Is today’s Music just a Laptop and a Celebrity? (2021)

what's up tim well i'm up and i was thinking the other day i wish every day was like today and then i think well every day is like today what day is today you just said something one second ago about how guitars were perfected in the 80s and i think that is such an interesting place to start yeah pete thorne mentioned that to me the other day in passing and it's really true when i moved here in 1979 we were just starting to use chorus and the boss chorus was the rage and you get your two amps that matched and you used the boss chorus and then you heard this detune thing on one side and it was just amazing but the other thing that happened is that people were modding strats and because of van halen and others mike landau you know he would plop a humbucker pickup right here and then have the ssh the single single hum and but the main thing that happened was the floyd rose showed up and it was just amazing the floyd rose had no fine tuners so you had to you had to develop a real kind of sense of how to tighten the nuts without making the strings go sharp and you did it you learned you learned how to detune it just the right way so when you crank that wrench and you tighten the nut everything was perfect and so the floyd rose oh it's in tune perfectly you can do whatever you want but i'm telling you the main thing that was was great is people started putting bass frets in guitar necks so you get your fender strat and it had the fattest frets on it and so you could really play like crazy they were like hot rods and then of course the vintage obsession began and everybody about when when did that happen tim uh it was actually i think in kind of the mid to late 80s you know because i remember not buying some vintage guitars that i should have bought because i was like i don't want this thing it was just starting to get kind of happening and then in the 90s it was just you know vintage guitars were the rage and the obsession and all this went away all of it went away all this kind of technology that had been put into the guitar was forgotten and the reason i have this guitar in my hand right now is because it it has that it gives me that it's like i can really work out on it i can actually play more stuff on this because the frets are fat and even the speed plate it's a floyd rose i mean you should yeah that's yeah it's literally a floyd rose guitar so anyway i mean i love my prs i could say the same thing about them they're high technology guitars uh i even played a gibson this kid ascher belski came over the other day who's at gibson in dorsey handed me his reissue sg and it was amazing so uh you know it's just i love new high technology guitars but that's something we forgot in the 80s i mean this thing i can get around on it man i mean it's just all smooth everything's smooth [Music] and it sounds good too really sounds good tim we were talking about the transition of rock music or what was going on i guess in the 90s too how it moved to nashville and i think that that's a really interesting topic that uh that i'd love to hear you talk about well i'm i i'm really really jealous i'm not anymore but for a long time i was really jealous and kind of pissed off about how nashville inherited classic rock they inherited my favorite music and they made records that sounded like the records that i was making here in the 90s in the 90s we were doing sessions with color parts just try whatever you can do all this stuff and you know layering all kinds of colors doing whatever you wanted and then it became this monotone thing where it was like there was creed and nickelback and 800 bands that sounded just like creed and nickelback and probably papa roach i couldn't tell the difference between papa roach and creed and nickelback i'm sorry but it was basically this one guitar part that was sounded like it was layered eight times and this one low distorted guitar part with no overdubs and no extra parts and no colors so you'd have the drums the bass one guitar part and the vocal and that was rock music and i think that really kind of contributed to people losing interest in rock but the real thing that happened i remember this story about jimmy iovine listening to hip-hop in his office and going i mean in an angry way going why does this sound so much better than the rock people are bringing me why does it sound so much better well of course it sounds better because it's samples right it's full fidelity samples i mean if i put the eagles hotel california on my turntable it sounds charming but it doesn't sound that the sonic range is not that big right even a song like layla by derrick and the dominoes you have this memory of it being this amazing sound the actual sound of that record is not great so it's actually much harder to record organic instruments than it is just to pick out samples on a laptop and i just it doesn't matter who you are if you press a button on a laptop the sample that you find is going to sound amazing it's going to be right in your face and then the bottom end on the drums is going to be huge the bass is going to be huge the keyboards are going to be lush everything's going to be full fidelity at every frequency in the spectrum so of course it's going to win and i think that's part of what happened in l.a the the urban hip hop thing i mean there was so much money to chase in that area that it was just kind of like okay we're out with the old in with the new we're going to do this now and then because nashville is still an organic instrumental environment i heard where t-bone burnett actually called it the alamo of the music business nashville was the alamo of the music business isn't that an amazing thing i think it's gotten past that now but it was like the last stand of uh you know organic music the thing about nashville is it was almost like okay you don't want it we'll take it and we'll run with it and that made me really jealous it for a long time it really did all my friends that were rock listeners that were my age they all started listening to country music right and i would listen to it too i i the the side of country music where tim mcgraw sings a love song i'm really i'm down with that but when it gets into the mythology of the other subjects that are very repetitive about i mean the thing the problem i have with nashville lyrics is they glorify a a life that isn't really real a lot of the time now maybe everybody does that but i'm sorry you're not necessarily happier if you have a dirt driveway and a pickup truck and and there's a creek down the road it doesn't i i you know please don't take this the wrong way but happiness comes from a different place than that so i just i can't buy the lyrics a lot of the time i think it's a it i i feel like the lyrics are often an affectation uh a true affectation they're not honest lyrics a lot of the time and the thing is they claim to be honest like ah shucks and this is going to be a compliment but most of the people i know who make music in nashville are kind of geniuses they're geniuses with their laptops their geniuses harmonically so for people to pretend that ah shucks we're just doing our thing and it don't mean nothing and it's really simple that's not who they are they're the kind of people in nashville who make music are badass geniuses so i totally agree i don't mean interrupt but the people technologically yeah i wrote with all these top songwriters back you know really from the end of 2013 into 2014 all the top writers there and they were brilliant they they yeah they were very sophisticated even in their lyri the way that they thought about their lyrics they'd write very simple lyrics but but they would be so well everything was so well written everything was so well played by all pro players and everything it was really kind of transported from what you were doing like what the session life was probably like in the 80s in la and went to nashville i mean it was kind of always big session playing was always big in nashville but totally and it's colorful that's the thing the music is colorful some of the lyrics i can't abide by because i just can't buy the story that they're telling but if you ask them in private moments if they could buy it either a lot of them would say well no we just we're trying to write a hit song and this is what it takes so like every style of music there's a formula and if you want to be a professional you have to obey the formula you have to fit into this lane i understand that i don't want to criticize it anymore but musically when i started hearing what they were doing i was frankly just i mean i just i love the colors and live off the floor two guitar players bouncing off of each other this is nashville i'm talking about we used to do that in the 90s but we gave it up and they took it and then that they they ran with it so i love the musical content i just you know i i i have a different idea of what a story should be to that's being told lyrically you said something the other night we were talking about a laptop and a celebrity and i it just cracked me up that saying explain what you meant by that when you were talking when you're discussing that well this is exactly what we're talking about now so what happened here in la is with technology and with the idea that we're trading out the old with the new whenever i talk about pop music it seems like it's a kid with a laptop who's ambitious and a singer who wants to be a celebrity and i've said this for a number of years and i i think it's still true it used to be like with r b music like marvin gaye a singer would sing and then there'd be space and you'd hear the over a two bar phrase the singer might take three beats it might take five beats and then there'd be space and your stuff percolate in the background there'd be a lot of actual less they weren't trying as hard they were just kind of easing into it now it seems like the singers it's wall to wall it's like lyric melody story wall to wall there's no space for anything it's like just a solid line of vocal in your face the reason i think that's the case is because it's a certain kind of narcissism where the actual singer usually is not trying to be an artist as much as they're they're dreaming of being a celebrity the music is is more of a vehicle for them to actually be famous in the media now that was always there if we look at i mean my love of music comes from top 40 radio in the 60s there were all in the 70s 80s there were always artists who just wanted to be famous right but now it's really the whole game i mean i think people grow up into this idea that they want to be in a video they want the money they want the endorsements they want the ancillary income they want the fragrance they want the vodka they want to brand themselves all this stuff supersedes the idea that they're an artist singing on a stage everything it's everything else it's the tail wagging the dog and as i said it's always been there but now it's pretty much the whole ball game now let's go to the other side the laptop person with the laptop can make everything now and and that and that stuff that comes out of the laptop is much easier to make sound big than this guitar you know it's it's just all right there the push of a button so somebody with talent and ambition i mean i picture a kid on a laptop spending the entire evening i mean the whole night from like you know 6 p.m to 6 a.m working on one bar right before the chorus because you can hear this thing that happens over two parts of this amazing event that happens and so all you have this this this ambition from this musical person or ambitious person and it really doesn't matter some of them have incredible music ability and some of them don't the ambition takes over and they just make amazing stuff with the choices they make from the actual data that they find right either way it can be great but it's the ambitious person with the laptop creating a track for the singer that wants to be a celebrity a lot of this stems from the what happened in the music industry starting around 2000 with the decline of record sales and the decline of of actual money in the music business that by the time and i saw this in my career as a producer by the time 2008 rolled around there the budgets were were pretty much gone labels were signing ba artists to 360 deals bans whatever whoever it was 360 deals trying to get whatever kind of money they could and there were no once people realized that there was no money uh from getting a record deal right the only money would be is if you were became a famous star that uh that people stopped hiring producers even this really happened more 2010 through 2012 and then since there were no budgets the only people that were making records with people that either had p rich parents that that you know people that if you weren't signed you either had to have rich parents or somebody rich that was financing your records and all my producer friends this was the case they had it was only people that had money that were able to make the records didn't matter how talented their their kids were if they had the money they could make a record and those were the things that had a chance of actually getting signed so there is an economic part to this and i'm sure that that that in your even as a session player you saw this all the time well economics are the driver of the whole thing that's that's the problem it's just gotten more and more all about the dollar and i understand that the thing is i had the rich parents hire me like crazy too and the irony of that at a certain point i always got paid better from the parent than i did from warner brothers or universal always they valued me more they paid me right on the spot they were appreciative and there became a certain point when doing sessions for a record company universal oh my gosh just trying to get paid through their portal what was that thing called the port what's the portal called that you have to use for universal uniport it's called the uniport i developed a policy about a year and a half ago where i said if it's universal and the uniport i'm not doing it i hire somebody else it's i ca you know it's just anyway i digress so parents were more respectful just kinder more open and there there came a point in the record business when i would if i was chasing an invoice so you do everything right at the you know you do your session you send the paperwork whatever it is and then of course you don't get paid of course you do of course so how long do you wait you wait for me it was like six weeks i'll give them six weeks so i call six weeks later and you're talking to somebody you know and you get the a r person's secretary or assistant or whatever you're talking to somebody who has no idea that you even exist or that you you what you did what on what you're a guitar player who played on okay yeah i'll so it's basically you're sending i always said that it's like i'm sending my invoice and it's basically being sent to a tree in a park it's just like sitting it's like it's going nowhere and the person you're talking to the thing is you can't make them angry because then they won't help you at all and you'll shut the door so you have to explain to somebody who has no experience because maybe they've just been hired and the reason they got hired is because they're uh well i don't know i mean i i don't want it's you don't know why somebody has kind of an entry-level job at a record company you know enthusiasm smarts sure but they don't necessarily care about the nuts and bolts of the actual you know dealings of the business so it would it might take i remember howard benson he he couldn't get me paid and he took he this this company owed me like 400 dollars and it took him like a year and a half to get me this 400 and he did it as a matter of pride for himself it was like i'm not gonna let this this one go it was some and i was kind of like dude just don't worry about it if you you know but he he actually finally got me paid so yes the rich parents became the record company at a certain that one that's that's it i mean that is that is that that is a that's a fact really that that happened in the music business yeah now i i heard an artist being interviewed on mark maron who said that music was better when there was a pot of gold on the other other side of that e chord music was better when there was a pot of gold on the other side of that e chord now think about that if there was no money to be made from riding stairway to heaven would you write it if there was no money to be made from writing you know i don't know i mean think of your favorite songs in this day and age it's not necessarily the song that earns the money and as you and i have talked about now should we go back to the laptop and the celebrity it's not one kid with a laptop it might be dozens of kids with laptops who are basically submitting data to a famous producer who then cherry picks from all of those submissions all at the same tempo maybe in the same key right and constructs a song i've heard songs where every part of the song sounds like a hit course the intro the verse the b section the chorus the bridge you can tell that they're all great chords that's what that's that's what that's what pop music has become it's just become a series of choruses whether it's the verse or the pre-chorus of the chorus or the post course it's they're it's all choruses it's all hooks all the time and i have to admit and i think you would admit the same thing those are the songs that i truly love yeah and i mean it's there's a it works you and i we we share this thing about you know we love pop music we love songs that are really well crafted um now do we love them the same way that we love stairway to heaven or led zeppelin no it's a totally different thing it's an and i think this comes from the from understanding what it takes to put together a song the parts that come together and you're you're an expert part writer and performer so that is baked into your brain when you hear something you you have incredible like i do being a producer incredible appreciation for how things are put together well yeah and when i hear something if something is brought to me to play in i think what is missing what is keeping this from expanding and it might be just a high [Music] part and i actually i'll look i could work on that for a long time and figure out just the three notes that are the most sweet and that bounce against the vocal and bounce against the track and syncopate just right that not only lift the song but maybe they actually disappear that's something that that jamie mahobarak jamie mahoverak and i spent years working with trevor horn and and jamie still does but what we would do with trevor horn is try and find parts that basically would disappear would be transparent so you don't know that it's there because you're still listening to the vocal and you're still feeling the rhythm but it's this thing that's happening maybe over over here on the left and something over here on the right that actually makes everything expand but doesn't draw your attention so that your attention is still focused on the vocal but i mean that's the other thing that reminds me i used to go into home studios all the time i would always do demos even though even when i was doing high profile records i would always do demos probably because i never trusted the music business but i just honestly there was less pressure it was more fun sometimes and the demos were like i remember i used to work for the go-go remember the go-go course right yeah belinda carlyle jane wiedland all of them well i actually did all of their solo projects and i was with them in some social situation like two or three of them at the same time and they found out at that moment that i was working with all of them and it might have been jane or jane looked at me jane whelan said you're like a therapist you know you don't tell anybody that you're working with anybody else but i used to love going to gina shock's house the drummer i mean she was just constantly coming up with new songs i would go into her garage and we would eat in her kitchen i would go to glen ballard's studio and eat in his kitchen i would go to all these home studios that were fabulous all around la because the music business was on i mean it was huge i mean there was a time when on sunset boulevard most of the billboards were yes you know most of the money being circulated here in l.a most of the glam or most of the exotic cars all that stuff that you kind of you kind of like to see when you're in a business it was all from music and that's not the case anymore it's just just a tiny tiny part of it now that to me is just so interesting and uh and and depressing at the same time you know well i think for me it was depressing i i don't know i don't consider you a depressed person but i do think that i do think that music was better when it was not so calculated and it's like a lot of the people that we admire they were able to just do whatever they wanted and music was music was the beginning the middle and the end they weren't thinking about ancillary fame fortune video vodka perfumes headphones right you know it was the music was the actual point and the art of it and even in the early 90s i thought about something today i did a big record in the early 90s that was really unlikely it was meatloaf's bat out of hell 2. and jim steinman wrote all the songs as he all the meatloaf songs all through that all those errors was just jim steinem it was basically jim steinman not being able to be a performer and having meat be the shadow performer for jim steinman and we did a song called i would do anything for love but i won't do that and it was number one in 28 countries the song was 12 minutes long it took us three days to track it they cut it down to five minutes and 13 seconds or something for the single and it still dominated the charts at number one all over the world for a long time and it was excess in every aspect of it there were tempo changes it was a duet uh it was there was nothing it was basically like a broadway single basically the thing is you could get away with breaking all the rules and and busting out of the envelope in music history not so much anymore though it it's like the formula has to everything has to be obeyed you know that the actual formulas all have to be stuck to and obeyed if you if you want to but but but is it this is it the listeners now that that require that or because you know the barrier to entry to spotify for example is you have to get on big playlists now does that mean that you can't do well if you don't have you know people that have big youtube channels or get big on tick tock or get big on instagram uh you know there are still we don't have the same barriers to entry into the music business that you had you had to go through an a r person that had to convince the head of a r they had to convince the president of the of the label to sign someone and put a million dollars behind him or whatever it would cost to sign a new artist there is there isn't that anymore yet music has become so i don't know if you'd call it corporate but uh you know even though even with kids making these things at home there's a um it's it's you know it's gotten even more formulaic that than than it even was when you had those people trying to get hit have hit songs all the time it what you're talking about is crowd sourcing and as a business person if i can crowd source my product and and just have people compete the thing that's brilliant about streaming services is they made what should be illegal they made it legal so if you pay micro pennies then you're scot-free you can go look we're compensating the creators and then if somebody has massive success they make enough money to go well i made maybe a few a few hundred grand from the song but basically most people creating music that's on streaming services they're not making a living wage okay some some people know that some people don't so if you're crowdsourcing everything and you just say just bring us the aggregate bring us you know everything and then it's this mass of people who are competing for a very small chunk of money at the very top it's still it's still they're basically doing it for free that's all for now don't forget to subscribe if you're a first time viewer ring the bell that'll let you know when i go live and when a new video comes out give it a thumbs up leave a comment that's very important if you're interested in the biato book go to my website at www.rigbiada.com follow me on instagram at rickbiota1 check out the new beatto ear training program at beautiertraining.com and if you want to support the channel even more think about becoming a member of the biato club thanks for watching you

Channel: Rick Beato

Views: 416,333

Keywords: rick beato, everything music, rick, beato, music, music theory, music production, education, tim pierce, studio guitar player, studio musician, session guitar player, session musician, guitar solo, studio guitar, guitar lesson, studio lesson, studio musicians, discussion, podcast, guitar, recording studio, session guitarist, guitar lessons, adele, funny stories, guitar gear, guitar recording, how to play guitar, improvisation, larry carlton, youtubers, interview, music talk

Id: IO-2I8b3Ngo

Length: 28min 34sec (1714 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 03 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/tonyrschmitz]

I love this channel. Rick knows so much and I love his “What makes this song great” videos

[u/tonyrschmitz]

I’ve thought this same thing myself about the classic rock sound moving to country. I grew up a country fan in my youth then became a huge classic rock nut in my HS and college years (especially arena rock) and then gravitated back to country cause I heard a lot of the same sounds and patterns in country. LeDoux, B&D and a lot of those 90’s artists had a classic rock vibe to them and it’s still there today with CoJo, Gilbert, Aldean and so on. I’ve heard other rock fours say that when grunge became popular in the early 90’s was when the arena rock sound went away from popular music. Rick Beato has another video that asks the question “what happened music “ that’s a good listen as well.