“I know now that it’s not about competition” Mateus Asato is ready to be an artist
Even if you don’t realise it, you’ve probably heard Mateus Asato. The 31-year-old Brazilian guitarist has spent the last decade carving out a uniquely modern route to stardom – embracing social media at the dawn of the short-form video era, he’s earned millions of followers, scores of famous fans, and worked with everyone from Bruno Mars and Jessie J to John Petrucci and Joe Satriani to Elevation Worship.
Mateus Asato on The Cover of Guitar.com. Image: Rachel Billings for Guitar.com
But despite being “one of the best guitar players around”, according to no less than John Mayer, there was something missing. You won’t find Mateus Asato records in your local store or streaming services – because outside of the wonderfully expressive, technically jaw-dropping and melodically head-spinning guitar vignettes that propelled him to Instagram stardom, Asato hasn’t formally released any of his own music. It’s an extremely 2020s route to being a guitar hero, but now after a decade that’s all going to change. As we log onto a call with Asato on a sunny Los Angeles morning, he’s looking a little tired, his luxuriant long hair looking more tousled than usual… as you’d expect from a man who finished the sessions for his debut album at the iconic EastWest Studios less than 12 hours before.
“I’ve been working in this world of promises for so long,” Asato says of his long road to putting out his own music. “I would be always telling people, ‘I’m releasing my record next year’. It’s been 10 years of a lot of doubts and questions… and some identity crises about who I am in terms of music.”
“The album is definitely a journey through all the sides of Mateus Asato”
Side Dish
Asato’s journey to this point has been a fascinating and distinctly modern one. His otherworldly playing has made him the most respected and influential guitar player in the social media sphere, while also propelling him into a career as an A-list sideman.
Touring gigs with Tori Kelly, Jessie J and Bruno Mars took Asato all over the world… but it also occupied his time in a way that limited his ability to become an artist in his own right. “As soon as I left music college, I started as a sideman,” he explains. “And then you’re not thinking as an artist. You don’t see the big picture. You’re just doing a service for somebody.”
Asato had all the trappings of an A-list guitar player – millions of followers, signature guitars, pedals and amp software, offers to do clinics and guitar camps around the world – but he wasn’t sure what his next step would be. “It’s the duality of being a musician,” he says. “I think everybody deals with that. There’s two things: I have to pay my bills, and I have to try to follow what my heart is trying to tell me.”
Image: Rachel Billings for Guitar.com
Asato admits that for a while he wasn’t sure what his heart was saying. His versatility and virtuosity was plain to see – a fact emphasised by the diverse guitars hanging on the wall behind him as we chat, from a Floyd-loaded SuperStrat to a Charlie Christian-style jazz box – and he wondered if maybe that meant he was best suited to being “just a sideman”. Then in 2016, he travelled to South Korea for a guitar clinic, and was confronted with the reality that the vignettes he posted on Instagram weren’t just getting lots of likes and shares – they were having a profound emotional impact on people emotionally.
“I had no idea of the impact that these little Instagram videos were having until I actually went to South Korea,” he reflects. “There were 500 people there just to see this ‘Mateus Asato guy’. That totally changed the game for me: ‘Wait a minute, I play for an artist… but also there’s a big potential for me to just do my own stuff’.”
“The only collab I’m doing is with myself!”
Pressure Cooker
The road to actually doing his own stuff, however, hasn’t been easy. It took a hard conversation with friend and producer Matt Mainhard to help him realise “it’s not okay to just have a list of songs. We gotta have a theme. We gotta have some sort of concept, or something that will tell you where to go.” It was the spark that gave him a new level of clarity and focus – “I was waking up thinking of the album, going to bed, thinking of the album” – and he put all his other projects to one side. Whereas in the past he felt “obligated” to finally release music, now he felt something more profound: “I have this thing that’s very important, and I have to take care of it and deliver it to the world.”
What Asato and his close-knit group of friends and collaborators – including drummer Anthony Uriarte and bassist Isaias Elpes – went into Sunset Boulevard’s legendary EastWest Studios to create is a summation of everything that’s led him here. “The album is definitely a journey through all the sides of Mateus,” he explains. “The Mateus who’s a sideman, Mateus as the Instagram boy, and then the Mateus that got more mature over the years. Who developed a different vision regarding music, regarding how I see guitar.”
Despite that wealth of experience and growing confidence, Asato admits that it was strange getting to grips with the pressure of being the Main Guy in the studio. “When I was just doing a session for somebody, I would not really pay attention to lyrics, y’know?” he laughs. “ It was just like, ‘Let me make sure I play this thing right and you’re happy with it’. But for this, my goodness, I had to think so much about every little detail. It was fun, but very challenging.”
Image: Rachel Billings for Guitar.com
Hearing the way that Asato’s solos explode from the fretboard, you’d presume that the biggest challenge would be nailing the guitar parts, but in fact it was quite the opposite.
“The hardest part was to not focus on my guitar,” he reveals. “Because I realised, wait a minute, if the drums and the bass are not right, even if my guitar is right, it’s gonna suck! In a couple of the songs, I had to stop playing, and I was like, just keep my take and now I’m just gonna listen to the boys play.”
At one point, Asato wanted his debut album to be one of collaborations, but eventually he realised that wouldn’t be an authentic statement of who he was as an artist. After all, “this is the first card I’m throwing on the table to the world.” Besides, the album has turned out to be collaborative – but not in the way you’d expect. “The only collab I’m doing is with myself!” he exclaims. “There are a couple of solos that I recorded from 2016 to 2019, but in that time my playing has changed – and when I listened to it back, you could tell that things were different… the vibrato, the tones, those little nuances. But I decided to just leave the original take and add new layers of me playing now, so it’s like I’m jamming with myself – that was cool!”
“Art is a beautiful way of expressing yourself and everything kind of becomes subjective”
The Beautiful Game
So how did the son of Japanese immigrants from the sleepy rural city of Campo Grande end up becoming a generational guitar talent? Well, as is often the case with Brazil, it all starts with fútbol.
“When I was nine years old, football was the only thing that I wanted to do,” Asato reveals. But seeing his older cousin playing guitar one day piqued his interest: “You’re in that season that you just want to copy the older kids – and he showed up with an acoustic and listening to some rock bands from Brazil.”
That’s an origin story that many guitar players can relate to, but no amount of natural talent makes you into the sort of otherworldly guitar player that Asato has become – you also need to put in a level of graft and effort that few are capable of. And for Asato, his football obsession helped him on his journey.
“With football, it’s a sport, so there is a first, second, third place. And just by nature, I am very competitive myself,” he chuckles, his hands becoming more animated. “It’s annoying sometimes, how even if I’m just playing with my friends and my dad’s friends on Saturday afternoon… I want to win every match!”
Image: Rachel Billings for Guitar.com
The discipline, drive and work ethic that had been instilled in him to get better at football, was now focused on guitar. “Why does a professional team exist?” he asks rhetorically. “Because they want to win a tournament, right? I didn’t need to win any guitar tournaments, but I kind of used that [drive] to help me to grow and develop as a guitarist.”
That said, he did win one, beating out over 500 other entrants to win Brazil’s Double Vision guitar contest in 2010. This national prize not only helped Mateus land his place at LA’s prestigious Musician’s Institute, it also convinced his family he could make a career of guitar (“I don’t need to be a doctor anymore!”) but its impact on him personally was even more profound.
“After I won that guitar contest, I realised I never want to mix those things again in my life,” he admits. “Because at the same time that I was very pleased to win that thing, I understood that if I didn’t win, that would have probably sent me down a very melancholic road where I’d have probably decided that I did not want to play guitar anymore. Forget about this thing! Thankfully, God was kind enough and gracious enough to give me that award, because it made me peaceful, but I know now that it’s not about competition.
“It was great therapy for me to understand that you don’t need to be the best. You just have to understand that art is a beautiful way of expressing yourself and everything kind of becomes subjective and relative. I’m still competitive, but I understood that this is way beyond the competition. It’s about transmitting a message to the world.”
Image: Rachel Billings for Guitar.com
After more than a decade of wrestling, Mateus Asato has finally reached the point where his message has been refined and crafted and is nearly ready to be beamed out to the world. It’s been a long road, but whatever happens from here, you get the sense that Asato is at peace and comfortable with the artist he’s blossoming into.
“My hometown is in the countryside in Brazil,” he reflects. “And of course, I had dreams, but I was never like, ‘Oh man, I want to be famous. I want to play for a lot of people.’ I wanted to be a great guitar player, I wanted to be happy when I played guitar. And thankfully, that’s been something that I’ve been doing, with great gratitude.”
Mateus Asato appeared on the cover of the Guitar.com Magazine May/June 2025 issue.
Words: Josh Gardner
Photography: Rachel Billings
Photography Assistance: Charlie McKay
Styling: Ben Adams
Hair & Makeup: Rachel Hearle
Location: Dawsons Local Soho
The post “I know now that it’s not about competition” Mateus Asato is ready to be an artist appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
