“From 1991 to 2016, I did no lead playing at all. By the time I started playing again for my YouTube channel, I’d forgotten everything I knew”: Why Rick Beato stopped playing solos – and why it was good for his playing

In a rare turning of the tables, Rick Beato has become an interviewee, and during a recent feature on Zak Kuhn’s channel, he made a surprising admission about his relationship with guitar solos.

Beato is best known for chatting guitars and gear with pretty much every big-name player on a YouTube channel that, at the time of writing, has 5.3 million subscribers. But before launching the channel in 2016, he was a session player and producer, helping break Shinedown to the masses, as well as a lecturer and tutor.

Speaking to Kuhn, Beato revealed that his career path and prevailing cultural trends led him to neglect the upper parts of his fretboard for years.

“I was a jazz musician for a living ’87 to ’92, when I was teaching jazz studies up in Ithaca, New York, and I would play jazz gigs five, six nights a week,” he says. “When I quit, I didn't play a guitar solo until 2016, when I started my YouTube channel.

“So from 1991 to 2016, I did no lead playing at all. I never practiced a scale, an arpeggio, nothing,” he continues. “By the time I started playing again, it was like I'd forgotten everything I knew. So, I started from scratch.”

That, he believes, actually worked to his benefit. It wiped the slate clean.

“I had no licks that were under my fingers, so I was able to start fresh,” Baeto details. “And it was actually good because my playing, I thought, was far more interesting than it was from what I remember it was.

“I knew a lot more about music; I was very closed off in the music that I liked back in my twenties. I only listened to jazz, but playing in rock bands and writing songs required me to know how to write really good melodies. It’s much more natural to sing a solo, because you put breaks in to breathe rather than just play scales.”

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While on the subject of solos, Beato recently celebrated the return of the guitar solo in pop music, with Chapelle Roan and Olivia Rodrigo leading the charge. And when Justin Hawkins recently guested on his channel, the Darkness guitarist named the super shredder that, if he were born a decade earlier, would have rivalled Eddie Van Halen.