208 | Rick Beato on the Theory of Popular Music

0:00:00.5 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. It's a well-known trope that there is a connection between music and mathematics. It's never quite made sure what exactly this connection is, but certainly scientists love music as a general rule. Albert Einstein, very famously, was a violinist and so forth. I think that it there's more to it than just the idea that math involves numbers or counting, right? That's certainly part of it. You have a time signature. You have certain numbers of beats, certain numbers of notes per measure and so forth, but it goes more deep than that. I think that there is not just a mathematics of music, but there is a theory of music. This is not my idea, right? There's a whole field of study called music theory. Well, I guess my point is that scientists love theory. Even experimental scientists love the idea that there is something out there in the world that we can think about in a systematic way, talk about it, understand why it works the way it does. And music absolutely falls into that category. So, today's episode, we're very happy to have Rick Beato on the show. Rick has become famous on YouTube where you probably have seen him, many of you have seen him.

0:01:12.9 SC: He started out as a musician, as a music professor. He's taught at places like the Berklee College of Music, and as a music producer. But then he started making these videos on YouTube where he first started by explaining music theory, explaining chords and progressions and so forth, to people on YouTube. And then he applied his knowledge of music theory and music production to explaining popular music, why certain songs work. My favorite subset in his YouTube videos is the series called, "What makes this song great?" And to me, even though it's about music, this is quintessentially Mindscapey material because it's taking something we all know about, we all experience music, and it's trying to understand it at a deeper level. It's not just, "This song is great," it's "What makes this song great?" Then you dive into why this chord progression goes the way it does. Why this change of tempo or this change of mode is effective in this particular place. And as we talk about on this episode, there's a connection between the psychology of music and the science of it, right? Certain things are very well known to cause certain emotional reactions. This chord change will make you sad. This key is very upbeat. Why is that?

0:02:28.5 SC: And part of it is, we don't know. But from the practitioner's point of view, it's just fascinating how we can take these different ingredients and put them together to cause an effect. And then of course, Rick also has opinions and he shares knowledge about questions like, "Why is there a certain chord progression that seems to dominate all the popular music?" And he has very interesting insights to the extent that it doesn't need to be that way. This is a choice that the music industry has made. So, he's a great explainer of things in a way that it is perfectly suited to this audience. And so, I think that this is an episode that everyone is really going to like even if it's a tiny bit of a departure from our usual affair. So, let's go.

[music]

0:03:25.2 SC: Rick Beato, welcome to the Mindscape podcast.

0:03:28.0 Rick Beato: Thanks, Sean, appreciate it.

0:03:30.4 SC: So, I have to ask a semi-personal question to start here like if 10 years ago, someone had said, "Oh, yeah, you're gonna be a very successful YouTube star," [chuckle] would you even have known what that meant? Would that have been in your scope of possibilities?

0:03:44.6 RB: No, the only thing I used YouTube for was to send videos to my mom [chuckle] of my kids. That's pretty much what YouTube was... That's what it was.

0:03:56.0 SC: The very first thing I used YouTube for was looking at old music performances, right? People put all of these things online, that was great. People you couldn't see live, suddenly you could see on YouTube.

0:04:07.3 RB: And my mom used to send me guitar videos...

0:04:11.4 SC: Oh, okay.

0:04:12.3 RB: Of people that she would find online, or music videos, same thing.

0:04:15.8 SC: Right, right.

0:04:16.5 RB: But that's pretty much what I used YouTube for.

0:04:20.7 SC: People complain about the internet in a lot of ways and social media and how it's denigrating society or dragging us down. But there's just so much good in it that I can't really get on the side of complaining. It's a balance, but there's a lot of good going on.

0:04:33.9 RB: I agree.

0:04:35.6 SC: And so, how did it happen? I think I know the answer to this story, but how did you get into making YouTube videos about music?

0:04:43.1 RB: So, I had this intern named Rhett Shull. Rhett is now a YouTuber himself. He's a guitar player. He was... Had been interning with me since probably 2013 or so, and I'd started my channel in 2016, almost exactly six years ago. It was June 8th. I made my first video of 2016.

0:05:01.5 SC: Okay.

0:05:01.6 RB: And in December of 2015, I did a video. A friend of mine asked me to make a video of my son, a guy that I... A guy named Shane that I was producing, a country artist, and my son Dylan. I was saying, "Oh, Dylan's got perfect pitch," and I played these really complex chords and Shane was like, "Oh, make a video of that so I can show my wife, Angie." And I said, "Okay," and so I just... I put it on Facebook, on my personal Facebook.

0:05:21.6 SC: Okay. Yeah.

0:05:22.5 RB: Sent Shane a link and I went off to my... I was on the school board at my kid's school, went off to my school board meeting and I came back and Shane says, "That video you put up, it's got 5,000 views." I said, "What?"

[laughter]

0:05:41.7 RB: I was like, "On Facebook? What?"

0:05:43.1 SC: 5,000.

0:05:43.6 RB: He says, "I think it's a viral video." I said, "No way." And the next day, he calls me in the morning, he says, "It's got 22,000 views." I said, "It's unbelievable." Then by the next... By that night, it had a million and it was getting 10,000 views a minute and stuff, and got 20 something million, 23 million views, something like that and... But that was on Facebook, and Facebook at that time was kind of like TikTok is now. You could have these really massive viral video. And so, we did a couple of videos like that. And six months later is when Rhett suggests to me, he said, "You should be a YouTuber." I was like, "What? Nobody's gonna watch a white-haired guy on YouTube."

[chuckle]

0:06:26.0 RB: And what I wanna make videos about music theory, history, whatever, film scoring, whatever you... And that's what I started doing. So, I started with music theory and nothing to do with music production or rock music or pop music or anything that I had been making my living at for the last 20 years. It was all stuff when I was a college professor in my 20s. I taught jazz studies. I have a masters in... A Master's degree from New England Conservatory in jazz studies. I have an undergraduate degree in classical bass. So, I have a pretty wide knowledge base from all different types of music, all different genres. And so, that's kind of how it started. I just started with one video and just kept making them. Now, I'm up to 1,000 videos.

0:07:15.8 SC: And that 1,000 videos, I cannot even imagine. I'm up to a little over 200 podcasts and it's just exhausting. So, [chuckle] kudos to you.

0:07:25.2 RB: Exactly.

0:07:27.0 SC: [chuckle] Doing the video thing. But the feature... The subject matter of that first video is kind of interesting, right? Why did it become viral? Is it just because people are fascinated by the idea of perfect pitch? Maybe you should remind us what perfect pitch is for those who are not music experts.

0:07:40.2 RB: Perfect pitch is to... When the ability to identify any pitch without a reference tone. So, my son Dylan can hear a 12-note chord and tell you, not only what every note is so quickly, but he can tell you... At the time when he was eight years old, he could say, "Oh, it's an Eadd9 over F major." Specifically what the notes were, which would be... And the cord voicing might be from the bottom up, C, F, A, B, E, F# G#. So, here's this E, B, F#, G#, and that's Eadd9 in inversion and then F major is in inversion C, F, A. And the fact that he could listen to it, he could pick it out, separate the two things and name them instantly is so beyond just regular perfect pitch 'cause it involves music theory. So, it's an eight-year-old kid that not only has perfect pitch, but he's got this... He's got the music theory part of it.

0:08:41.0 SC: It has to help that he's the offspring of a music producer/professor [chuckle]

0:08:48.9 RB: Well, yeah. So, when I realized he had perfect pitch when he was about three and a half, I thought, "Oh, I'm gonna teach Dylan music theory," 'cause Dylan had an incredibly good memory too that... I remember I did a... I did a thing. I said to him, "Dylan... " He wanted me to buy him these cup stacking things, this thing he did in his gym class. And I looked and it was like 40 bucks for these cups that have no bottoms in them, and you stack them as fast as you can and stuff. I said, "That's ridiculous. It's so expensive." And he's like... And then he said, "Can I do something for it?" I said, "Okay." And we had just watched this Vsauce video about 52 factorial and the amount of possibilities of a deck of playing cards. And I go, "Alexa, what is 52 factorial?" And it goes, "80 unvigintillion," [chuckle] blah, blah, blah, and it names this 87 digit number. And I said, "If you can recite this Dylan, I'll buy this for you." He goes, "Oh, no problem. Record it for me." So I say it again, I record it on my phone. He goes, "Just send it to me." He goes to his room for about two minutes and he comes back. He says, "Okay, I got it."

0:09:58.0 SC: [laughter]

0:09:58.1 RB: And I said, "No way." And he recited it. Then I was like, "Wait, how do I check?" I said, "Is that right?"

0:10:04.9 SC: It doesn't matter.

0:10:05.9 RB: So, then I had to listen back and then he said, "I'm gonna write it down." And he wrote it... I have... We had a whiteboard in the kitchen at the time, then he wrote it down for me, the 87 digits. He's like, "Yeah, no sweat." And then I recorded him doing it... I said, "Well, okay, make a video with me."

0:10:19.8 SC: But he also got lucky 'cause as I recall, you have a video explaining how adults who don't have perfect pitch cannot develop it, to just... This is not gonna happen. It's an early onset skill.

0:10:32.0 RB: Well, this is my theory, anyways. My theory is that people develop it when they develop language, and I call it native music fluency 'cause your native language is the one that you learn as a baby. Whatever languages you learn as a baby, you retain and perfect pitch is the same thing.

0:10:49.3 SC: But people can learn... You do ear training and music training, so people can learn relative pitches? Is that the idea?

0:10:57.6 RB: They can learn relative pitch where they... Where it's pretty much, if you're really good at it, like having perfect pitch.

0:11:01.7 SC: Yeah, okay. And then...

0:11:05.3 RB: So...

0:11:05.4 SC: So, I guess this is what... What I wanna get into is just this intersection of music theory and popular music, and the big question... Well, let me put it this way. When I was in junior high school, we had math... Sorry, music class, and we had a music teacher, Mr. Bell. I still remember his name.

0:11:20.6 RB: Okay, good name.

0:11:22.9 SC: And unlike all the... Yeah, exactly. All the previous... Unlike the previous music teachers I had, he used pop music to explain what he was talking about. And he explained to us that popular songs have a structure, intro, verse, chorus, and there's the instrumental part. And every group has a rhythm section, and then you have the lead instruments and singers. And as a budding physicist at the time, like the idea there was a theory, even at that super simple level, there was a theory of the structure for a song totally changed the way that I thought about music. And is that a fair, sort of, model for what you're trying to spread more widely to the people out there on YouTube?

0:12:03.5 RB: Absolutely, absolutely. I try to teach people things that are of whatever the genre of music is, whether it's the structure of a song, whether it's... If it's a how to listen to a jazz tune, how motifs are repeated and developed, or... I just interviewed Bernard Purdie who's a famous drummer that played with Aretha Franklin and Steely Dan. And he has a drum beat called the Purdie Shuffle that a lot of people... Jeff Porcaro from Toto used for Rosanna. It's a variation of the Purdie Shuffle, or John Bonham from Led Zeppelin used it on Fool in the Rain, his own version of it. And I interviewed Bernard in New York last week, and he's 79 years old. And I asked him about how he mic'd his drums, how he taped his drums to deaden the overtones, and then he pulled off his hi-hat. I started filming as soon as he came in there before we even had the camera set. I'm filming on my phone. He said, "Oh, this hi-hat, this is no good." The way they make the clutch on the hi-hat, it's the thing that holds the hi-hat to the top cymbal. And he says, "These are too long now and they produce too many overtones."

0:13:27.7 RB: And it's so fascinating to talk to a guy that was around when people were developing the sounds of how drums were recorded from the '60s to the '70s. How they went from three microphones to six microphones or seven microphones, and from mono to stereo. And it's all part of the history of music, the history of recording. So, it's all these things I try to teach simultaneously. And if there's the historical part of it, that's really important to preserve, so...

0:14:03.6 SC: Are you a believer that people can appreciate music perfectly well without knowing any theory at all, but you appreciate it in a different way if you do? Is that fair?

0:14:11.5 RB: Yes. Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, music touches people in different ways. I don't ever think about the theory of a song that I like. Never even occurs to me. I only think of it if I have to explain it to someone.

0:14:25.4 SC: Right. Right, okay, so you yourself don't really...

0:14:28.5 RB: Me, myself, I made a video on the song Josie by Steely Dan. This is a couple of months ago, about the intro. I call it the weirdest intro of all time or something like that [chuckle] And I started... And the video was very short, I just did the intro. And I thought, "Well I need to break down the whole song." And I thought to myself, "I've never learned this song. I've been listening to it for 45 years. It's so odd. Why have I never figured it out?" Because I just enjoy listening to it.

0:14:58.6 SC: Yeah, good. And then did you discover reasons why it was good in the process of taking it apart and thinking about it?

0:15:07.6 RB: I discovered that it was even weirder than [laughter] I thought. I thought to myself, "How would you come up with something like that?" It's so... There's a randomness to it that sounds so good, that the parts sound so good together. This did not fit with any kind of theory. This is purely them experimenting with things that they thought sounded good together.

0:15:32.5 SC: Perfectly legitimate way of doing it. And I wanna get into... Well, let me just ask it right now. Do you think that the most successful popular songwriters and musicians... What percentage of them know any music theory at all versus being completely intuitive musicians, and what percentage are highly-trained in that stuff?

0:15:54.1 RB: I think that people know a lot more music theory. They might not know the names for them, but they know how things are put together. For example, does Elton John... Well, Elton John, this may be a bad example. I did a breakdown of Tiny Dancer last week, and Elton John uses a lot of chord inversions. Now, does he know they're chord inversions? Of course he does 'cause he is doing them on purpose. He'll play a G7 chord with a B in the bass, and he moves it up to a D in the bass. And he obviously knows... He's got... One hand's playing the chord as GBDF, and so he plays the B in the bass and D in the bass. He knows what notes are in the chord 'cause he's playing it in his right hand. So, he knows that these other notes are cool bass notes to use, they're inversions. But does he know that with the B in the bass, it's a first inversion? Maybe not.

0:16:47.8 SC: Maybe not. We don't know, yeah.

0:16:49.3 RB: Maybe he doesn't know what that's called. It doesn't matter. He knows that it sounds good.

0:16:52.5 SC: Right.

0:16:52.8 RB: That's the intuition part.

0:16:54.8 SC: And it's how...

0:16:55.2 RB: But also the progressions are very sophisticated, Sean, too. He goes to all these different places using his intuition, but, he has to know what the chords are to come up with them, put them together too. So it's kinda [0:17:09.9] ____.

0:17:10.5 SC: And that intuition is trained by the fact that we grow up listening to music, right? It's not like if you were put on a desert island as a baby, you would figure all this out. But you sort of pick up things from the air, and even if you don't, like you say, know the names for them. Certain things sound good and you figure that out.

0:17:24.3 RB: Yes. A great thing that I learned from watching The Beatles: Get Back documentary was that the guys in the band have phenomenally good memories. For example, any time that they would go into a cover song, Paul McCartney would start one or John Lennon, they would play it and they would never make mistakes.

[laughter]

0:17:46.5 RB: When John Lennon went to... And these are songs that they played back in the '50s and early '60s when they were in Hamburg. They knew a thousand songs. Then when John Lennon would say, "Oh, this needs an organ part," he'd go over and sit down at the Lowrey organ they had. I think that's what they had in the video. And he didn't ask Paul McCartney, "What are the chord changes?" He sat down and just played the right chords and didn't make any mistakes ever. Now, if I'm narrating this as the video's going out, I'd be saying some things like, "Notice that John Lennon just sat down at this. They're writing the song. He sits down at the keyboard. He doesn't ask what the chords are or anything. He just sits and starts playing and never makes a mistake."

[chuckle.

0:18:29.0 RB: And the guys were just... They were geniuses.

0:18:33.7 SC: Yeah, it's not fair. They were pretty good. The rest of us can't always keep up, but let me just do a very little bit of asking about what music theory is or what it sort of comes down to in modern Western music. There's a lot to cover. I will encourage everyone to go to your channel because you cover it all, but the... It takes a long time to get there, so I guess octaves and scales are probably the very first thing one should think about and I've always had this really basic question. So we have an octave, that makes sense to me. At the math-y level, there's a note and there's another note with twice the frequency, but then we divide it up into 12 intervals or 11 intervals, I guess, and okay, so we can do that and it's equally spaced and there's algorithm in there, and so I even get that, but then we pick out some subset of those 11 notes and call it a scale. A major scale, a minor scale, blues scale or whatever. So who says... Who decides that we should pick out those notes? Is that cultural? Is there some deep mathematical reason why we do that or is it just, "Yeah, it sounds good. Let's not ask too many questions."

0:19:48.7 RB: When equal temperament came into a common use...

0:19:58.0 SC: So that's equal temperament is equal spaces between the notes.

0:20:01.6 RB: Yeah, yeah, so during the baroque era, Bach has these two different cycles of altered tempered Clavier. Two books, Book 1 and Book 2. The first book was written in 1722. The second book was written in 1742. So when he was 37 and 57 years old, and there's 24 Preludes and 24 Fugues in each, so they're in each key, and this is when we were able to play in every key and modulate anywhere and have the instruments not be out of tune as they would be in some of their earlier temperaments that they had. So who decided on this stuff? As far as the names of what to call them, there were early music theorists that came up with some of these names, but some of the names of the modes were... Go back to Pythagoras, I believe.

0:20:55.9 SC: Yeah. [chuckle] But I guess what I'm asking is less about the name than the specific subset of notes that make up the major scale. So there's some half steps and some whole steps, and it sounds good when you play them together, sometimes you're going up by a little bit, sometimes you're going up by a lot, and it sounds good. Is there an understanding of why that sounds good, or do we just say, "This is how this sounds, let's put it to work"?

0:21:26.6 RB: Okay, this is interesting. This is an interesting question, an interesting topic. So when my girls were young, well, they're still pretty young, I was in the car and I said, "Let me play you something." And I played the music to Psycho. The slasher... The shower scene...

[vocalization]

0:21:50.4 RB: And I said, "What do you think?" "That sounds scary." Okay, now they don't know what the movie is. They have no idea what this is. Why does that sound scary? Well, it sounds scary because it is a cluster that's called an X-cell. So it's four chromatic notes. They're not played consecutively chromatic, they're in different octaves. They're dispersed in different octaves, but they give... Because of the way the overtone series works, there's a lot of beating of intervals, 'cause you have these all these close... It may not be a half-step, it may be a minor nine interval, which is a half-step expanded, so it could be from C to C-sharp up the octave, so that would be a minor nine as opposed to C, right next to C-sharp would be a minor second interval. And then maybe you have a B in there, and that's a major 7th interval, so you have all these beating intervals that are beating really quickly, and it gives a very tense sound and it just sounds scary.

[laughter]

0:22:48.0 RB: And they don't know any theory or anything, but they know that it sounds scary to them, so what does that mean? I'm not sure what that means, but I think it means that certain combinations of notes together have inherent properties that will produce a certain emotional response from a human.

0:23:12.1 SC: Yeah, that's exactly why I want to dig into this.

0:23:14.0 RB: It probably differs from culture to culture.

0:23:16.4 SC: It could. Yeah, I bet that there is both some commonalities and some differences from culture to culture, because some of the reasons why there might be commonalities is there is math behind it. I promised there'd be no math or physics, but there is the idea that notes sound good if there are a ratio of a half or a third or four-fifths next to each other, whereas if they're a ratio of 11-12ths, you're gonna get a little jumpy in some sense. And maybe that helps explain why scales fit together in nice ways, and if you're teaching someone to improvise, just stay in the scale, whatever you play will sound pretty good.

0:23:52.4 RB: Right. Yes, you're absolutely correct with that.

0:23:58.4 SC: And when we're listening... Okay, and just tell the audience, what are the scales people should know about? Everyone says there are major scales and minor scales. Is that enough or should the semi-sophisticated pop music listener be a little bit more knowledgeable?

0:24:15.0 RB: Well, those are pretty much the main scales that people should know, but there are certain scales, there are modes that are commonly used in pop music, like the Mixolydian mode that most rock songs are based on.

0:24:33.5 SC: Can you explain what a mode is?

0:24:35.9 RB: Mixolydian mode would be a major scale, but with a flattened 7th. So if you start in C, so C, D, E, F, G, A, B-flat-C as opposed to B natural C. So that's a Mixolydian scale, and a lot of rock chord progressions are based on the Mixolydian scale or melodies are. And the Lydian scale is another mode that's very common in rock music. The first part on Don't Stand So Close To Me or Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic by the Police are both examples of melodies that are Lydian melodies.

0:25:17.4 SC: So I guess, I thought... Maybe I'm totally wrong about this, or maybe it's equivalent. I thought that a mode was the same set of notes, but with a different starting point. Rather than starting at C major, you go up. But maybe if you just shift, it's equivalent.

0:25:29.1 RB: It is. It is, it is. Yes. So Lydian is the fourth mode of the major scale. So every scale, there... I call them parent scales. There's really a group of parent scales. There's the major scale. The minor scale's within the major scale. It's the Aeolian mode is really the natural minor scale.

0:25:49.5 SC: Oh, good.

0:25:50.1 RB: But you have other types of minor scales. You have the melodic minor and the harmonic minor scale. Then you have the harmonic major and the double harmonic major scale. Those are pretty much the... All the parent scales and all modes are derived from those five different parent scales.

0:26:06.8 SC: And if you're listening to a song, could you identify what scale it is taking advantage of?

0:26:12.1 RB: Yeah.

0:26:13.6 SC: Okay. [chuckle]

0:26:13.8 RB: Yeah. You can pretty much just play the chord progression, or you can just sing the scale that the melody is using and know if you can sing the starting note of the base of the root note of the chord and sing the scale, you know what the notes are... What mode it comes from or what scale it comes from.

0:26:33.3 SC: And, again, just to be super naive about this, there's also what key the song is in, which is a different question.

0:26:41.0 RB: Yeah. So the key refers to how many sharps or flats it has, and whether it's major or minor. There are 12 major keys and 12 minor keys. And they have a key signature associated with them. And they go around this thing called the circle of fifths. So the circle of fifths would be, if you go in the sharp direction, is C, G, D, A, E, B, F-sharp or G-flat, then D-flat, A-flat, E-flat, B-flat, F, and then you're back to C. So that's the circle of fifths. And it starts with C has zero sharps or flats, the key of G has one sharp, D major has...

0:27:18.2 SC: Right.

0:27:19.0 RB: G major has one sharp. D majors has two sharps. If you go in the flat direction, F major has one flat, B-flat major has two flats, E-flat major has three flats. And it's just something that you commit to memory. These are the basic building blocks of music theory. I usually start with key centers, then I teach people scales and how to build chords, how to build basic major, minor chords.

0:27:42.5 SC: And same question for keys as for scales. Can you listen to a song and know what key it's in, or do you need perfect pitch to be able to do that?

0:27:51.2 RB: Well, Dylan can tell you what key it's in, but I can tell you that it's in a major key or a minor key, or it's in a mode, but I don't know, unless I have a reference tone, I don't know the exact key it's in. Although, if I'm hearing a guitar, I can pretty much tell you what key it's in. If I'm listening to somebody play on guitar, I can tell you what the chords are and things like that. I can recognize the shapes of them.

0:28:16.2 SC: And that's just mostly from super duper familiarity with playing and watching other people play the guitar?

0:28:21.0 RB: Yeah. I call it a... It's a collection of recognized sounds.

0:28:25.8 SC: Okay.

0:28:26.2 RB: It's a vocabulary of recognized sounds. Pitch memory, tonal memory, whatever you wanna call it, it's... You recognize what a D major chord on guitar sounds like just by hearing it, or an E minor chord or A major. They just have a certain sound to them. You can recognize the shapes. And most people that are... That have played for a long time can instantly recognize those shapes.

0:28:51.6 SC: Okay, okay. Good. I got it. And so that's all the music theory I wanted to cover, mostly to inspire people to go watch your videos and learn more details, so...

0:29:00.7 RB: And they're way more interesting than what I just described there, so...

0:29:03.6 SC: Well, you need to know what you need to know, right? It's like you need to learn...

0:29:07.0 RB: That's right.

0:29:08.3 SC: The scales, the keys, the chords. Good. And the circle of fifths. Very, very important. But what I wanna get into then, is the connection between these ideas and how the song makes us feel, how we react to it. Is there any sense... So if I have a key, if a song is played in a key, you'll often hear musicians say, "Could we play in a different key? My fingers don't go that way," or whatever. Is the feeling of the song changed by going to a different key? Isn't it, in some sense, just increasing the pitch of every note by the same amount in some very vague understanding?

0:29:45.1 RB: That's a great question. Now, I would say yes, and I don't have perfect pitch, but I think that certain keys have certain sounds to them. People with perfect pitch really say that that's the case.

0:29:58.4 SC: Okay. [chuckle]

0:30:02.5 RB: Certain keys, A major is a very bright key, for example, or D major is a very bright key, and D-flat minor is a very kind of dark key or... There's certain keys that if you try to transpose a song to a particular key, where to me, it just sounds weird. I went to see a... I won't say who the artist is. It was a very famous duo from the '80s back about four years ago or so. And I went to the show, and they were playing their hits. Now, like I said, I don't have a perfect pitch, but they were playing them tuned down so far that they didn't even sound like the songs. I couldn't even... I didn't even know what songs they were, Sean, and they were these famous hits. But because of their voices, 'cause they're older...

0:30:47.2 SC: Their voices had gotten lower, yeah.

0:30:49.4 RB: They needed to tune them down, and they just sounded so weird.

0:30:53.0 SC: Yeah. I think Joni Mitchell sounded better in the '80s and '90s than in the '60s because she lost the ability to get up so high. So, sometimes that can work against you. But it's really interesting, the famous quote, of course, Nigel Tufnel in Spinal Tap, saying that D minor is the saddest of all possible keys. And I still... I think maybe the connection with perfect pitch helps me understand a little bit, because whether we know it or not, it's not just the relationships and frequency between the notes, but the note affects us somehow. And that's at the heart of these keys having an effect.

0:31:26.6 RB: I think that's true. I absolutely believe that's true, yes, whether people know it or not. And everyone has a certain amount of this pitch memory, Sean, that is... They have a feeling that whether they realize it or not, a subconscious feeling of these things that affects them in certain ways, I think.

0:31:48.9 SC: Yeah. Okay, good. And then, okay, again, put it to use in some sense, if we know enough music theory, so we know some scales and some chords and so forth, there's a set of words I hear over and over again when you're giving your videos, you do this wonderful set of videos on what makes this song great, and often you will hear, well, because we go from this chord to this chord or we modulate from this key to this key, it gives us a sense of excitement or resolution, or nervousness or fright or whatever. How systematic is that? If I said I would like something that makes us feel melancholy, does that translate in your mind into a certain chord change or is it just you fool around to see what makes that work?

0:32:38.1 RB: Both.

0:32:38.3 SC: Okay. I believe that. [chuckle]

0:32:39.0 RB: I think you come up with this stuff by seeing what makes it work, but there are certain things, certain type melodies like, there are certain minor keys like Aeolian, which is natural minor that has a very melancholy sound to it. And the note in the natural minor, beyond the minor third of the chord, the flat six, which is one of the important notes of the scale that gives the Aeolian mode or the natural minor scale its flavour because it leads you down to the fifth, as opposed to the Dorian mode, a Dorian melody, it has a natural six and that leads you up to the flat seven. And when you have notes that are leading down to really strong anchor tones in the scale, the root or the fifth of the chord. So a flat second pulls you down to the root, and a lot of metal uses a lot of flat two chords and things like that. It has a really strong pull back down to the tonic, it has a dark sound. Whereas a sharp four leads you up to the fifth and a flat six leads you down to the fifth. So the sharp four from the Lydian scale, it has an uplifting, a celestial sound or other worldly sound. Whereas that flat six has a more melancholy, depressing sound, I think. I think most people think this too.

0:34:01.7 SC: Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense, except... Let's choose that single example that you mentioned of the flat two, I guess, that is useful in heavy metal? What is that? What's a flat second?

0:34:13.2 RB: Flat second would be, in the key of C, it would be a D flat. So just a half-step above the root. So it's not in the major scale, it's a step below what would be the second note if you go "do, re, mi, do, re" It'd be... I'm such a terrible singer here, if I had my guitar I can play it for you, which I do have my guitar. So there's your do. That's note C to D, instead of... That's a flat two.

0:34:48.7 SC: Got it. So it's just a single note.

[vocalization]

0:34:52.4 RB: Has a certain darkness to it that...

0:34:58.0 SC: [chuckle] Makes me think of the Batman song from Lego Batman.

0:35:00.8 RB: Exactly, exactly. So composers use these things to evoke certain feelings. Film composers, they know how to use these devices, these intervals within scales that will give the listeners a certain sense of, like I said, Lydian is otherworldly or celestial. Thomas Newman, the composer, great film composer, he used that. I was watching a talk that he was giving on YouTube and he said, he talked about the difference between the sharp four and the flat two. And the sharp four, it gives you a feel of hopefulness and things like that.

0:35:52.1 SC: I'm feeling very manipulated just by these frequencies. [chuckle] It's almost... Is there a worry that making it too mechanical to understand these things too well? I mean, I think the answer's no but I can see why people would be concerned.

0:36:04.5 RB: No, people just play the things and then they realize, every time I use that it has a celestial sound or a hopeful sound. And this is just tools in their repertoire that... It's not there to manipulate the listener, but I guess it is actually.

0:36:23.6 SC: Yeah.

0:36:23.8 RB: I think all songwriters do that.

0:36:25.6 SC: Sure. Sure. But it also speaks to this idea that you don't need to be trained in music theory to have these feelings in some sense. You talked about...

0:36:34.8 RB: No.

0:36:35.8 SC: The root note of the scale, that first note where you start. And is this connected to the concept that you raised in some of your videos about musical gravity, you wanna come back to that starting point.

0:36:48.1 RB: It's exactly what I'm talking about. Musical gravity, that certain keys, certain tones want to move.

0:37:01.1 SC: Right.

0:37:02.1 RB: Have a very strong pull to a certain pitch. Like I was saying, that flat two wants to move down to the root. And it's commonly used that way.

0:37:15.2 SC: Yeah, and it's interesting because it's not in the major scale. So this is... One thing I wanted to ask about was, the major scale is so common because the notes all more or less sound pretty good together, but then you get some interesting-ness by deviating from that, right, by taking something that's outside your expectation, and that the sort of heaviness of metal is one way to be interesting in that context.

0:37:40.9 RB: Yeah, so when I interviewed Sting back in November and Sting, I asked him about surprise in music. And he says, he goes, "That's funny that you use that term," he goes, "If I'm not surprised within the first eight bars, I stop listening."

0:37:58.8 RB: And the surprise meaning, going someplace that people aren't expecting. That's really important having some odd note that you go to that's unpredictable. "Oh, what is that?" And Joni Mitchell is a great example of a person that just always goes to these places that are just, whoa, wow, that's amazing. It's beautiful. Just incredible. Just intuitive ear that she had of going to these different... Modulating to different keys that you would never expect and these beautiful melodies that float on top of these incredible chord progressions that she comes up with, with these alternate tunings, and she's such a genius. Then she comes up with the lyrics that work with them.

0:38:47.1 SC: Yeah.

0:38:48.0 RB: And Sting is the same way. They just come up with these credible lyrics that go with these... All these things where it just goes to places you don't expect and that's what I love about music. I want to always be surprised.

0:39:04.5 SC: Well, while thinking about this podcast, I came up with a theory for the meaning of life. It's to explore little bits of dissonance and surprise and chromatic things off key, but then always to resolve to the tonic. That's my new theory of what we should be doing in our lives.

0:39:22.3 RB: There you go. No, that's true... That's always bringing it back. When you go outside somewhere, bringing it back to home base is really an important thing. Otherwise things don't feel like they're complete.

0:39:37.1 SC: And of course, we can overdo it so one of my favorite videos that you have is on the four chords that ruined pop music. What are these chords and how has the ruination taken place?

0:39:48.4 RB: The one, four, five and six chords. How has it taken place? Because there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of famous songs over the last 20 years that have been written with this exact same chord sequence or variations of the same sequence. It can be 4-1-6-5, 4-1-5-6, 1-4-5-6, 1-5-4-6, 1-6-5-4. Any of the permutations of those four chords are the four chords that ruined pop music.

0:40:26.8 SC: And we've all seen these videos of someone playing this chord progression and just singing different melodies over it and doing every song that's in the top 20.

0:40:35.5 RB: Yeah, exactly. And you don't see it as much these days. It's not used as much. It was used in all different genres of music. It was in pop, it was in rock, it was in country. But really from the late '90s to 2016, 2017, 2018, it was just used over and over and over. And one of the reasons I think is that people that worked at record labels, they didn't think that songs sounded like singles if they didn't use that chord progression. So the people that were in charge thought, "Oh, whether they knew it or not, they would just always think that songs that had that chord progression sounding like hits and those would be the singles.

0:41:23.0 SC: But what I loved about that video is that you did an experiment, you collected data, you said, "Let's pick some of the most successful hit songwriters in our lifetimes." The Beatles and Max Martin, who actually, I'll confess, I did not know Max Martin's name. But tell us who Max Martin is. Everyone knows who he is, even if they don't know his name.

0:41:43.7 RB: He's a Swedish composer, that pop songwriter producer that said... I'm not sure how many number one hits he's had now, probably in the high 20s or so, maybe 30.

0:41:56.1 SC: But he's not the artist. He gives these to other people and so we all know Max Martin songs, but we don't know that they are Max Martin songs if we're not in there now.

0:42:04.9 RB: That's right. And and he has very few songs that use that chord progression as The Beatles did. I think that The Beatles had only one song of their 27 number one songs, which was Let It Be, that had the 1-4-5-6 and even Let It Be used a few other chords beyond those.

0:42:20.0 SC: So it's not that you need to use those chords to make a hit, clearly if The Beatles and Max Martin didn't do it. But so you're saying this is more commentary on the music industry than it is on music theory?

0:42:32.3 RB: Correct, yes.

0:42:33.2 SC: And is this a lesson for young songwriters? Like should they try to march to the beat of their own drummer, as it were? And these are different chord progression?

0:42:43.9 RB: Yeah, and I think that people have moved on from that now, finally. I almost need to make a video about that. Have we seen the end of 1-4-5-6. And I haven't heard... I'm not hearing it a lot and maybe when I hear it again, I'll think to myself, "Wow, it's nice to hear that again."

0:43:04.1 SC: It reminds me that there's one music theory esque question that I had. So as a very naive music person, someone who loves it but doesn't know a lot. To me, the first thing is actually a melody in a song. But whenever you talk to musicians, they're always about the chord progression. And if I just knew the melody, could I figure out what the chord progression is, or is that an extra thing that is added in the particular track?

0:43:29.8 RB: No. You cannot figure out the chord progression from the melody unless it's Bach or Beethoven or a Classical. It depends what the melody is, but usually for pop songs, you can't tell what the chord progression is necessarily because there's a lot of different possibilities but...

0:43:49.3 SC: But there's a relationship? You wanna be singing songs that are either in or close to those chords or... I don't know, I'm making this up.

0:43:55.1 RB: Yeah, it depends on the song. Some songs really describe the chord progression. It really depends on the song, I guess. Some songs really describe the chord progression in the melody very clearly. A song that doesn't do it, for example, is Smells like Teen Spirit, which has an incredibly sophisticated melody, but it doesn't necessarily spell out the chords, whereas... Well, a song like Norwegian Wood by the Beatles, John Lennon's song is in one scale, so it really spells out the scale. It's in the Mixolydian mode, and it spells it out with the guitar part and with the vocal melody. So...

0:44:37.3 SC: Does this mean in principle that I could have the same melody over a different chord progression?

0:44:43.1 RB: Yes, absolutely. And people do that, it's called re-harmonization. You take a melody and you just put different chords under it.

0:44:48.6 SC: Oh, okay, good. I did not know that was allowed.

0:44:51.6 RB: Yes, that's fully allowed. And jazz players do it all the time.

0:44:55.7 SC: They do lots of crazy things. I love it. But is it just a stereotype, or is it true that there's a slightly higher level of musical sophistication for a typical jazz song than for a rock song?

0:45:07.0 RB: Usually, yes, yes. Depends on what rock song, but most jazz songs have more sophisticated chord progressions and melodies than rock songs.

0:45:18.9 SC: Okay, I'm glad that we were able to verify my prejudices along those lines.

0:45:24.1 RB: Yeah.

0:45:24.5 SC: I wanted to get into... It's interesting, because this is... I presume that this is most of what you do now, making YouTube videos, rather than...

0:45:32.5 RB: Yep.

0:45:35.4 SC: Okay. So there are some videos that are gonna be more popular than others. And I love the music theory explanations, but there's a great demand out there for top 10 lists. You know, best guitar solos of all time, and so forth. And so you do mix that in. Do you have an agenda when you do that, are you trying to teach people along with just making a provocative list, or is it just like, "I think this is fun, let's just go for it?"

0:45:58.8 RB: I use those lists to expose people to things that they would never heard. I always put things that are out in left field, that would never be on a top 20 or a top 10 list. I just did a video of the Top 20 Strangest Guitar Solos Ever, and it was basically an excuse to expose people to weird guitar solos by players that they wouldn't normally hear; like Allan Holdsworth was one of the people, who's a really... Allan passed away in 2016, but he was a really sophisticated progressive rock guitarist and instrumentalist, and amazing guitar virtuoso, and had really weird song structures and very, very advanced chord progressions that he would improvise over. And so it was my excuse to expose people to people like Allan Holdsworth, and a few of the people that I put in there that are out in left field, I used the video to draw people in and then expose them to the things that they wouldn't normally hear.

0:47:02.8 SC: Good, I think that's a great... I have the same philosophy of my podcast; try to mix in big names with people you've never heard of before.

0:47:09.2 RB: Right.

0:47:11.6 SC: But the other genre video that you come out with it that I love that I've already mentioned, or the What Makes This Song Great videos. And one of the things I just gotta ask while I have you here, you're often saying, "Oh, let's just play the drum track," or the backing vocals; like where do you get these individual tracks? Is their technology that will isolate them, or do you just know people who know people?

0:47:33.0 RB: There are some technologies that you can isolate some things if they are panned to the side or they're right in the center of the stereo image; there are pieces of software that will separate them. But I typically will get them... If the artist is in the video, I get them from the artist. I mean I had Brian May in my Bohemian Rhapsody video. People said, Where'd you get the tracks to Bohemian Rhapsody? From Brian May who's in the video.

[laughter]

0:48:00.2 RB: I had a video on Kiss From A Rose, and Seal is in the video. Where did you get the tracks from Kiss From A Rose? From Seal, he's in the video.

0:48:07.3 SC: That's... Okay.

0:48:09.2 RB: But pretty much all the ones that I play on that series are multi-tracks that I've... Or stems, which are usually stereo versions of like the drums, or there'll be a guitar stem with a left and right, and they're just things that people have given to me over the years.

0:48:24.4 SC: You do know that Brian May also has a PhD in astrophysics, right?

0:48:27.8 RB: I do, yes.

0:48:29.6 SC: Yes. Just like me. So we have that in common. He's better at playing the guitar than I am, but... [chuckle] We have something in common.

0:48:34.8 RB: I love that about Brian.

0:48:36.3 SC: Yeah, he's done serious astrophysical research, it's pretty awesome. So from doing these, What Makes This Song Great videos, let me sort of re-ask the question that I alluded to earlier. These are all songs you think are great, and one of the great things is about it is you're pretty ecumenical when it comes to genre; like you'll do folk songs and heavy metal and progressive rock and whatever. Do you find yourself liking the songs even more or discovering things about them when you sort of analyze them at this slightly more conscious level than just grooving to them?

0:49:08.8 RB: So this is something I like to tell people. I don't say it that often, but when I say, What makes this sound great, I have a question mark in the title. And the reason I have the question mark is that not every single song that I've analyzed I think is necessarily a great song; it's why I think other people think it's a great song.

0:49:32.1 SC: Okay.

0:49:32.9 RB: Even though in general, 99% of the songs I think are great songs, or 95% of the songs I do I think are great songs, but it's really more answering the question, why do people think that this is a great song? Why is this a hit song?

0:49:47.5 SC: That makes perfect sense. When I read someone like Dan Brown, who wrote the Da Vinci Code, I don't think he's a great writer in the sense of what I look for in a writer, but he's getting something right. He's appealing to some people and that's a talent, that's a skill. He's doing something really, really well. [chuckle]

0:50:03.1 RB: It is. Right. It's exactly right.

0:50:07.0 SC: And, however, I do wanna say it was just before we did this, listening to the video that you did about Comfortably Numb, and I don't think you were faking your enthusiasm for that one. You seemed to be very genuine.

0:50:19.1 RB: No. No, no, no, no, no. No. Like I said, 95... 98% of the songs that I do are songs I really love.

0:50:26.3 SC: And since you're there, you have been a music producer and musician and music professor, talk a little bit about the way a song gets made in pop music, especially let's say now versus 20 years ago versus 40 years ago. I get the feeling it's not someone, an artist who is at home with a guitar, writes a song and then brings it in, teaches it to the band and they record it that day. It's a little bit... There's more moving parts these days, yeah?

0:50:52.4 RB: That's correct. Yeah, that used to be how it was done, is that they would... When I started, that's what it would be; you'd show it to your band and you'd rehearse it, you'd come up with an arrangement, and then if you had enough money you could go into a recording studio, and if you had even more money you'd go and get, hire a producer, and you would record it. And nowadays, people can open up their laptop and get a DAW, with a some type of DAW interface, digital analog digital interface, and record all the parts with simulated amplifiers, simulated drum samples and keyboards, and pretty much do everything in a laptop, plug the mic into the DAW into your converter and do your vocals, and you can pretty much do everything in computers.

0:51:46.6 SC: It seems like guitars, or stringed instruments more generally, would be harder to do in that way. Like if I just gave a computer a musical score, it could play the piano part, or the drums, right?

0:51:58.2 RB: Yeah, guitar is harder to do a digital version of, but you can get samples that are pre-recorded sections and piece together a guitar part like that.

0:52:16.0 SC: And so is it... So okay, so you can do that now, the computers are helping us do this. It would seem to me that there's two directions that pulls us in. On the one hand, maybe it takes us away from the organic soulful side of people playing their instruments, or even the virtuoso side of people playing their incidents really, really well, since anyone can do it and ask the computer do it. On the other hand, it sounds like it's a democratizing influence where anyone can make an album, which I think is great, so I don't know where do you come down there?

0:52:51.9 RB: Well, I wouldn't be able to... I wouldn't be talking to you right now if it weren't for computers and DAWs, because the only way I was able to become a producer at 37, was that they... Digidesign invented Pro Tools with the DIGIO-01 interface, and I was able to purchase one for 1200 bucks, and learn the software. I couldn't have gone, as a 37-year-old to a studio, and intern for two years to learn how become a producer and how to engineer things. I had taught myself, taught myself how to edit in digital audio workstations, and then that eventually led me to be able to learn how to edit video and make videos, 'cause you edit video just like you had an audio, and a matter of fact, you use the wave forms, the audio wave forms to know where you are just like editing a podcast, you look at the wave forms, and you know where to make cuts.

0:53:46.0 SC: So you do think that there is some positive effect of this, but presumably, there's some negative effects.

0:53:50.5 RB: Absolutely.

0:53:51.8 SC: Of too much technology creeping into the making of music also.

0:53:55.2 RB: Yeah. People don't really have to be virtuous on instruments anymore, you don't have to hire session players if you don't want to. The fact that you can fix any performance and don't have to play anything in real time, makes it to where anyone can do it, but the fact that anyone can do it kind of makes it maybe not as special, I don't know. That's a debate to have.

0:54:24.8 SC: Yeah, well, you give a couple examples in your videos with auto-tune, which can fix the pitch of singers, and then also with quantization of drum beats, and I say that only reluctantly, 'cause quantization means something very different to physicists than it does to music producers. But in both cases, you're sort of rubbing off the rough edges, right? You're making something a little bit perfect, which takes away some of the meaning of it, or is that just us being grumpy old men? Is it good to be more perfect, or is it making it too similar and clean and therefore not as exciting?

0:55:06.8 RB: Well, it kind of depends on what it is. People have been using drum machines since the '80s, and some of my favorite songs have drum machines on 'em, Tears For Fears, and a lot of '80s music, when drum machines first came out, the songs that I really love, used drum machines. Tom Petty used drum machines. On some of his big songs he used drum machines. He also used real drummers. And I'm not gonna say that no auto-tune uses... There's nothing that's... Nothing that's good about auto-tune. I saved many of performances by having auto-tune on records that I produced, where the vocal... Vocalist wasn't here, or just couldn't hit a pitch, and I would have a take that the tone of it was great, but the pitch might have been off it on a line on a couple notes, and it was way easier to fix those, than have the exciting performance and get it and have those notes be more in tune than using a worse performance that was more in tune. So...

0:56:13.9 SC: Yeah. That makes sense.

0:56:15.4 RB: It really comes down to trade-off.

0:56:17.2 SC: But in the case of the drum beats, I think it's a very specific example of the question that I have in mind. We have in mind the idea that the perfect drummer will be just exactly on time, like the same amount of intervals between every two beats in the measure, or whatever it is. And so, what could be bad about fixing that? 'Cause real drummers are not. John Bonham was not exactly marching to a metronome, but doing most of those Led Zeppelin songs.

0:56:44.0 RB: No, so I find that the human element of these great drummers, I just interviewed Bernard Purdie, and he had a drum beat called the "Purdie Shuffle" that they used in Steely Dan's song, "Home At Last," and "Sisters of Babylon." Bernard just has such an incredible groove, and shuffles are based on triplets. And it's almost impossible to do a great shuffle as program a great shuffle to where it feels really good, 'cause there are so many dynamics in it. And having that triplet feel, when it's so rigid that it's got no variance, it just sounds weird to me. It sounds really unnatural. Straight rock beats though, are, when they've been quantized and things like that, people don't notice them as much. It's just like a drum machine. So, it's not always bad, but when people say... I made a video about this song called Sucker by the Jonas Brothers, and there was a New York Times reviewer saying how this was such a great groove, and I was the contrarian on it and I said, "It's not really a groove, it's been quantized."

[laughter]

0:58:00.0 RB: And I chopped up the thing and I changed the tempo to show that it was all quantized onto the 16th note on a grid, which is why I could change the tempo and change the timing of the song. I could make it faster or slower, because it was perfectly edited to a grid. So, there... It really wasn't a groove, it was at least not a human groove.

0:58:23.1 SC: There's a quote that I love from, I think it's Francis Bacon, who says, "There is no excellent beauty that has not some strangeness in the proportion." I think this is what it's getting at, both from the dissonance stuff, when we were talking about melody and harmony, and from the groove. If it's too clean and too crisp and too predictable, it's not what we find really beautiful.

0:58:44.1 RB: Yeah. I do find, though, that people nowadays have been listening to quantized music for so long, for a generation, that anything that's not quantized they notice.

0:58:55.6 SC: Oh okay.

0:58:57.4 RB: They noticed that it's not quantized. And there's a lot of singers that mimic auto-tune in their regular singing.

[laughter]

0:59:08.9 RB: They mimic the weird... Whatever you would call them.

0:59:14.3 SC: Yeah, it gets all distorted in computery. I know what you mean.

0:59:14.8 RB: Anomalies of Auto-Tune that the weird pitch bends that Auto-Tune does, where you think, "Wait, do you have Auto-Tune in your voice?" "No, that's me singing." They're just mimicking it. Really amazing.

0:59:29.9 SC: Well, and all of these...

0:59:30.0 RB: Art effects.

0:59:30.2 SC: Yeah, all of these changes in how music is made... Well, actually, let me... There's one follow-up question there, which is, it sounds... 'cause I recently did an economics podcast, it sounds like a market opportunity, right? Like if everyone is doing drum machines and Auto-Tune, then is there gonna be sort of a new place for more authentic, acoustic, slightly messy and imperfect musicians?

0:59:58.1 RB: Absolutely, and there is plenty of indie music that's out there that's not perfect, and that a lot of people like and that I like to listen to. But it's hard to make generalizations on genres of music or certain pieces. There's things that are perfectly quantized that I love the sound of. But it's kind of a... When every song is expected to be like this, and it started in the early 2000s with rock music, I think that this is a thing that really helped limit the appeal of rock music was the tuning and the quantizing of it, that made rock lose its edge.

1:00:48.2 SC: Well, this is gonna be my very next question, following up on the title of one of your music videos, is rock music dead? And why? [chuckle]

1:01:00.5 RB: Certain types of rock music are very much alive, and progressive metal music is very much alive. And I've made a lot of videos with a lot of the people that are kind of the leaders of the progressive metal movement, which is guys like Tosin Abasi from Animals as Leaders, Tim Henson who's in Polyphia. Plini is a guitarist from Australia, who's a fantastic guitarist. Aaron Marshall from Intervals. I've had these people on my channel many times. I talk about a lot of these progressive metal bands, and that's a very vibrant movement. All the people know each other, they all support each other, and I just love it. I think it's incredibly innovative, and they're just re-inventing a lot of... From the types of instruments, there's a lot of extended range instruments, seven strings, eight strings that are used, nine strings, and I find it really refreshing. So it's not dead, it's just dead to the... There's no Van Halens anymore. There's no rock bands that are massively big all over the world, or not really, not many that aren't in their 50s.

1:02:14.9 SC: The top 20 whatever list you have on Spotify or whatever is not going to be many recognizable rock and roll bands these days.

1:02:25.0 RB: Correct.

1:02:25.7 SC: But is it mostly technological? Because you also seem to suggest that it had... Some of the effects came from wandering away from the blues-based roots of this music and into something else.

1:02:37.3 RB: Yeah, I think that when rock lost the blues, that people became disinterested in it; when there were no blues-based melodies. In the last... You started seeing blues disappear from rock music in the early 2000s in new metal. There was a lot of great new metal music, but the last people that had a lot of blues-based... And you had people like Jack White with the White Stripes that used blues. But in general, the last movement of music that was rock-based that used a lot of blues inflections was grunge, and that's 30 years ago now.

1:03:17.0 SC: Make me feel old.

1:03:19.6 RB: So bands like Soundgarden and Pearl Jam and Nirvana and Alice in Chains, and they used a lot of blues-based melodies and blues inflections, a lot of pentatonic, riffs, things like that. So once we moved away from that in the new metal era, I think people started to become disconnected from them. And that happened with Auto-Tune happened in 2000, when new metal got really huge. So you had quantizing, you had Auto-Tune and you had blues-less melodies.

1:03:52.0 SC: Well, I guess that's what... I have no idea what the answer to this is. I'm trying to figure out whether or not there's a connection between these technological changes and the move away from the blues. So I'm willing to buy your hypothesis that, moving away from the blues has made rock music either less compelling or pop music less rocky or something like that, but is that because of the new technologies or is this just things that happen at the same time, coincidentally?

1:04:18.7 RB: I'm not sure.

1:04:21.2 SC: Yeah.

1:04:22.4 RB: And it could be both. It's an interesting question, though, why did they coincide? That's a great question. That's a really great question.

1:04:29.7 SC: Maybe there's a different spirit to it? I'm just making things up now, speculating, but when you say "The Blues", there's a very specific musicological meaning to that.

1:04:40.4 RB: I mean notes that are bent, I mean notes that are not... That are under the pitch. Things are using micro-tones that...

1:04:49.7 SC: Right. Right. But all these are deviations from perfection, right?

1:04:53.4 RB: Correct, yes. Yeah.

1:04:55.3 SC: And just the words "The Blues"...

1:04:58.0 RB: So called perfection.

1:04:58.8 SC: Sure, sure. But Blue Notes in the broadest sense, is sort of the ones that don't fit in to the scale you're playing.

1:05:07.3 RB: Yeah.

1:05:07.9 SC: But we also have this picture of sitting in a garage or in a run-down saloon or at the crossroads and just plucking with your guitar and your tiny little drum kit, and it's very far removed from sitting in a computerized workstation and laying down some beat. It sounds like there's both a musicological difference and also a stylistic spiritual difference between the two approaches.

1:05:32.3 RB: Exactly. Totally, totally right on with that.

1:05:36.2 SC: And with that, what do you think is going to be... What happens next? Are you able to predict the future of popular music? I know that you do these wonderful things where every so often you check in with the Spotify, Top 20 and go like, "What is going on here?" You say that the title is always like, "I rant about the Spotify top 10", but you often like the songs actually.

1:05:55.6 RB: I do. And much to most peoples dismay I like the sense... I just put out a video called, "Jimmy Hendrix wouldn't be famous today."

1:06:05.0 SC: Okay.

1:06:07.6 RB: Just before I came... I put it out a couple of hours ago, and I haven't looked at any of the comments, but it's... The video is doing really well right now. Which to me, leads me to believe that people agree with this. That Jimmy Hendrix, if he came out today, no one would pay attention.

1:06:27.9 SC: It will be interesting to see the demographics on the views of that video, is it just folks in their 50s and 60s are like, "Oh yes, those kids today don't understand real music."

1:06:36.6 RB: No, it probably is a really... Much like my channel, my biggest demographics is 25 to 34 on my channel.

1:06:44.3 SC: Oh, very interesting.

1:06:44.9 RB: And this is... So this will be people commenting from that are probably all different... From all different generations.

1:06:53.4 SC: Yeah, okay good. I will check that out.

1:06:55.6 RB: Yeah, so I don't know what they're saying, but from the looks of it, it looks like people are agreeing with my premise. It wasn't my premise, it was from an interview. I did an interview with a bass player named Jeff Berlin in 2017, and I was at the beach this weekend with my family, and for some reason, this video popped into my head, this thing that he said, and he said, "In the '70s, if you were a great player, you'd be famous." And that's just not the case anymore. And I started thinking, "Yeah, the rise of the famous soloists was really... " A lot of it happened in the '70s, the '70s, and then the '80s, and then after that, they're famous instrumental soloists... Even people in bands, that Eddie Van Halen happened in the '70s you know? The bands that had virtuoso in them are gone to a certain degree...

1:07:56.3 SC: Well, and yet the...

1:07:58.6 RB: Some of the greatest virtuosos are here today, but they're just not...

1:08:04.4 SC: We don't know who they are.

1:08:04.5 RB: Hugely popular...

1:08:04.6 SC: That's right. I mean even the Grunge bands that you mentioned, they were Blues based, but they were not characterized by amazing virtuosity. I mean Dave Grohl turns out to be a wonderful musician, but that wasn't the point of Grunge.

1:08:17.0 RB: No. Dave Grohl is actually virtuoso drummer that people didn't realize was very... Well I did but... I don't mean that... I realized he was a great drummer, I could tell he was a phenomenal drummer. The guys were virtuoso singers as far as I'm concerned, including Kurt Cobain, but Chris Cornell was a virtuoso. He's one of the greatest rock singers that ever lived. So the virtuosity went to the vocals in the Grunge era.

1:08:45.4 SC: Fair enough. Well, I always like to end up on a hopeful or optimistic note, or at least a useful note. I mean obviously with you, it's too easy to say people should check out your videos, but maybe is there a sales pitch for the music lover on the street to become a bit more knowledgeable about what goes on in the songs? Whether it's really Music Theory or just listening for cord changes that resolve in interesting ways, why should we bother to put in that little bit of extra effort rather than just putting on random on our playlist and getting on with our day?

1:09:21.1 RB: I think it makes... If you know a little bit more about music, it makes it more enjoyable. You can actually appreciate it on a different level. If you understand how it's constructed, just like what you said about your teacher that talked about the form of music. The intro, the verse, the pre-course, the chorus, the bridge, the solo, the interlude, whatever, and knowing those terms and then you start listening to songs and you can talk to your friends about them, that's really what music theory is. Music theory is just the ability to talk, to put terms to things, and so you can talk about them while you're not listening to the music.

1:09:57.7 SC: Yeah. I guess, that's a very nice way of putting it because music is very universal, everyone can enjoy it, but then to talk to other people about it, you need to be able to put words to what is causing or what is behind that particular sensation you got with that drum fill or whatever it is. Yeah.

1:10:14.0 RB: Yeah, drum fill or if you say, "Hey, Shaun, what do you think about the chorus on that song?" Well, you know what the chorus is, it's usually the title of the song. "Oh, I love that chorus." But if you say, "What is a chorus?" Knowing what a chorus is important in being able to talk about this... If you wanna talk about a song, you need to be able to talk about the different sections and know what they are, so that's music theory basically.

1:10:41.0 SC: Yeah, no, I like it, that's it. It's a great... It's a communication device, and you've done as much as anyone in recent years to help people understand that, so Rick Beato thanks so much for been on The Mindscape Podcast.

1:10:50.6 RB: Thanks, Sean, I appreciate it.

[music]