The First Guitar Solo Rick Beato Learned Was "Hey Joe"

Asked for an early guitar solo that felt like magic, Beato does not reach for something obscure. The first one he learned was Jimi Hendrix's "Hey Joe," a beginner-friendly song whose chords — E, C, G, D, A — he could actually hold. He figured out that the solo lived inside one shape on the neck, what he would later call the E minor pentatonic scale, though at fourteen he had no name for it. There was nothing to look up. If you could find the notes, you noticed a pattern, and that was enough to get obsessed.

He showed the song to his younger brother John, who had started guitar at the same time: Beato was fourteen, John eleven. Beato would play rhythm for five minutes while John soloed; the moment Beato started soloing, John threw the guitar down and they fought. Their mother asked what was going on, heard that John would not play rhythm, and sat down herself. "Okay, I'll play rhythm for you. What are the chords?" Beato's mother, gone ten years now, played E, C, G, D, and A for twenty minutes while he went at it. Looking back, he says only that his parents were so cool.

Lex notes that Hendrix is often ranked the greatest guitarist of all time, and that even those "simple" chords are not simple in his hands — fragments, riffs, almost improvised rhythm. Beato will not say greatest. He makes lists, they change from day to day, and a list of twenty exists partly so he can smuggle in someone like fusion guitarist Allan Holdsworth, a player many listeners would otherwise never meet. The people who inspired Hendrix, he says, include Charlie Christian, Django Reinhardt, and Andrés Segovia: three giants of twentieth-century guitar from whom later players grew.

Django's story is the one that sounds like myth. After a fire, the tendons in his left ring finger and pinky were so damaged that the fingers were essentially melted together; he had almost no independent use of them, though he could still press them into chords. The astonishingly fast lines of gypsy jazz — a whole living movement still built on his language — were played with two fingers. Stéphane Grappelli, the violinist, was a frequent partner. Everything Django is doing in those lines, Beato says, is improvised. It sounds free and swinging. None of it was written down in advance.

After the big-band years of the 1920s through the 1940s, players went out in small groups, and Charlie Parker became one of the main figures of early bebop. They used standard chord progressions — many in AABA form — as vehicles to improvise on, and Parker built a language far more sophisticated than the swing players of the Benny Goodman era. The tempos were fast, the lines angular, and the music thick with chromatic notes. Beato likes to think of those notes as connecting notes: you put in more pitches than are "supposed" to be there, and the texture changes.

He calls bebop one of the most difficult styles to master, because all of these musics are languages, the way blues is a language. Hearing it as a child, he argues, is like hearing a spoken language early: it enables you to learn it later in a way that someone first exposed as a teenager almost cannot. His father loved bebop. The man was not a musician. He worked for the railroad, was born in 1919, and spoke few words. For reasons the family never explained, he liked incredibly sophisticated, technical music — Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson, Joe Pass — and put the records on when Beato was small.

Beato has six siblings, and none of them could figure out why their father gravitated to music that technical. They took it for granted. Father and son would put on a record, sit on opposite sides of the room, and not say a word: side A, flip, side B, then get up and go do other things. They did that all the time. His father died in 2004. They never really talked about why the records were on.

Beato's theory of perfect pitch is borrowed from language. He believes every child is born with it and starts to lose the ability around nine months, when babies become what linguist Patricia Kuhl calls culturally bound listeners. In Kuhl's talk "The linguistic genius of babies," which he watched in 2010, infants begin as citizens of the world, with neural pathways for the phonemes of all roughly 6,500 languages. Around nine months those unused pathways are pruned. In one experiment, babies heard Mandarin from a live speaker three times a week for 25-minute sessions and later still recognized the sounds of that language.

The catch, which Beato takes seriously, is that the learning has to involve the social brain. A baby looking at your face, watching your mouth, extracting social cues, can hear where a word starts and stops. A recording does not do the same job. When he realized his son Dylan had perfect pitch — the ability to identify any note, or a collection of notes, without a reference tone — and that nobody in the family had ever had it, the only explanation he could find was what he had played prenatally and in the first nine months of life.

Relative pitch, which Beato actually teaches, is more useful for working musicians. Given a reference, you hear that A to C is a minor third; once you know the first chord of a song, the rest fall into relation. His course starts with small intervals, minor second and major second, first as melodic intervals (one after the other) and then as harmonic intervals (together), then chord qualities: major, minor, diminished, augmented, suspended. Practice daily and a couple of months can produce real progress. Those interval names are already music theory. "Music theory," he says, "is just the name of things in music."

For a beginner, Beato wants open chords in first position and an eye toward actual songs, because motivation is the scarce resource. The first hard problem is not theory. It is arching the fingers so you do not mute strings you want ringing: on a C major chord, the index on the first fret of the B string has to leave the open high E singing, and that micro-adjustment can stall a new player for days. People who have played forever do not even think about it. The pain of acoustic strings, he and Lex agree, is real and temporary — a week or two, not a life sentence.

Once you can hold chords, electric guitar gets fun: single-note playing, riffs like the one embedded in "Back in Black," Hendrix-style chordal riffs moving up the neck. Fingerpicking, as in the opening of "Stairway to Heaven," means isolating notes of a chord and playing two together, repeatedly; later the same song wants a pick, or hybrid picking, fingers and pick at once. Hendrix wearing the guitar low, thumb over the top, is not sloppiness. The thumb mutes lower strings that would otherwise ring through a loud amp. Even the first note of the "Comfortably Numb" outro solo, a bend at the ninth fret of the G string, requires angling the index so the B string underneath stays dead.

Theory can wait. Learn songs first so people fall in love with playing. Beato told Dylan, when the boy started guitar a couple of years before this conversation, that ten minutes a day, seven days a week, beats one hour on a single day — roughly the same minutes, completely different encoding. He leaves his own guitar on a stand. Walking past, he picks it up "for a second," and the second becomes ten minutes, then an hour, then two. A day off becomes a week, then a month, then the instrument has gone untouched. The stand is a physical argument against that slide.

The first video that made Beato famous was not made for YouTube. A friend named Shane, whose band Beato was producing, asked him to show Shane's wife what Dylan could do. Beato was on his way to a school-board meeting, called Dylan downstairs for "one minute," and got a no; his wife Nina had to send the boy down. Dylan has a mouthful of candy in the clip. He is eight. Single notes first: A, C-sharp, B-flat, C, D, A-flat, all correct. Then two notes at once. Then the part Beato thinks actually made it spread — polychords, stacked and inverted, voiced close in the piano's midrange: C augmented over D-flat augmented, A-flat major over A major, A minor over D-flat major, E add 9 over F major. Dylan named them and sang requested pitches. Beato had to look at his own hand to confirm what he had played.

On Facebook the video did something like 80 million views and 250,000 comments. Beato's observation about the path is specific: the more someone knew about music, the more they shared it. Ordinary listeners could not hear the difficulty. Working musicians heard an eight-year-old dissecting close-voiced inverted polychords with theory, and forwarded it. How had they even found the pitch sense? When Dylan was about two, Beato FaceTimed his brother Jon and played Neal Schon's "Stone in Love" solo; Dylan sang along in tune, then did the same with Led Zeppelin's "Black Dog." The brothers shrugged — they had good ears too; maybe they could have done that at that age.

At about three and a half, in the car, Beato asked Dylan to sing the *Star Wars* theme. It was in the right key. The *Superman* theme, from a week of John Williams soundtracks, was also in the right key. He turned the car around, went to the studio, hit B-flat on the piano, and Dylan said "Star Wars" — the theme opens on a big B-flat major chord, the B-flat the note you hear. He hit G, and Dylan said "Superman," the first note of the trumpet line. In five minutes Beato taught him the names of the twelve notes. The boy already knew they were different; he just did not have the labels. Dylan does not see colors. He says every note sounds completely different. Beato calls it native music fluency.

The method behind it was what he calls high-information music, starting at fifteen weeks of pregnancy: thirty minutes a night on his wife's stomach, Bach's *Well-Tempered Clavier* and fugues, improvisations by Turkish pianist Aydin Esen, Keith Jarrett — jazz, classical, modern classical, harmony and line at high density. After Dylan was born, Beato sat with him for an hour every morning, listening and looking at him. He never pointed at the piano and said "this is C, this is B-flat." He played complex music and stayed in the room. Rock came later, once the boy was born. The social brain, he thinks, had to be engaged, or the pathways would have closed.

Joe Pass lived from 1929 to 1994 and was one of the great bebop and solo-guitar players. In 1973 he recorded *Virtuoso*, an album of just guitar. Beato's father gave it to him for Christmas in tenth grade, with a sentence that was not like him: "If you ever learn to play guitar like this, you've accomplished something with your life." The record sat unopened until March. Beato put it on, thought it was cool, and decided he could figure some of it out. He knew no chord names, no intervals, no music theory, and he did not have relative pitch. He moved the needle, heard a chord, and tried combinations of fingers on the fretboard until something sounded identical. One shape was so weird he had never played it. He kept moving until he heard "that's it," then looked at his hand and thought, what is that?

He memorized chord shapes he had never used, then the single-note lines, then realized — only later — that whole stretches were inversions of the same chord, a C9 in the top notes, ideas Pass had improvised. By the end the vinyl was so scratched it was wrecked. It was worth it. Lex argues that the struggle is the education, and Beato agrees: YouTube can now hand you the answers, but the struggle is where it's at. When he finally played the record for his father, there was no "that's amazing." The verdict was "Hmm, pretty good." That, Beato says, was his father. That was how that generation talked.

Why do so many jazz roads lead to Miles Davis? Beato's answer is that he was the greatest innovator in the history of jazz, at the front of style after style: bebop, *Birth of the Cool*, modal jazz, hard bop, then *Bitches Brew* and what people started calling fusion. Two quintets matter most. The 1950s group had John Coltrane, Paul Chambers, Philly Joe Jones, and pianists including Wynton Kelly. The 1960s group had Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Tony Williams, and Wayne Shorter. Miles never looked back. He did not want to hear the old records. He always moved on.

Beato asked Ron Carter, who has played bass on some 2,200 records, whether they ever rehearsed with Miles. Never. They showed up, Miles put charts on the stands, and they rolled. They did not listen back. On the live club records, Carter said they never knew they were recording; maybe he would notice a different microphone on his bass amp, and months later an album would appear with him on it, which he would take to the union so he could get paid. Miles's instruction was: do not think, just play. Drummer Vinnie Colaiuta later gave Beato the sentence he keeps: "Thought is the enemy of flow."

Flea, of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, showed up to Beato's interview in a Miles Davis T-shirt, which looks like a genre joke until you hear the biography. Born in Australia, moved to New York, parents divorced; his mother married a jazz bassist, and the house filled with jam sessions. Once jazz gets inside you, Beato says, it is just there — close to his own childhood. What stayed with him from the interview was the intensity when Flea picked up the bass, talked about practice, and fell into slapping. Beato sat across from him thinking *whoa*.

Beato's first instrument was cello in third grade; he switched to bass in sixth and majored in classical bass as an undergraduate. He still thinks of himself as a bassist first. The bass, he argues, is one of the only instruments where a bad note is obvious to everybody, because the bass defines the quality of the chord. You can put the root down there, or the third, or the fifth, or passing tones, and whatever you play tells the ear what kind of chord it is. The bassist has a lot of power. He loves guitar more than anything. He still thinks bass is the most important instrument in the band.

On the day they spoke, Beato's favorite rock guitar solo was the first solo in Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb," not the famous outro — because nobody talks about the first one, and it is equally great. He played it for David Gilmour in an interview and watched Gilmour's face: thousands of live performances, probably years since he had sat with the record. Stairway to Heaven was next, then "Hey Joe," because it was the first solo Beato learned. Number three on that list was Larry Carlton's solo on Steely Dan's "Kid Charlemagne," extremely hard to figure out. He also put Neal Schon's "Stone in Love" and Carlos Rios on Gino Vannelli's "Brother to Brother," solos most viewers would not know, so that scrolling the list would force a collision with something new.

He wanted Van Halen's "Ice Cream Man" on there and could not play the opening lick: a huge stretch, a tricky rhythm, Eddie tilting the guitar up to make it possible. Dweezil Zappa said he would have to practice. Phil X said the same. Beato's fingers hurt. Nancy Wilson's Heart solo he did not play; he ran the video. He shot the whole Top 20 in one day and played nineteen of the twenty. Mark Knopfler's "Sultans of Swing" he originally wanted lower, then kept high because the start of the video had to establish that this was a serious list. The song hits on every level: melody, lyrics, multiple great solos, a unique Strat tone, and it is a song about music. The intro to "Money for Nothing," on a Les Paul, is almost impossible to recreate because the sound is so particular, and it was improvised.

Gilmour's genius, for Beato, is melodic sense: how phrases go together, how one idea leads to the next, how much space sits between them, the way speech works. He does a lot with less. The tone looks like hardware destiny — the same Binson Echorec, the same pedals, the same Hiwatt, a tech named Phil who has been with him about fifty years, a black Strat signature that is an exact copy of the old one. Then the anti-myth: when Gilmour records alone, he sometimes plugs into a Zoom 9030, a 1990s modeler, runs Pro Tools himself, plays a solo, and decides he will not replay it. People insisted he must have gone through an amp. Beato has the video. The presets are labeled DG1 and DG2.

Lex argues that Knopfler beats even B.B. King on the pure beauty of a single note. Beato's test is recognition: Brian May, Gilmour, Hendrix, Eddie Van Halen, B.B. King — one note of King's vibrato, he says, is enough. Lex wants three to five. Beato offers to separate the tracks and play twenty players as a test. The same logic showed up when he tried reversing songs for a video and his assistants named Adele and Nirvana instantly from tone, backward or forward. Great guitarists, in this view, are not faster. They are more themselves on one pitch.

The craft Beato is chasing in interviews is often production, because producers work on many records at once and carry stories across catalogs. He has talked with Rick Rubin, Daniel Lanois, Brendan O'Brien, Butch Vig. At Abbey Road he interviewed Ken Scott, who started as a tape op at sixteen on *A Hard Day's Night* and, at eighteen, recorded the orchestra on "I Am the Walrus" with the Beatles standing right behind him. Brian May once told Beato that a slightly depressed whammy bar at the end of "Bohemian Rhapsody" makes the piano sound out of tune, a detail that still bothers May. Lex offers the drum break in Phil Collins's "In the Air Tonight" as a hook people wait for and air-drum — usually, Beato says, created by accident. If you chase it, you will not get it.

Sting told Beato that modern music has gotten simpler, more minimal, and that "the bridge is gone." Sting's gloss was that the bridge is therapy: a chance to look back at the verse before the chorus returns. Beato's more technical version is that the bridge is where you can change a song's frame of reference. His example is the Beatles' "We Can Work It Out." McCartney writes the verse — try to see it my way, do I have to keep on going until I can't go on. The bridge is Lennon: life is very short, no time for fussing and fighting, I have always thought that it's a crime. Two worldviews colliding inside one song is, for Beato, a Beatles specialty.

How did they write so much of the essential pop catalog before thirty? Beato has never fully figured it out, but he has a theory about bad PA systems. At Shea Stadium the screaming was so loud they could not hear themselves, there were no monitors, and they decided to stop touring and become a studio band. Then came the density: *Help!* on August 6, 1965, *Rubber Soul* on December 3, *Revolver* on August 5, 1966 — three fourteen-song records, written and recorded, inside 365 days. Four supreme talents trying to outdo one another every day, plus George Martin, plus the muscle of singing takes constantly, the way club musicians who play four-hour sets five nights a week never lose their voices.

He separates fluid intelligence from crystallized intelligence. Processing speed and the ability to combine new ideas peak in the late twenties and around thirty, then decline; crystallized intelligence, built from life, keeps growing. That is why, in his theory, pop songwriting and jazz improvisation tend to peak before thirty, while classical composers often write their most important work at the end — Beethoven's late quartets and the Ninth. It is just a theory, he says, and not all improvisers fit. Lex turns to the 27 Club: Hendrix, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse. Beato steers toward cigarettes. Beatles movies, *Get Back*, MTV Unplugged — if a singer's hands were free, they were smoking. Dylan, asked whether anyone smokes at his high school, treated the question as absurd. Nat King Cole at four packs a day died of lung cancer; Sinatra, McCartney, Lennon, Miles, virtually every famous singer across jazz, soul, and rock smoked, and Beato thinks the rasp was part of the sound. Lex will not recommend drugs as a creativity tool. The stage's dopamine spike and crash, plus a culture that blesses certain chemicals, made abuse structural.

Beato was producing Jump, Little Children in Studio B in Atlanta while Elton John was in Studio A. Elton's assistant asked if they were that band; then Elton walked in, said he was a fan, and invited them over when they finished. Beato spent an hour watching Elton and Bernie Taupin work. The pace was two records a year, then tour; a whole album written and recorded in two weeks. Taupin handed over lyrics; Elton looked at the sheet on the piano and wrote the entire melody in about fifteen minutes, said record this, and moved on. There is YouTube footage of him finding "Tiny Dancer" in the room, telling the band how it goes, tracking it, next song. Almost nobody works lyrics-first. Beato says 99 percent of songwriters build the track and hang melody and words on it. Words first is far more difficult.

Kirk Hammett's interview left several specifics Lex still thinks about. One is the line Hammett draws between heavy metal and hard rock, genres people mash together. Another is downpicking: all downstrokes, no alternate picking, the attack that makes James Hetfield's rhythm sound hard, even, and driving. Beato used to be able to do it and cannot now. The basal joint of his thumb hurts, and after thinking about it he blames phone swiping — the same spot, worn down. He is serious. Hammett, underneath Metallica's finished architecture, is an improviser with a melodic, soulful streak, and he gave Hetfield heavy credit as a composer of riffs and rhythm. The records sound designed; they were born as jams and fragments. Hendrix using different string gauges on different strings was another of those details Beato had never heard. Uniqueness, he says, often comes from doing the thing everyone assumes you should not.

Billy Corgan, asked how he gets the melancholy that runs through Smashing Pumpkins songs, joked that the secret is the seventh and the ninth. Over a C chord, a sung B is the seventh, a D the ninth, and he does use a lot of those notes. Beato told Sting he calls them surprise tones; Sting liked the word. Notes outside the chord, dissonant against what is being played, create emotion. Dissonance equals emotion. Beato wants music that depresses him. Lex hears melancholy as the other side of happiness, a longing with hope in it, the private connection of being alone in a car and having to pull over. Kurt Cobain, on *In Utero*, in "Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle": "I miss the comfort of being sad." Beato's reaction was yes. That is it. Pearl Jam's "Black," the line about a beautiful life in somebody else's sky — "why, why, why can't it be mine" — hits him the same way, and Eddie Vedder's delivery makes it heavier.

Greatest frontmen, from Beato: Freddie Mercury, Robert Plant, Steven Tyler, Jim Morrison, Roger Daltrey. Lex adds James Hetfield, then nominates Metallica's September 1991 Moscow show as the greatest concert of all time, months before the Soviet Union collapsed, on a bill with AC/DC and Pantera. Some reports say 500,000; Lex calls that ridiculous for a free concert and puts the crowd over a million, likely 1.5 to 1.6. The set — Enter Sandman, Creeping Death, Harvester of Sorrow, Fade to Black, Sad but True, Master of Puppets, Seek and Destroy, For Whom the Bell Tolls, One, Whiplash — is, Beato says, his kind of set. The Black Album had just come out. Politics, fear, and a band at peak aligned in a way that only that time, that place, and those ten songs could hold. Beato would rather hear people in small clubs, or in the studio. He still grants the historic exception.

Lex's other candidate for greatest concert is the premiere of Beethoven's Ninth. He came to the personal story through the film *Immortal Beloved*, with Gary Oldman, and then to the fact that Beethoven was already deaf when he began the piece: some thirty-five to forty minutes of orchestra and chorus, edited entirely in his head. At the premiere he had to be turned around to see the applause. Beato keeps asking what would motivate you to write music you can never hear except inwardly, sick as Beethoven often was, while a flute in the next field was audible to everyone but him. The Heiligenstadt Testament, a letter to his brothers from 1802 found in his desk after he died, is full of shame and humiliation: why him, of all people, when hearing mattered so much.

Doing that work, Beato argues, requires perfect pitch. Without it you cannot hold specific pitches in the mind well enough to compose in silence. He thinks most of the great composers had it; Brahms, from what he knows, may be the exception. Beethoven sometimes bit a stick against the piano's soundboard and felt the vibrations in his skull. Lex adds the political wound: Beethoven had supported Napoleon as the French Revolution's promise of a world without kings, then watched him become an authoritarian, and still never lost a complicated fascination. The Ninth ends in the Ode to Joy, not as irony, as a call for peace in the pause after the Napoleonic Wars and before wars Beethoven could not see coming. Beato has spent many hours on that fact.

Lex's piano dragon is the third movement of the Moonlight Sonata; he can play the first and has always told himself he will never be good enough for the third. "Never say never," Beato says. Lex jokes that if he slays that dragon, maybe Tom Waits will email him. Waits is the guest he has wanted for years and has, at this point, half given up on. Beato's counsel: once you give up, it happens. Then Bach. Beato's claim is absolute: Bach is the greatest composer and musician of all time, and every famous songwriter is influenced by him. Sting and Dominic Miller told him they go to Bach every day for practice. In his lifetime Bach was barely known beyond Eisenach, where he was born, and Leipzig, where he spent years, though great musicians knew. Manuscripts were hard to find. Mendelssohn's parents collected them; at twenty, Mendelssohn got a score of the *St. Matthew Passion* and conducted it in Berlin on March 11, 1829, returning it to public view. Mozart and Beethoven studied both books of the *Well-Tempered Clavier*. The contrapuntal complexity, Beato says, has not been matched.

Bach had twenty children; only ten survived to adulthood. He lost both parents at nine, within nine months of each other, and went to live with an older brother. He was extremely productive. He did not write "Master of Puppets," Beato jokes, but he wrote some powerful music. Lex used to try to explain that riff's brilliance to music teachers: sometimes a good riff is greater than a whole composition. Beato agrees. Every time he tries a new amplifier, "Master of Puppets" is the first thing he plays. In a guitar store he is the person who walks in and plays Metallica, or Alice in Chains, or something in drop D, Tool, some kind of metal, because he needs a heavy riff to hear whether the bottom end is tight.

Beato started making AI-music videos in 2023, inventing fake artists — Eli Mercer; for CBS, Sadie Winters and a song called "Walking Away" — to show what Suno and similar tools could do. His pipeline was ChatGPT for cover art, Claude for lyrics (much stronger than Suno's), then lyrics into Suno for the track. People freaked out about replacement. His cooler take is that the people who will benefit are already great songwriters, because you have to recognize when the model spits out something good. He has created about 130 song ideas. Three were good. Lyrics, Lex thinks, are still where the human edge lives: sophistication without surprise, or surprise that turns cringe, is the usual miss.

The first time he played a Suno song in the kitchen, his youngest, Layla, asked why he was listening to AI. It took him four or five days to hear what the kids heard: artifacts in the vocal reverb, a failure of ambience, models trained on low-bitrate MP3s. Later, in the car, her line became "Is this AI? It sounds like it could be." For an NPR piece he made "Neon Ghosts"; Layla asked him to solo the vocal, then said it was really realistic, hard to tell even isolated. Lex does not want an AI B.B. King. If he knew AI had been in that process, he would tune out. He does not think that is curmudgeonly. He thinks people want authenticity. Beato will not use AI to make his own music, because it is boring. Every three or four months he sits down, prompts a few songs, checks the progress, and feels nothing. Lex uses AI for code, where the code is not the product. When the product *is* the generated thing, the culture will get bored of one-click hits and go looking for something raw. Beato's kids spot AI video a mile away, say boring, and start to disengage from the platforms. YouTube is decent at whack-a-mole. The mole keeps coming.

A breakdown of Sabrina Carpenter's "Manchild" became a small industry fight. Credits include Jack Antonoff, Amy Allen, Carpenter, and others. At an awards show someone relayed that an old guy on YouTube — Beato — had said Carpenter had little to do with the song; the reply was that she wrote everything. Beato's question: then why are the rest of you on the split? He is angry about two habits. Songs of the Year with ten or eleven writers. And interpolations, which used to be called stealing, plus records built on samples — Doechii lifting a Gotye track, removing the original melody, singing a new one over a song that already worked, which also already worked in 2011, and in Luiz Bonfá's 1967 version. It saves time. You do not have to make a track. Lex thinks the target should be the machinery, not the musicians: Bruno Mars, Billie Eilish and Finneas, Taylor Swift, who Beato agrees works on her own songs and never has more than two co-writers. Doechii's album, he adds, has actually good songs. The question is why *that* one floated to the top.

Beato's channel will be ten years old in June, and he has fought the major labels' Content ID systems from day one. Early on, playing music in a YouTube video meant blocks: Guns N' Roses, AC/DC, Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin, some of that still true. Then a skateboarder drinking Ocean Spray to Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams" on TikTok sent the song back to number one, and labels switched from blocking to demonetizing. Twenty seconds in a one-hour video can send the whole video's revenue to the claimant. After his Rick Rubin interview, Beato hired a lawyer — another YouTuber, not cheap — who reviewed about 2,100 videos, called every claim fair use, and has now beaten 4,000 Content ID claims without a loss. A Top 20 solos video draws twenty claims, from the sound recording or, if Beato plays the part himself, from the publisher. Third parties scrape big channels with AI because that is where the views are. The system works because most YouTubers never dispute; they are afraid of losing the channel. It took Beato nearly a decade to start fighting. If it is fair use, he says, fight.

Spotify, in one sentence: it turned music into a commodity, like turning on a water faucet. He likes play counts as a signal — a billion streams still means a massive hit, and few songs get there. He dislikes how artists are paid, now sharing a pool with podcasts, and how algorithms pigeonhole listeners in one genre. Radio programmers used to play what they liked; you might hear a new Soundgarden record by accident. Lex still uses Spotify Radio — Rage Against the Machine when he works out — and does discover artists. What disappeared is listening to a Led Zeppelin album all the way through in the car. Beato kept his 2005 iTunes library, CDs ripped to the computer. In interviews he plays WAV files, not streams. When he talked with mixer Andy Wallace, comments raved about how the songs sounded. Part of that is Wallace. Part is original rips, not Spotify remasters with extra top end.

The studio is Pro Tools, also Logic and Ableton, Mac only. If there had been no Mac, he says, he would not be sitting there: when his band was on UMG, the label bought him a G3, an SM7, and Pro Tools Digi 001, the first prosumer system, and that is how he learned editing, video, and producing. He travels with Neural DSP — he just filmed at their Helsinki HQ; CEO Doug Castro is a friend — plus a Kemper, an Axe-Fx, a Helix. At home he has about a hundred real amps, maybe ninety-five, down from more, because each has to do one thing extremely well or he sells it. A modded Marshall JCM800 for a certain midrange; Mesa/Boogie for scooped Metallica or Dream Theater; Vox AC30 for Brian May or the Edge. He could get by with seventy-five. Guitars are old-school Gibson, Fender, PRS. Three nice acoustics: a 1957 Gibson Country Western he has played for thirty-odd years, a Gibson J-45, a Martin D-28, plus a Guild twelve-string and a Guild in Nashville tuning — E, A, D, and G up an octave. Gilmour wrote the chorus of "Comfortably Numb" on Nashville tuning with the low E up two octaves. Beato does not choose guitars by feel; they are all set up to play the same. He chooses by the sound the part needs. His signature is a double-cut Les Paul Special with P-90s, five years in. Lex, who lives next to a shop in Cambridge and fell in love at first sight with a silver American Strat, uses BIAS FX and apologizes. Beato uses sims too. He had just received John Mayer's Neural DSP plugin, modeled from Mayer's amps, which Mayer said sounds like his. They have known each other since Mayer was in Atlanta in the early 2000s. Beato thinks Mayer is one of the great living guitarists, and one who celebrates other people's playing.

The advice from a man who started YouTube in his mid-fifties is almost blunt: somebody has to be successful, so why not you. He did not set out to make a channel. The Dylan video exploded; working musicians and conservatories wrote asking how to teach that; he could not teach Dylan's gift, but he could teach relative pitch, so he made videos so he would not have to answer every email. His wife asked what he was doing. First month 4,000 subscribers, then another 4,000; 100,000 in a year, 200,000 six months later, 300,000 three months after that. He had assumed nobody would watch an old white-haired guy. Wrong. The rule that did not change: make videos on what he is actually interested in. Lex's gloss is that young platforms teach people to chase clicks, while Beato spent decades getting good offline — classical bass, a jazz-guitar master's from New England Conservatory, five years teaching jazz studies from 1987 to 1992, a 1992 PolyGram publishing deal, producing from thirty-seven with no engineering background, then editing, then interviewing, then Shorts, then his own thumbnails. From 1999 until the Dylan video in December 2015 he would not let bands photograph him. There were almost no pictures of him on the internet. He still says never waste a friendship: siblings multiple times a week, two sisters almost every night, friends from every era, visited when he can. Nothing means more than family and the friendships you keep. Music's job, he thinks, is to enlighten people and become the soundtrack of their lives. Creating it is one of the greatest things humans ever did. Lex leaves Nietzsche on the table: without music, life would be a mistake.