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Lex AI Rick Beato

2:42:27 recording · EN · 2 speakers

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Brief overview

Rick Beato traces his ear, his son's perfect pitch and guitar's greatest solos to early immersion in music.

  1. Perfect pitch is learned like a languageBeato says babies can hear every phoneme until about nine months, and Dylan got pitch names in five minutes because he already knew the sounds.
  2. Work solos out by ear, struggle includedHe figured out Joe Pass's Virtuoso solo with no theory at all, moving his fingers until the chord matched, and says the struggle is where the learning is.
  3. Ten minutes daily beats one long sessionHe told Dylan it is better to practise 10 minutes a day seven days a week than an hour once, because a skipped day turns into months.
Executive Summary AI
  • Beato says the first solo he ever learned was Hendrix's Hey Joe over the chords E, C, G, D, A, at 14, and when his 11-year-old brother John refused to keep playing rhythm his mother sat down and played it for 20 minutes instead.9:41
  • He argues every child is born with perfect pitch and begins losing it around nine months as they become culturally bound listeners, citing Patricia Kuhl's talk The Linguistic Genius of Babies, which he saw in 2010, and the babies' capacity for the phonemes of all 6,500 languages.17:32
  • He tested the theory on his son Dylan, playing Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier and Aydin Esen's improvisations to his wife's stomach from 15 weeks for 30 minutes a night, and the Facebook video of eight-year-old Dylan naming polychords reached about 80 million views.38:34
  • His father, a railroad worker born in 1919, gave him Joe Pass's 1973 album Virtuoso for Christmas in 10th grade, and Beato worked the solo out purely by ear before he knew any theory, scratching the record in the process.42:07
  • Ranking solos, he puts Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb first, with Stairway to Heaven, Hey Joe, Kid Charlemagne and Mr. Crowley alongside it, and he credits the Beatles' three albums inside 365 days from August 1965 plus fluid intelligence before 30 for that concentration of great work.53:52
Key Quote
“Well, the first solo that I learned was Hey Joe.”
— Rick Beato9:41
Key Quote
“if you ever learned to play guitar like this, you've accomplished something with your life”
— Rick Beato42:25
Key Quote
“Thought is the enemy of flow, as Vinnie Caliuta told me.”
— Rick Beato50:59