“I realised if the drums and the bass are not right, even if my guitar is right, it’s gonna suck!”: Mateus Asato on the difference between session work and making his own album
Instagram star, session ace and now would-be solo artist Mateus Asato has opened up about the biggest challenge he faced while recording his debut album.
The 31-year-old musician – arguably the reason the term ‘Instagram guitarist’ even exists today – recently wrapped sessions for his long-awaited solo record at Sunset Boulevard’s iconic EastWest Studios. While he’s no stranger to the studio, Asato admits that the shift from sideman to main guy came with a steep learning curve.
“It was fun,” he says of the process. “But very challenging.”
READ MORE: “There’s a big difference between filming content and making music”: Mateus Asato on why he quit social media during lockdown
Speaking to Guitar.com as the cover star of our May/June 2025 issue, Asato explains that his new album is a snapshot of every stage of his musical journey so far: “The album is definitely a journey through all the sides of Mateus,” he says. “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 his wealth of experience, Asato says that the change in perspective wasn’t easy.
“When I was just doing a session for somebody, I would not really pay attention to lyrics, y’know?” he jokes. “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.”
One of the biggest surprises? Learning to take a step back from the very instrument that made him famous.
“The hardest part was to not focus on my guitar,” Asato explains. “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.”
And though he initially imagined the album to be one full of collaborations with fellow guitarists, that idea soon gave way to something more personal.
”The only collab I’m doing is with myself!” says Asato. “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!”
The post “I realised if the drums and the bass are not right, even if my guitar is right, it’s gonna suck!”: Mateus Asato on the difference between session work and making his own album appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
