Rick Beato: Greatest Guitarists of All Time, History & Future of Music

Lex Fridman introduces Rick Beato as a music educator, interviewer, producer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who plays guitar, bass, cello and piano. He credits Beato’s YouTube channel with helping millions of people, Fridman included, “fall in love with great music all over again,” and opens by saying Beato had an “incredibly fun and diverse beginning” to his music journey.

Fridman asks which early guitar solo first felt like magic to him. Beato says the first solo he learned was Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe.” It suited a beginner because the chords are “pretty simple”: E, C, G, D, A. Working out the solo by ear, he noticed it stayed inside one pattern, which he now identifies as the E minor pentatonic scale, though he didn’t know the name then. He stresses that there was nothing to look up. You worked out the notes yourself and spotted the pattern.

Whoa, he’s just in this one shape here.

The obsession turned into a family routine. Beato was 14 and his brother John was 11, and they started guitar at about the same time. Beato would play rhythm for five minutes while John soloed over “Hey Joe,” but as soon as Rick started soloing, John would throw his guitar down and they would fight. Their mother stepped in, asked for the chords, and then played rhythm for 20 minutes while Rick soloed. Looking back, Beato notes that his mother has been gone for 10 years and says of his parents:

My God, my parents were so cool.

Fridman adds that the rhythm part in “Hey Joe,” and in Hendrix’s playing generally, goes well beyond strumming the listed chords. What Hendrix does with those chords is “almost improvisation.” Beato agrees and points to Hendrix’s “really cool chord fragment riffs” as the core of “the Hendrix style.”

When Fridman notes that many people rank Hendrix as the greatest guitarist of all time, Beato answers indirectly: “You know, I make lists.” Fridman describes those videos for anyone who doesn’t know them: interviews with musicians, song breakdowns, and top 20 lists in which Beato is “very opinionated, sometimes very openly critical.” Beato adds a caveat about how fixed any ranking really is:

But they do change, Lex, from day to day.

He explains that he likes lists of 20 because the length gives him room to include something unusual that many viewers won’t know. His example is the fusion guitarist Allan Holdsworth. He might slip in one of Holdsworth’s solos, “some oddball solo,” so that people working down the list hear something they would not otherwise come across. In his telling, the lists are partly a way to introduce players, not only a ranking.

Fridman teases him that he showed up to argue Hendrix isn’t “up there.” Beato says that isn’t his point. He just doesn’t want to use the word “greatest.” He shifts the question to influence and names the players who inspired Hendrix and others. Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt were “the first two really big” figures, and “probably Andrés Segovia” was a third. He calls them three of the giants of the 20th century as guitar influences “for most of the players that were to follow.” The “probably” marks Segovia as the less certain inclusion.

Fridman looks Reinhardt up on Perplexity and reads that he was a jazz guitarist and composer, active mainly in France, and widely regarded as one of the greatest guitarists in jazz history. Beato adds that there is “a huge movement right now,” the Gypsy Jazz Movement, built around the style Reinhardt played in the early 20th century. Beato also names Stéphane Grappelli, a violinist who often played with Reinhardt.

Beato’s main point about Reinhardt is physical. After a fire, Reinhardt’s third and fourth fingers, his ring finger and pinky, were “essentially melted together.” Beato first says Reinhardt had no use of them, then qualifies this: he could use them for chords, but he played many of his very fast lines with just two fingers.

a lot of these incredibly fast lines, he’s just playing with two fingers. And it’s amazing.

Fridman asks how much of what they are listening to is improvised. Beato answers without hedging: “Everything he’s doing there is improvised.” Fridman says the music feels “so free” and fun, like swing.

Fridman refers to Beato having described Reinhardt as “pre-bebop,” a remark not in this part of the transcript, and asks what bebop was. He notes that it was influential both on Beato and on the music that followed. Beato’s history: big bands ran from the ’20s through the ’40s, and musicians also played and toured in small groups. Charlie Parker, “one of the main figures of early bebop,” developed its language. The players improvised over standard chord progressions used as “vehicles,” many of them in AABA form.

Beato’s central claim is that Parker built a language of improvisation “far more sophisticated than the swing players of the big band era,” with Benny Goodman as his example of that earlier era. The traits he goes on to list are really fast tempos, angular lines and chromaticism. In the transcript, the sentence listing them begins with “They” right after the Goodman reference, so the speech doesn’t say exactly who “they” are. The context suggests he means the bebop players.

The two then define chromatic notes. Fridman calls them notes next to each other on the keyboard, and Beato agrees. Beato prefers to think of them as “connecting notes.” Fridman puts it as adding “more notes than are supposed to be there,” which creates interesting texture.

Beato calls bebop one of the hardest styles to master and sets up the analogy that runs through the rest of this section:

all these things are a language. Blues playing, they’re all just languages, right?

He first heard this language through his father, who was not a musician but loved bebop and “incredibly sophisticated” music that was very technical. As a small child Beato heard records by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson and the jazz guitarist Joe Pass and accepted them as normal. He says he didn’t realize it was training his ear. Because bebop is so hard to improvise in, he thinks hearing it in childhood made it learnable, compared with someone first exposed to it as a teenager. Fridman says they will come back to Joe Pass; later they discuss Pass's Virtuoso and Beato's effort to learn a solo from it by ear.

Beato extends the language analogy into what he calls “kinda… my theory on perfect pitch.” He presents it as his own theory, not an established result:

every child is born with perfect pitch. And they start to lose the ability around nine months

His support comes from language research. He says babies start out as “citizens of the world,” with the neural pathways to hear the phonemes of “all 6,500 languages spoken on Earth.” Around nine months they begin to lose that ability and become “culturally bound listeners.” He cites a YouTube video, “The Linguistic Genius of Babies,” by the language researcher Patricia Kuhl. He saw the lecture, “like a TED Talk,” in 2010. As he describes the experiment, babies heard a person speak Mandarin three times a week in 25-minute sessions and could recognize that language’s phonemes even later on.

He links this to his son Dylan, who has perfect pitch, even though no one else in the family ever had it. Beato attributes it to the sounds Dylan heard before birth and in his first nine months. This is an inference, and Beato frames it as one. The research he cites concerns speech sounds, not musical pitch, and his evidence for the pitch claim is one case in his own family. He states the reasoning openly:

‘Cause that’s the only way I could explain it.

Fridman says Beato’s early videos with Dylan about his perfect pitch are “in part” one of the origin stories of Beato publishing online, and he asks for a definition. Beato defines perfect pitch as the ability to identify any note without a reference tone, however quickly the notes are played, and to identify a collection of notes as well.

Fridman then brings up Beato’s ear-training course. Beato says it teaches relative pitch, “not to be confused with perfect pitch.” Fridman asks whether relative pitch is the more useful skill for musicians to learn, and Beato says yes. Relative pitch means identifying pitches relative to a stated tonic, to something you have heard, or to each other. If you start on A and the next note is C, you can recognize the interval as a minor third. Fridman adds that intervals make up both scales and chords, so developing relative pitch “to any degree” helps you hear music better.

Beato’s outline of the practice: (1) It is “just practice, basically.” (2) Start with small intervals such as the minor second, a half-step, and the major second, a whole-step. (3) Learn intervals both ways: melodic intervals, with the notes played one after the other like a melody, and harmonic intervals, with the notes played together like a harmony. (4) In his course, the software plays an interval and you click to identify it, for example major third, minor third, major sixth, minor sixth, perfect fifth or tritone, and it gradually teaches you to recognize all the intervals.

Fridman asks how fast the ear learns intervals across age groups, offering options from a week to five years. Beato’s estimate is hedged (“I think”) and assumes daily practice. He doesn’t answer the part of the question about how age changes the pace:

within a couple of months, you can really make a lot of progress on it, if you practice daily.

Lex Fridman starts by asking what practical benefit a trained ear gives a musician. Rick Beato's first answer is about working out songs. A trained listener can hear a progression and name its function right away, for example moving "from the six minor chord, or the four major, to the five major, to the one major." Because every other chord is heard in relation to the first one, once that first chord is identified, the rest of the progression follows. He says the same skill helps with learning solos and melodies, which comes down to "being able to sound something out."

Fridman asks whether ear training should be paired with music theory. Beato says the two "have to be taught together" because the vocabulary of ear training is already theory. He lays out an order of study. First come the 12 intervals in an octave (major second, minor second, major third, minor third, perfect fourth and so on), heard both melodically and harmonically, meaning played separately and played together. Then come chord qualities: major, minor, diminished, augmented and suspended. He argues that by working through this sequence a student is learning theory at the same time.

Music theory is just the name of things in music.

Fridman builds on this with a three-part framing: the sound of things, the name of things, and the haptic side, which is physically playing chords and scales. He mentions that Beato has courses on scales and chords, then turns the conversation toward beginners who want to start on guitar, piano or other instruments. He adds, half-joking, that guitar is "the greatest instrument of all time," and Beato replies "Absolutely."

For a complete beginner, Beato recommends a good beginner guitar course and learning the open chords in first position. He notes that many songs, especially older ones, can be played this way, though he hedges that this is "maybe not new modern songs necessarily." When Fridman frames it as learning a few chords with an eye toward playing a song, Beato agrees and adds learning chord shapes and basic strumming patterns.

Beato names a narrower skill as the real first hurdle: placing the fingers so they don't mute strings that should ring. He calls this "the hardest thing for people to do." His example is the C major chord. The index finger sits on the first fret of the B string, and the open E string still has to ring, so the fingers need to be arched. Beginners find these micro-adjustments hard. Experienced players stop noticing them, and Beato points out that Fridman has been playing for what both agree is "Forever."

He extends the point to lead playing. In a solo such as Comfortably Numb, which Beato calls Fridman's solo, the player has to "out of mid-air, strike the string that your finger’s on to play the note." He describes all of this as "fine adjustments" made without conscious thought.

Fridman, who calls himself "just a hobbyist recreational player," agrees that the physical side is tricky. He argues that lead playing demands a very clean sound in two different settings. Fast passages need precision. A single sustained, bent note "better be really clean." He lists what goes into that: finger placement, calluses so it doesn't hurt, where the string falls on the curve of the fingertip, and how far the finger is bent. Beato adds a mechanical requirement for bends.

You have to have enough flesh on it to actually raise the string in pitch.

Fridman agrees that the string is lifted with part of the flesh. He then sets up a contrast between technique schools. On one side is the "proper" classical approach, with fingertips perpendicular to the fretboard. On the other is Jimi Hendrix's thumb over the top of the neck, which Beato says goes "Way over the top." Fridman jokingly voices Hendrix's attitude as "Fuck it. You nerds. I’m gonna do it." and adds that the messiness "is part of the magic." He offers B.B. King as more evidence: his finger positioning looks messy, yet his tone is "incredibly clean," and Beato agrees. Fridman's tentative conclusion is that "maybe any position can converge towards a super clean tone."

Beato offers a functional explanation, framed with "I think." Much of the difference comes from how players wear the guitar. If it hangs low, as with Hendrix, the fingers can't get on top of the neck in the classical way. The thumb over the top also mutes the lower strings, which matters through a loud amplifier. Fridman accepts the point about guitar height ("That’s true").

Beato returns to Comfortably Numb for a concrete example of muting. The first note of the closing solo is at the ninth fret of the G string and is bent. If the player accidentally hits the B string under it while bending, that string must not ring, so the index finger has to be angled to mute it. He says players don't think about these adjustments after enough repetitions because they become "part of your brain." He uses this to make a broader claim about children, though he cites no research for it.

That’s why this is such a great brain developer for kids to learn instruments.

Fridman says learning to hold chords must be frustrating at first, and that it hurts, particularly on acoustic guitar. Beato confirms it hurts but says not for long, first saying "For like a week" and then agreeing with Fridman on "Couple weeks." He is careful not to discourage anyone: "It’s actually pretty easy to learn basic stuff." Fridman sums up the point as "the pain is temporary."

After the basics, Beato says the path depends on the styles a player wants. On electric guitar, single-note playing is where it gets "really fun" for him. He cites Back In Black, which has a riff built into its melody, and Hendrix songs with chordal riffs that move up the neck and use all the fingers. Fridman sums this up as different parts of learning a song: riffs and leads. Beato adds fingerpicking, with Stairway to Heaven as the example, because it requires isolating particular chord notes and playing two together, repeatedly.

Fridman describes these as crossroads, such as whether a right-handed player uses fingers or a pick. Beato complicates that choice by noting that some songs need both. Stairway to Heaven opens with fingers, or fingers plus pick ("hybrid picking"), and later uses the pick to flat-pick the patterns.