37 minutes of interview with EJ. What sets this apart is that Beato is a musician himself. So he has much better question than what we usually get IMO.
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Iām gonna need a Rick interview with every guitar virtuoso.
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I agree! If you check out his channel, there are interviews with Vai and Robben Ford, so that is a start 
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I think he has an older one with Petrucci too
I hope people can see the one occuring similarity between all these interviews that Rick does. Every virtuoso player says one way or another that he is or at least was obsessed with his craft.
Being obsessed isnāt considered healthy by psychological terms, but itās the only way to really excel at something. These people didnāt have the most normal social life growing up, didnāt have many other activities, etc. Of course there are exceptions to this, but this is normally what it takes to excel.
Is it worthy? Only you can decide, it was a great interview nonetheless.
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Cool interview, Iām a big EJ fan and have watched Beato for a while. Check out his āWhy Adults Canāt Learn Perfect Pitchā video for something different.
Regarding obsession, I like the way Mozart put it:
Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.
Mozart
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This is similar to something Nita Strauss said in an interview if i recall correctly in regards to the reason there are so few female guitar virtuosos. Teenage girls arenāt willing to sacrifice a social life in order to develop guitar chops.
I donāt know if you follow Abigail Zachko at all, but I think of her and players like Melanie Faye as kind of the future in this regard:
She clearly likes guitar and plays a lot. She also has all the chops in the world and has since her mid teens. Sheās at Berklee now, which we typically think of as all practice rooms and tendonitis. But sheās outside playing in parks, playing with friends, playing and singing ā a refreshing variety of stuff.
The sequestered virtuoso with the metronome thing suddenly feels like both a very dudelike and rather outdated image thatās overdue for a refresh. Tons of great playing happening out there from people who didnāt lock themselves in a room with Hal Leonard books and a metronome. And Iām āhere for itā, as the kids say these days.
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Letās just agree to disagree Troy. Having 2-3 people here and there being really good (not excelling) at something AND having a perfectly ānormalā social life, doesnāt mean that itās the textbook example.
I work in academia and I donāt know a single person in the top 1% that had a normal social life growing up, or even right now. They all spend 8-10 hours per day on their field, some people in research even more. The day has 24 hours and you need at least 6 hours of sleep, which means that the math donāt work out for everything.
I get your message and point of view, I just donāt think that you get at a top top level without spending the entire day on your craft, at least 5 days a week for years.
I donāt feel time required for acedemic excellence correlates completely with time required for advanced musical skill. While long hours and musical skill is common - I think itās more an artifact of obsession - not necessarily huge amounts of time required to obtain the skill - when it comes to learning a common musical instrument that is.
Over the last 10 years our access to good instruction/examples/performances/free lessons has changed how we learn - itās a game of filtering a relativly huge amount of information instead of looking to beg/borrow/steal it. The visual aspect of YouTube (as opposed to sound only) makes a big difference in the learning curve - at least it would have for me and Iām pretty average. Iām not so sure an individual (partularily a younger one with that oh so wonderful brain plasticity) needs to spend all day for years to become excellent. Itās seems crazy for someone like me that grew up with the āwork hardā ethos but in the current environment itā seems to be more about āwork smartā. My subjective opinion only.
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Donāt get me wrong, Iām sure Abigail plays a lot. And sheās in a musical environment where itās probably a constant hobby. But consider also that she has had Bonamassa-style picking chops since at least the first video I saw of her when she was 16. If she did put in that much time at one point, I can tell you that to maintain those skills, she does not need to put in that kind of time any more.
All great players probably play a lot and think about guitar a lot. Iām just saying the very specific image we have of it, very much the āRocky trains in Siberiaā way of thinking, where more always equals more, may be coloring our view of what real people in the real world are actually out there doing. And itās nice to get a new perspective on that once in a while.
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Youāre right, loved the āRocky trains in Siberiaā analogy. The actual scene is pretty inspiring as well. 
I agree that being in a musical environment helps in being active musically most of the day. This alone is very beneficial in development, might be in other aspects of guitar, not only chops.
Iām not suggesting that people should ruin their hands practicing 12h/day, but Abigailās level of playing demands a serious work ethic and a pro attitude throught the years. It isnāt just a hobby for her, even though she clearly loves it a lot.
My whole point was that regular people with day jobs that drain them physically and emotionally shouldnāt compare themselves to people like Eric Johnson and feel inadequate. Players like Eric Johnson have devoted their lives on their craft and this is why theyāre so skillful and successful. Beating yourself over the fact that you canāt play Clifs of Dover that easily while practicing 1h per day (on a good day) is a recipe for disaster and mild mental illness.
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I think the ālocked in a bedroom practicing for hoursā is more true of players like myself that started in mid to late teens. There are a lots of distractions at that age to learning guitar especially if you arenāt in a supportive musical environment.
Nobody should be beating their ego up about guitar technique. I know itās common, but I also believe we have to work hard to remove that negative energy. Thatās a whole other discussion it sounds like weāre probably on the same page about that.
But I really think that for the kinds of rock stuff that āregularā folks want to play, they can absolutely get there with an hour a day on a good day. And yes I think this includes things like Cliffs of Dover. I havenāt asked but I bet there are more than few players who could pull off some of the āfast pentatonicsā type lines, taken verbatim from that tune, without too much trouble. When we did those Skype type lessons a few months ago, I saw people who maybe donāt post here all that frequently but who had more than enough chops to play it. Iām almost certain that @Tommo could, based on what Iāve seen of his USX / DWPS technique, and he has a wife a baby and a job. Some of these picking styles, theyāre just not that difficult. This is pop music after all.
When we first started releasing those animated episodes of the show where we ārevealedā downward pickslanting and upstroke string changes, we ran this contest where we asked people to use their knowledge of DWPS to figure out how to play pentatonic āfoursā, ascending:
We only requested tab but some players also sent video submissions. They often came with notes about heir story. One guy told us he works in a cover band, and never thought of himself as āgoodā with picking technique. Then he watched our stuff and realized he was already basically doing a USX type motion, and he just didnāt know it. So all he had to do was make sure to play phrases where the string changes are upstrokes, get his hand synchronization down, and so on. The standard stuff we recommend. Paired with the note was a video of him sitting in his practice room playing the pattern we talk about in the video, up to speed. Just like that. Had this been on a record in the '80s he would have been in magazines. Now heās just one of us.
It was really, really cool to see that. Since then, weāve seen and heard variations of this story so many times that weāve lost count hundreds ago.
I donāt want to minimize the challenge that a lot of people face in trying to learn instrument technique. This is why they come here, and helping them is why Iām excited get up in the morning. But a lot of these challenges are really specific ā dealing with stringhopping, learning a new motion. Or even just becoming aware that a motion you already know how to make has āsuperpowersā when paired with the right kind of fretting and a little work on hand synchronization. Things can happen fast.
I think back in the day, we just assumed an arbitrarily high amount of time is required to anything at an elite level. But I think we wrong in considering all skills more or less equal. Theyāre not. Playing fast pentatonics does not require anywhere near the same amount of time in terms of years of input as learning a Liszt or Paganini piece. We have a lot of evidence now that this is the case.
And I think we were also wrong in assuming that just because a famous person born in a low-information era, who may also be obessive in nature, feels like they had to spend huge amounts of time learning instrument technique, that this also true for everyone. Again, see the pentatonics thing. We know itās not true in all cases, and that not all skills require the same amount of time. In fact, our best evidence suggests that virtuosos learn most of their technique early, over a period of maybe two to five years, and then stabilze after that with minimal upkeep. Michael Angleo Batioās technique has looked basically the same since 1986. And heāll be the first to tell you how little he warms up for gigs and clinics.
Anyway sorry for the rant! If anything, Iām just optimistic that for what most people want to achieve, itās very doable on a let less than we think. You might not write the hit song. But I do believe you can learn to play them.
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While I donāt have the link handy, Iām sure thereās discussion on the forum of Noa Kageyamaās advice about practicing from his CTC interview.
And more glibly, this suggestion from drummer Tommy Igoe, that I posted in the āOptimum number of practice hoursā thread:
Thanks for the mention @Troy
It is a very broad question (if I understood the question at all!), but Iād say the answer depends on oneās definition of ābeing able to play somethingā!
Yes, I do think that once the mechanics of DWPS/USX (or generally single-escape motions) are consolidated, they do not require a lot of maintenance. If I took a month break, I reckon I could still pick up a guitar and play the Yngwie 6s pattern (or the pentatonic 6s EJ style) pretty fast across 6 strings. But I donāt want to take a month break for now 
I also agree that learning these mechanics is about problem solving more than āhours spent with a metronomeā, so proficiency can be attained with much less than the legendary ā8 hours of guitar practice a dayā, if proper guidance is given.
When it comes to working on a tune with all the details however (composition, note shaping, phrasing, timing etc.), the work can be endless!
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