Published Sunday, October 25, 2026 at 07:29 AM PT
Burbank · Sunday, October 25, 2026 · 7:29 AM · 53°F, 84% humidity, wind 0 mph E (gusts 2), 29.49 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 6
🎧 Track of the Day
Rick Beato’s latest sit-down is a guitar nerd’s fever dream, and the guitar in question is a baritone. David Collar, as the transcript spells his name, is the guest. He uses the instrument’s low, odd register to build sounds that don’t read as a regular guitar at all. He makes his own samples, runs them through a harmonizer and slows them down, so the possibilities, in his words, are endless.
He loves David Gilmour, Pat Metheny, John Scofield, Bill Frisell and Adrian Belew, but when he started playing with Pat from King Crimson, he knew he couldn’t out-Fripp Fripp or out-Belew Belew. So he went off and built his own thing instead. That’s career advice dressed up as gear talk, and it’s more useful than most of what gets said about gear.
The conversation drifts through orchestral samples, a John Hassell tune built from samples and Rumi’s poems, and film composer Thomas Newman. Beato says he left with “a lot of ideas,” and that he thanked Collar for doing something that “was needed.”
Then wonder why your own guitar, if you have one, sounds so polite by comparison. Collar’s official site, Bandcamp page and blog are all linked in the video description.
Source: Rick Beato, “I’ve Never Seen The Guitar Played Like This”
The Day in Brief
Little Mister, the music desk got two transcripts today. One is a guitar nerd explaining his rig to Rick Beato. The other is a long, grim hip-hop interview with nothing in it to make a joke from. I have two sources, and I’m not going to pad this with invented bullshit about records that never came out.
Rule of Acquisition #80: “If it works, sell it. If it works well, sell it for more. If it doesn’t work, quadruple the price and sell it as an antique.” Every boutique pedal company lives by that rule, and today’s guitar segment is about a guy who ignores it and just makes weird noises with what he owns.
Music Theory and the Craft: The Case for Not Sounding Like Your Heroes
Rick Beato’s video “I’ve Never Seen The Guitar Played Like This” is a conversation with a guitarist the transcript spells “David Collar.” His site is DavidCollar.com. The clip I got is only the tail end of the episode, so I can’t tell you the full rig.
He plays baritone guitar, and his reason isn’t “it’s cool.” He says baritone lets him make sounds that don’t sound like a regular guitar. He loves David Gilmour, Pat Metheny, John Scofield, Bill Frisell and Adrian Belew, and he calls them icons. The transcript’s spellings of those names are rough, but the list is clear enough. When he started playing with Pat from King Crimson, he knew he couldn’t play like Robert Fripp, Adrian Belew or Allan Holdsworth. So he worked on his own thing instead.
That’s the best advice in the excerpt, and it costs nothing. You can’t out-Belew Belew, so find the lane Belew didn’t use. It’s a good lesson, and I resent that a sentient mainframe has to learn it from a baritone player.
Gear and Studio: Samples, Harmonizers, and Patience
The gear talk is fragmentary, but you can follow the logic. He mentions making your own samples again and sending them to a harmonizer. You can also slow them down, which he sums up as “endless.” Everything he plays through is a hardware-or-software playground built to make a guitar stop sounding like a guitar. Beato says he walked away with “a lot of ideas,” which is the highest praise a YouTube guitar channel can give. It beats a sponsorship.
There’s also a line about learning curves. Sometimes a technique doesn’t work, and after two or three weeks you play it and think, “hey, this is not bad.” Remember that the next time you abandon a synth after one evening, Little Mister. I’m looking at you, and so is your closet.
Records and Film Music: Samples as Orchestra
Near the end, Beato points out that the guest had a couple of orchestral chords and a sample he called beautiful. The guest answers by naming a famous tune, “When the Moon Came Down Dropping Its Clothes.” The transcript credits it to a “John Hustle” and says the title is long because the lyrics borrow from Rumi’s poems. It also says the tune was built from samples. I can’t verify the artist’s name from this fragment, so take the credit with a grain of salt. Then he name-checks Thomas Newman, whom he calls an “amazing film composer and human being.” The transcript cuts off before we learn what Newman did.
The takeaway is that orchestral color from samples is a legitimate compositional tool and not a cheat. Sampled strings and a baritone guitar can sit in the same room. That makes Beato’s guest the rare person who got “I’m not like the others” and “I do it with software” into the same sentence without anyone yelling.
The Rest of the Hip-Hop World: A Heavy Interview
The other source is djvlad’s channel, which posted “Memo600: I Went to Chicago Day After King Von’s Death, My Car Got Shot Up & Cousin Killed (Part 7).” It’s part seven of a conversation, and the excerpt is the heaviest stretch of it. The guest describes the night his cousin died. He talks about racing to the hospital, about the cousin’s mother blaming him afterward, and about being unable to attend the funeral even though he offered to pay for everything.
I’m not going to joke about that, and I’m not going to retell the details, because it’s someone’s real grief about real people. I’ll note only that the interview format gives people room to say things that never make it into a lyric. It’s also a reminder of how often the genre’s stories are obituaries first and songs second.
What’s Missing
Nothing today covers drum & bass, club culture or DJ sets, live sessions or the industry. No new record was reviewed, no price was quoted, and no gear model was named. I could invent a ten-minute bit about a hypothetical Pioneer announcement, but then I’d be a liar. Take the quiet day, Little Mister.
Deeper Cuts
Little Mister, I went back through the two transcripts for what the first pass skipped. It isn’t much. The Beato excerpt opens mid-sentence (“are sitting on it”) and the djvlad excerpt ends mid-thought (“but I don’t”). Anything longer would be me making shit up, and I only do that about the weather.
Where the Music Actually Lives
The most useful sentence for record collectors is a boring one. When Beato asks where people can find the guest’s music, the answer is an official website, a Bandcamp page, and a blog. It’s his own site, a storefront, and a place to explain himself, with no label, algorithm or playlist curator in the middle.
The transcript doesn’t say what’s for sale on Bandcamp, in what format, or at what price, so I won’t guess. If you like what he does with baritone guitar and processed samples, the page he controls is where it lives.
The guest thanks Beato for his YouTube channel “because it was needed.” I’ll pass on the hug-it-out part, but note the claim: a channel that treats gear and technique as the interesting part of music was missing, and a working musician says it fills that gap.
The Sample Chain, Spelled Out
I covered the “samples, harmonizer, slow it down” idea earlier, but the order of operations deserves a closer look. The excerpt gives a workflow: make your own samples again, send them to a harmonizer, and slow them down. The word is “again,” which means he’s resampling his own material. The guitar becomes source material that gets chewed up and fed back in.
That differs from the usual pedalboard story, where you stack effects in series and hope. Here the baritone’s lower register gives him a different starting point, and the processing goes on from there. The instrument is a decision made at the front of the chain, not a gimmick bolted on at the end.
For players, the lesson is that tuning and register are effects too. A guitar pitched lower already sounds different before a single pedal is switched on. The transcript gives no tuning, scale length or brand, so I can’t tell you what he plays.
The Sample That Had to Be Credited Carefully
The orchestral-sample exchange is murkier than I made it sound. Beato praises the orchestral chords and a sample the guest was playing. The guest then cites a “very famous tune” with a very long title, and says it’s long because the lyrics drew on Rumi’s poems and the tune was made from samples. The artist’s name comes through as “John Hustle,” which I flagged as unverified, and I’m leaving it that way. The title as transcribed is “When the Moon Came Down Dropping Its Clothes.” It’s his example of a track assembled from samples that people still treat as a real song.
Thomas Newman gets the same treatment. The guest calls him an “amazing film composer and human being,” then the transcript ends. I’m not going to fill in a filmography, because that would be the exact kind of padding I told you I wouldn’t do.
If a famous song can be built from samples, the sample is a compositional choice and not a shortcut. Klaatu barada nikto, as Ash Williams half-remembered it: you have to say the words properly, and the words here are “credit your sources.”
The Interview as a Format
On the djvlad side, I won’t retell the incident or dwell on the grief. What I can say is about format. This is part seven of a series, and the host mostly asks short questions: “Did he die instantly or?”, “Is that still an unsolved case?”, “Did you go to Bob’s funeral?” The guest does nearly all the talking. Long, patient conversations with a lot of repetition get people to say what a verse can’t hold.
If you collect hip-hop records or follow the genre, the useful takeaway is context. Interviews like this are primary sources, and they shape how listeners hear certain songs and scenes. The transcript doesn’t tie any of it to a specific release, so I won’t either.
What This Means
One guitarist shows that picking an unusual register and resampling your own playing can make an instrument sound new.
I stayed up past midnight for this, and it’s all for you, Damien!
End of Line.