in this guest house what the guest house was was just a big empty space with a mattress on the floor with a sheet pillow and then there were four plastic bags and i was like what is that he goes well that's all my stuff that's all his belongings he had a record deal but he didn't have any money because the band that he was in they had spent all the money and then got dropped he was basically just crashing on the floor of this guest house in jacksonville so we start talking when you're going to write with somebody you want to kind of get to know them a little bit but i pull out my acoustic guitar he's like you got anything and uh like his first song ideas i said no i said but let's just let's just jam so i pick up my acoustic guitar right this guitar and i start going [Music] and literally he came in singing the first verse right off the top of his head he just sang this [Music] [Applause] hear that weird chord there [Music] we used to have weird long intros strange here's brent [Music] [Applause] and when he came in with [Music] [Applause] on this [Music] [Music] so we literally improvised that whole section right there he came up with the lyrics on the spot first time through he had a cassette player going and i said did you just improvise that you said yeah i could not believe it and he's saying it just like that as a matter of fact we wrote the song and i went back in and he came up to came to here to atlanta to my studio and we just did this demo this is the demo vocal that he did this isn't the cassette one but he did one pass on it through the song and that was his vocal performance and then i put it like a double and then he did the harmony part on it one of the interesting things is is like he says to me that uh he goes what is that second chord you're playing and i said oh that's like a c major with the nine and the sus four and he goes it sounds really cool it's very moody sound so it just immediately inspired me when i heard that i've never heard a chord like that and then the pre-chorus that i played people at substitute then [Music] the discord once again this is kind of a weird chord that you would never hear in a rock song now what we needed to do is we need to come up with a chorus he didn't have the chorus yet so i then immediately tune my guitar down to drop d we did this [Music] [Music] is [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so that was the song lost in the crowd you can listen to it on shine down's first record it started out just as an acoustic song but obviously it was a rock song and we played it over the phone to stevo and he heard it and he said keep going before we go any further i just want to say since i never do this in my videos to please subscribe to my channel i never asked that but i'm starting to do that now and if you want to support the channel you can buy something from my store like my biato book my ear training course or my quick lessons guitar course that helps support the channel and keep it going or you can actually just make a donation and i'll leave the links below so we continued to write songs we wrote uh i think like three songs for it there was there was that lost in the crowd then there was a song in memory stranger inside then there's a track i produced i think it's called all i ever wanted then there's another song actually called leave a whisper that didn't make it to the record but i thought that was one of the best songs it's this whispers [Music] [Music] drum film so the band comes up to atlanta i had these demos these basic demos they come up we track the songs here's some pictures from the tracking that are pretty hilarious of the guys at tree sound we spent probably i don't know i'd say a week tracking the stuff i mean brent some of the demos that we did we did demo vocals on them and those are the ones that we use he never even be saying this one he's saying the songs one time he do one pass no punch-ins nothing on this stuff i mean he was such a good singer the rest of the record had been done i think all the songs were by bob marlett maybe one song was by tony battaglia 45 was the song he had written the song with brent and i think they used his version but the front half of the record was mixed by andy wallace so andy wallace who's one of my favorite mixers of all time mixed all the songs that i didn't do which included fly from the inside which is a really great great mix so all the mixes that i had heard up to that point sounded phenomenal so the label had me go work with randy staub up in vancouver now for those of you that are metallica fans randy staub engineered and mixed the black album so i went up to vancouver just me i brought the tracks the four or five songs that i did i brought him up there and randy i spent a week with him just me and him mixing them and i remember asking him all this stuff about recording the black album he was i think this is one of the rooms that that they had worked in up in vancouver and he told me it was um quite a year and a half of his life i think he said he spent spend a year and a half working on the album i asked him about drum sounds and stuff i said did you guys actually bring in these sheets of plywood and shellack him do all this stuff to make the room more live he said yes we did he said it was it was amazing he showed me kind of where they placed the mics in the room to record the drums it was very very cool and he's a great guy great mixer so he mixed the tracks then i remember i went to england to work with a band when the first week the record came out and the anr guy stevo calls me up so this is like this is i don't know eight months later or something record came out and the first week of soundscan comes out and i said how'd it do he got 6700 records and i thought wow that's pretty good he said yeah it's good so the record starts perking along as you know doing 6000 a week then eventually kind of gets to eight thousand a week then ten thousand a week and fifteen thousand a week and then the band did a um version of simple man for a radio station that was uh in boston they just covered the skynyrd song and that became a massive hit on that radio station it was a really influential station so they did a new version of the song just with brent and the guitar player jason i think it was um did a new version just a duet re-released the record with it on it and then all of a sudden it started selling 25 000 copies a week the record went gold on august 17 2004 so remember i started working on in october of 2002 and then it went platinum october 21st 2005. certified platinum 2005. so i started producing 1999 2005 i had my first platinum record i figured that was pretty good progress right there because really one of my goals as a producer was just to produce a song that sold a million copies that was one of them i always wanted to write a song that went number one and produced a record that sold a million copies and i did both of those i had this country song that i've made a video on this uh with this band parley who just had their second number one very recently i had a number one song at the end of 2013 and that was it i reached my goals as a producer and i went on and started my youtube channel so this is my way of kind of giving back from that but the idea that you know oh rick is an old guy and everything i hear so much of that when i'm talking about spotify and everything it's like yeah i was producing records up until four years ago most of the people that work in the music industry that are actually the mixers and the producers a lot of them are in their 40s and 50s some of them are even older i think a lot of people actually don't realize that some of these songwriters like max martin max martin who writes all these big hit songs he's he's in his early 50s at least so anyways that's the story behind my first platinum record i'm not listed on wikipedia anywhere as having produced anything it has a little thing where i co-wrote a couple of the songs on there but i did work on the record you can see my platinum plaque right here in this picture i have it hung up in my lounge and that was pretty satisfying you know to have a platinum record and some gold records under your name is um i felt was it was a pretty good accomplishment so that's my story for today that's all for now don't forget to subscribe ring the bell and leave a comment check out my new quick lessons pro guitar course that just came out also the biato book if you want to learn about music theory that's how you do it and check out my biato ear training course at beautiertraining.com and don't forget if you want to support the channel even more think about becoming a member of the biato club thanks so much for watching [Music] you

Channel: Rick Beato

Views: 606,760

Keywords: rick beato, everything music, rick, beato, music, music theory, music production, education, Shinedown, shinedown simple man, Leave A Whisper, Platinum Record, 1000000, million, Gold Record, Hit Record, Hit Song, Grunge, Nuryl Metal, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, 2000's Rock, Hard Rock, Guitar, Gibson Guitars, Acoustic Guitar

Id: NaqySto4bKI

Length: 13min 36sec (816 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 12 2021