I like him for the storytelling. He reminds me of my primary school teacher, fond memories, who always turned any subject into personal anecdotes, gently opinionated, slightly inflated and imaginative. Rick's generation perhaps among the last who grew up on low bandwidth media and loads of storytelling all day long among everyone.
His music theory approach is useless. It's just a checklist of terms that fit into his particular grid that day. No one wrote any worthwhile pop or rock songs with theoretic emphasis, ever.
For the record I generally like Beato's channel. I suspect part of what you dislike is a result of the YouTube-ification of his videos. Making everything amped up, strong opinions, etc. Watch some videos from 5 years ago. There are no "wow!"s in response to every line in a song, more nuanced opinion, etc.
Unfortunately, though, he's been a little more clickbait-y of late. For example his "rant" videos, which are both very clickable and don't have copyright claims like most his videos. I expect to see more of these going forward now that he knows he can rant for 30 min, cut it down to 10 min, post it, and make $10k from ad views.
The "What Makes This Song Great?" series is wonderful. If for no other reason where else are you going to here isolated tracks from your favorite songs? But I somewhat suspect he was trolling his viewers with doing one on "Since You Been Gone" a few weeks ago. I enjoy the song and am happy to crank it up and dance with my kids, but the production / arrangement is typical Dr. Luke blandness. But of course I still watched the whole video, waiting for him to "break kayfabe". :)
He doesn't really understand electronic music in my opinion. I find these sweeping statements about how "x ruined y" to be extremely lazy. Especially when it comes to comments about computers and music from these traditionally rock-ist people
Totally agree, needing to groove or follow harmony in some ways is a limited way of thinking about music. And my job is to teach people how to groove and follow harmony! One of my favorite types of music is electro acoustic because it is soooo far from the ideas of western music, probably most similar in formal structure. That being said Radio Head’s ‘Amnesiac’ is a superb example at bringing together the extended sonic pallets of electro acoustic in a main stream setting. What are some examples where you feel technology has enhanced traditional music forms?
Yeah, Radiohead are a great example indeed of bringing these two worlds together. Kid A is another amazing one from them.
When you say "traditional music forms" what do you mean specifically? I'm trying to avoid going down a rabbit hole of references which answer the wrong question :D
My answer to any question would change day to day really, especially at the moment as I'm finding lots of new and interesting ways to think about and approach production. Last night I was watching this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VspVQiG6hj8 (most well known as the artist Rrose making pitch black techno) which presents such a simple idea for creating an interesting drone sound using resonance alone & without any actual audio input.
I think a lot of the early IDM people like Aphex Twin, Autechre etc in their music have really used technology to push music beyond its traditional forms. And you have people like Oval that go with this kind of idea of "the medium is the message" (https://archive.aec.at/media/assets/b3d9569953edbc479d2a7bf6...) marking CDs to create glitches etc and surfing through filestystems to create microsamples
yeah 'traditional music forms' was a poor choice of words, guess I meant western music, or modern popular styles.
I really love synthesis & IDM but I tend to gravitate more towards soundscape compositions that are made of samples that have been abstracted to varying degrees. For example here's a piece I made that loosely follows Sonata form but has very little harmony or rhythm. Made completely of samples from an outside field and my living room. https://soundcloud.com/anthony-nagid/the-reality-sculptor-st...
The video where they sit down listening to various string gauges and nod at the obvious tone change comes to my mind. I'm 99% sure they would not see any difference in a blind test.
He also has plenty of videos about his past, his achievements, very opinionated tastes about what is good, etc. I find it quite annoying and over self centered.
However, electric guitarists are placebo addicts and if 4 nice men spent a 20 minute internet video agreeing on something one of the bearded guys from ZZ Top maybe once said, some guitarists will play along with a little bit more ease in their hearts.
