What Does Rick Rubin ACTUALLY Do?

Rick Rubin knows nothing about music according to Rick Rubin in a recent 60 Minutes interview that sort of broke the music internet last week he said those exact words I know nothing about music and people were kind of freaking out why is this guy who's making millions and millions of dollars as a producer on all of these hit records why does he know nothing about music but the big question that I'm gonna ask today is is that actually a bad thing I submit that it is not and today I want to talk about why that

is let's get this out of the way to start producer an engineer are not the same job it's possible that you can do both of them it's also worth noting that neither of those jobs is musician it's possible that being a musician could make you better at either or both of them but it's not a prerequisite I'm sure he's also exaggerating to a degree like he's been a professional record producer for 40 years he practically lives in studios he's got a new book coming out I'm sure a lot of what he said was to sort

of generate hype and obviously it's working I kind of want to get that book watching people react to this has been kind of hilarious because it's demonstrated that on a grand scale people don't really understand what a producer does the word itself has kind of lost almost all of its meaning because in different genres it means vastly different things and two the general public even musicians it's reached this sort of Mythic status it's a almost a god-like character in the studio so it could stand to reason that you would be confused that someone who was

a music producer might know nothing about music if you're watching this channel it's pretty likely that you yourself are a musician so if I were to tell you that someone is a producer what do you think that it is that they do if you play metal it's pretty likely that you're imagining that they are a an engineer of some kind that they're going to help you to record all of your parts edit them mix them sample replace probably reamp your guitars if you're a rap a producer is probably the person who makes the beats that

you rap over if you're a pop artist it's possible that the producer writes the entire song creates the whole track does all the sound design and everything and writes all the lyrics and the Melodies and everything and then you just sing them and if you've never worked for the producer before and you saw this interview you might think that a producer is like a con man or like just some megalomaniac who takes your money and doesn't actually add anything to the music it seems like a lot of the hubbub and blowback is coming from people

who think that music is just playing notes good through expensive equipment and making it sound good if that's true then of course him and every other producer on Earth are scam artists and uh we should probably be getting our pitchforks and torches ready but if we're prepared to accept that music exists on a level other than just technical then we should also consider that it might be very very important for somebody to help us to improve it on this other level I know a million Engineers who can make something sound like gold I myself as

a musician could tell you for example what chords are happening in a given song and what the melody notes are relative to those chords but that doesn't mean that either of us can help you to connect to people better how to make a song that will connect you to a vast audience of people who feel the same things and that's where somebody like Rick Rubin is absolutely invaluable he's the master so what the hell is a producer's actual job and why might it benefit them not to know anything about music all of the things that

I mentioned before could be part of a producer's job because their number one job is hurting cats musicians are idiots and more than anything else what a producer needs to do is make sure that the record gets made whatever it takes the job is defined by need whatever the artist needs to finish the record is what the producer needs to provide this this would be anything from being a good engineer or you know a musician of some kind to being a therapist buying the drugs if you've watched any of my recent songwriting contest reaction videos

you'll know that what an average amateur musician would need from a producer is a lot a lot of very very close Hands-On fixing of things a lot of like hardcore musical help to get the song from what it is to what it needs to be just in terms of the composition itself but if you're a band at a level where you're working with Rick Rubin then you've already got all of that together so what does an artist like that actually mean Rick Rubin is what I like to call a big picture producer he doesn't go

in there and turn knobs and tell you what chord to play at a certain part in the song but he'll do things like what he talks about in the interview for example Tom Petty gave him a demo tape none of them spoke to me but that guitar riff that opens a song was something that was played between two of the songs just like a like a warm-up it turned out to be a breaker hits ever most artists don't actually know what their own best work is they have the things that they like the most that

they've done but that is rarely the same as their best output and a really good big picture producer can take a step back see which of the things that the artist has created is going to have the most emotional cultural impact and identify it and help them to get that to where it needs to be if Rick Rubin was a proper musician do you play instruments barely he would probably fall into all of the same traps that we as artists and musicians fall into getting way up our own ass thinking about how much work we

put into something and thinking that that makes it good but Rick Rubin lying on the couch with no shoes and his eyes closed is just vibing to the music like a normal person would be who just enjoys music and isn't burdened by having gone to a conservatory or spent their whole life shredding in in the Woodshed trying to get scales down and he can just like go by what feels good and what feels right and what really hits him on an emotional level and then he goes there it is that thing grabs it out of

the stream and goes like this is your best thing you need to work on this we need to take this and develop it into the the one we as musicians have very very little objectivity on our own music we're usually looking at it kind of like this and we're very focused on the process because it's so hard it takes so much it takes so much work to take something from a seed of an idea all the way to a fully fledged song I've done it many times and it never really gets any easier and then

we have our like little pets the things that we made that we really like that aren't necessarily all that good and having a producer who especially one who is not a musician who can just listen to the thing that you made and go like that's not that great or oh this is amazing but it's too long it's not long enough and to be honest and decisive and to understand music culture at large and to have a lot of experience in the music business all of that is worth the amount of money that somebody like Rick

Rubin is getting paid obviously he's sort of a special case not everybody can get away with lying on the couch taking off their shoes closing their eyes and just vibing to make millions of dollars and get points on a huge record but you know 40 years in the music industry with so many Gold Records that he literally can't even keep track of them all or where they've gone I used to send them all to my parents and I don't know where they are now he's kind of earned it being a producer is a separate job

from being a musician in the same way that being a guitar tech is different from being a guitarist there's kind of a purity to the separation of the two that makes it work better when he says he doesn't know anything about music what he's actually saying is that he doesn't know any music theory he doesn't know Harmony he's approaching it completely intuitively and honestly I kind of miss being able to do that he's the avatar for the average listener in a way that most more musical producers can never be he's able to feel the music

in the way that a normal music listener does but he's also got the experience and the musical knowledge of the of the music world as a whole to know where it fits and what to do with it he's sort of like a bridge between the audience and the artist if he was a proper musician he wouldn't be able to do that the way that he does he's also sort of a unicorn he's a very very special case you can't just be like all right well I don't know anything about music I'm gonna be a producer

too this doesn't like remove knowledge of music as a prerequisite for being a producer you can't just go into a studio now having never played an instrument or knowing anything about music and be like yeah I'm gonna produce This Record because I listen to music sometimes I kind of think of him like the ultimate test audience he's sort of just an average listener with really good taste and you can play him something and he decides if he likes it or not and then he can also tell you what to do with the results of the

test if you play a song for your mom she'll tell you if she likes it or not but what good is that information to you she can't tell you what to do with it and this is why he's been able to work across all different styles of music all genres with tons of different kinds of of artists and have great results he literally did Slayers Reign in Blood he also did diabolous in Musica so they can't all be winners but the fact that he can produce albums for Run DMC LL Cool J Slayer the cult

Tom Petty proves that he's tapped into the part of Music That's Universal that transcends all of the genre trappings or styles of all of those artists one amazing example of this is that it was his idea to have Run DMC and Aerosmith do a collaborative version of Walk This Way rap and Rock think about what it would have taken to make that happen in that kind of an era when it had never been done before rap and rock were completely separate but he didn't see him like that and of course he had to be able

to to know everybody involved and have enough sway to convince them to do it and they did it and it was a huge hit it worked great it's a great song and it paved the way for well I mean Limp Biscuit to be fair but sometimes in order to make stuff you have to Break Stuff one thing that falls under the sort of vague category of what a producer does is challenging the artist maybe you know giving them some pushback about a decision that they've made musically or artistically and giving them suggestions of what they

can do instead a producer who's doing like a lot of just concrete things more engineering stuff for example suggesting that you put fresh strings on your guitar before you track it might not ever do something like that they might never say oh are you sure you want to play that note there or like do you really think that this section of the song needs to be there or maybe we should put this in a different key stuff like that do you need somebody who's going to do that who's going to say like hey I don't

know if working you should try something else even something as general as like why don't you try a different thing here just give me a different take on this same idea that can be incredibly valuable even literally somebody just saying do better is incredibly valuable sometimes if nobody ever asked you to do better it's possible that you might just not you might think that what you're doing is is perfect and it can't get any better producer is an incredibly important and Incredibly vague job and I think that the reaction to this Rick Rubin interview is

proof that it's sort of thankless to boot I mean most producers are not very well known Beyond musicians and even then it's pretty unlikely that you'll know who produced a given album but if it goes badly they're gonna get a lot of the blame because of this vagueness the efficacy of a producer can be very difficult to track it's possible that one of their biggest contributions to an album was just being the goalie keeping the artist from putting something on there that would have just been disastrous you you can't look at an album and go

like man I'm really glad this song wasn't on there because it was almost on there and then the producer was like is that really what you want to do because you as the listener will never know that but that's a huge part of the job that people don't really talk about to me the most important takeaway from this interview is to try and approach your own music the way that Rick does when he's listening to other artists I'm not trying to sell it I'm just cheering what I'm feeling to separate out all of the things

all the work that you put into it all of the detailed knowledge that you have of your own music and put that aside and really try to listen to it as a listener as someone who's just heard it for the first time someone who has no idea the hours of work that you put in on the back end all the time that you spent practicing your instrument honing your craft all of that stuff and just take it for what it actually is does it have the emotional impact that you want your music to have is

it gonna have the cultural impact that you want it to does it make you feel the way that you want the person listening to it to feel is that feeling something very special he's not listening for the stuff that us musicians are listening for all he's doing is paying very close attention to how every part of it makes him feel because that is the only thing that matters the final product of a piece of music can take many many different forms but the way that it's going to make the listener feel is number one across

the board across every genre style culture everything when they hear the music how does it make them feel Full Stop in my mind it is very clear that he would actually be a worse producer if he was a great musician and or a great engineer it's important that he maintains this sort of separation between himself and musicians if he could like and like dial in a perfect EQ curve would we still have the same Rick Rubin I don't think so the dude is tapped into something very special and that's more than enough so I'm gonna

spend some time really trying to get back in touch with that so that I can not only enjoy music again as a listener and making it but also because it'll help me as a songwriter and a musician to really focus on what's important but if you want to learn some real concrete ways in which you can get better at writing songs you're definitely going to want to check out my course which is called complete Rock and metal songwriting it's 15 hours of everything that I know about writing songs you can get that at the link

in the description below thank you so much for watching watching if you haven't already hit the Subscribe button and the Bell so that you can get notified when I put up more videos like this one and I'll see you real soon