The problem is people love to make comments after watching like one or two of his videos. Come back when you have a better idea of his content as a whole.
On the subject of Beato's practical knowledge of Jazz, I find this video about his experiences playing in Jazz bands as a student very informative:
I think Beato does pretty good at knocking out those excerpted parts of "Donna Lee." He just needs to slow down some- he's trying to take it at that fast bebop tempo, the way Bird and Jaco do it. I mean, that's a Class IV bass part, at minimum. Even taken at a slower tempo. I doubt that he spent months woodshedding it to prepare for the video. And in context of Youtube, he's so much better than the average guitar or bass solo clip that it's ridiculous.
He's pretty decent. He did say that he played bass in some bands in the past. I took up bass a couple years ago but I waited too long. I have tendonitis and arthritis in my hands and wrists which makes it difficult to play for more than ten minutes.
True, though I think there might be a way to split the difference -- to be attention-getting without demeaning oneself. Beato isn't the worst offender by a long shot: I had to stop watching Davie504's videos because I couldn't stand seeing this Italian guy constantly imitating some caricature of a vapid teenage girl ("OMG!!"), or just reduce everything to endless lazy and/or tryhard memes. It was funny until it actually became part of his persona, then it was just irritating as hell. ...huh, I wonder why so many of the most visible music YouTube people are bass players, either full-time (Davie504, Adam Neely) or otherwise (Jacob Collier, Rick Beato)? That's a painful visual, right there. I think that's a good way of putting it -- and frankly, it's the way a lot of great teachers do their job: combining their own enthusiasm and subjectivity with more formal analysis and information-sharing. Certainly, some of the best teachers I've ever had are propelled, not impeded, by their excitement about the materials.
You missed Charles Berthoud from the list, one of the most musical bass guitarists I've ever heard. Victor Wooten shared the following video on his Facebook:
And as a quick update, today's "What Makes This Song Great" is for Seals' Kiss From a Rose, and it's fascinating (including a visit with Seal himself). Yes, the song was overplayed on the radio ("radio", what's that ), but after watching Rick show how the song is put together, I cannot argue the brilliance of its compositional components. And for those who suggest Rick merely re-record songs to make his points, the highlighting of orchestral and other instruments in today's WMTSG shows the absurdity of trying to recreate the magic of what's been recorded (which is necessary to make the very point Rick sometimes highlights).
Even though I am not a musician, Beato's videos get me to notice nuances and little things I had overlooked prior. To me, he is very knowledgeable, and he seems like a huge music lover who just wants to share his love for music and make fans aware of the little things. That is a good thing.
Perhaps that explains why our friend Low proclaimed he was done with this thread, and then subsequently posted 20+ more times.
Regarding the multi-track "stems" that Rick (and other YouTube channels) employ, I've never understood exactly how these stems are derived. Can anyone shed light on this? It sounds like the vocal stems for example, also have the effect send added. Are these actually raw multi-tracks, or are they "pre-mixed", or what?
Now that a bunch of posts have apparently been purged from this thread, I want to clarify that this post followed a bunch of positive stuff about Beato from me. Without the context, it looks like a random drive-by insult. (I still hate the clickbait thumbnails though)
I'm not sure whether someone like Rick would have access to multitrack tapes of famous artists, highly doubtful. I'm guessing that he is using a number of sources: quad mixes, 5.1 mixes and heck he could have even pulled stems from Guitar Hero of all things. There's probably a few other methods out there to capture multitrack stems, he could have gone down that path but it's all speculation.
Nice chatting but I'll see you later. Apparently if you disagree with an opinion and ask for a concrete reason or example your posts get deleted. Mine did.
He's been very cagey about it, which makes me think that he does have files of the multitracks sourced from somewhere that he doesn't want to disclose. I did a quick search and found a post on a forum form someone claiming that he worked with Beato in the studio and was told that he has the multitracks ... obviously take that with a pinch of salt but if he were depending on things like Rock Band stems I don't think that he would be able to separate tracks out as well.
In many cases, as with Seal, he has friendly access to the artists or producers themselves, and they send him the stems. In other cases (I think "Comfortably Numb" recently was an example of this) they are not true stems but 'extractions' from unofficial sources that are nonetheless surprisingly good sounding No, he doesn't use the full multi-track sessions; stems are indeed 'pre-mixed' layers of the song in convenient stereo pairs (ie. all guitars in one stereo pair, all drums in one stereo pair, etc.) this is what film/TV mixers tend to get when they license a song for use so they can easily ride these layers up or down in context with the other dialogue/effects that must be blended alongside the music
In the case of 'Kiss From A Rose' Seal provided the stems so assume they are actually from the multitrack tapes.
What an absolute tool Beato is for donating all of the profits from his new Gibson signature model to a music charity.
Not that he seems to be a huge dick to his son, publicly venting about how he is "just lazy" in his streams?
Unfortunately I just saw that the Video got taken down due to a copyright complaint by him. It was an excerpt from a livestream where he answered viewer questions. Essentially he said how angry he was right now with his son, because he'd only want to spend time on his iPad video chatting with his cousin and that he was so lazy. Like they got him lessons with one of the top oboist teachers and he wasn't interested in it, so Rick wanted to confiscate his iPad. When people told him in the chat "Yeah he's a kid, most kids are like that" he responded (paraphrased): "No but Dylan is just exceptionally lazy!" Mind you, all of this publicly to his viewers.
Why has this thread become a referendum on Beato’s private life? What does it have to do with his music abilities? Let's leave the tabloid-ish behaviour to the tabloids.
I just stumbled in here, don't want to derail the discussion. However I don't think it's tabloid-ish to discuss how he presents himself to his followers. I mean yes, separate the art from the artist, bla bla bla, but if someone makes money off of his child (his video "The Worlds Greatest Ear" with Dylan is his 7th most watched video with 3.6 million views) yet bitches about and talks **** about the very same child in front of an audience, that warrants to be criticised. Mind you, it's not like Dylan has the same audience to "right the wrong" or something like that, he probably doesn't know that a lot of people have heard that his father thinks he's just a lazy bum. Again I don't want to derail this discussion here, but that's far from tabloid-ish, but just ****ty behaviour that should be called out.
That issue with his son has a broad relevance, inasmuch as it nods towards the role that drive and discipline (viz. sacrifice) play in acquiring proficiency and maintaining personal connection with a practice or craft.
