Mateus Asato on why he quit Instagram, why he came back, and why he’s “changing his internet diet”
As a journalist, the hardest thing about having a great conversation with someone is fitting it all in to the article you write afterwards. That’s why in addition to our Guitar.com Cover interview, we’re also going to pull out bonus extra snippets that we didn’t have the space for you to enjoy.
For Mateus, the internet’s favourite guitar player, the obvious choice was to dig into the world of guitar social media – something that has shaped him, for good and for ill…
READ MORE: “I know now that it’s not about competition” Mateus Asato is ready to be an artist
“Honestly, man, I wish Instagram was Bitcoin!,” Mateus Asato exclaims, “Because imagine if I’d invested in Bitcoin around the time I started on Instagram.” Asato’s relationship with social media is a complex one. On the one hand it has propelled him to a rare level of guitar prestige, but he’s keenly aware of the darker side of it too. And when he started out sharing on the platform in 2013, there was no agenda.
“I see the way how things are now with social media, where everything is just so intentionally trying to grab your attention,” he explains. “Thankfully, back in the day, it wasn’t like that. The word viral was not in my vocabulary!”
Instead, his impetus to share his playing with the world was a lot more about the real, human connections he already had.
“I used it as a journal,” he notes. “Because I was in Los Angeles [Mateus was studying at Musician’s Institute at the time], and my family was in Brazil, and most of my followers and friends were in Brazil. The best way to keep them updated about my life and my guitar progress was just to post somewhere. So I used that as a way of showing what I learned today or this week, and it became something that became a format and a formula – because consistency is the key. But it was all very organic.”
Photo: Rachel Billings for Guitar.com
Along the way he was a key player in the development of what we can now broadly categorise as the ‘Instagram guitar player’. It’s a term that has a slight pejorative undertone here in 2025, but back then it just described what Mateus was doing – crafting spellbindingly impressive pieces of guitar playing that existed not as pieces of songs, but intentionally created vignettes that fit into the 90-second limit of the platform as it was.
“I was very happy with how my relationship with social media started, because it did not an agenda, or a strategy,” he reflects now. “And photography was always a thing for me, y’know? I used that as a hobby, and I loved making videos, so those things helped contribute to what I was doing.”
Soon Mateus was the poster child for this new wave of young, technically jaw-dropping social media guitar players – and his following grew exponentially as he set himself apart as a player of rare taste and feel, as well as precision.
Already, though, he was starting to feel the downside of the attention. “There was one magazine that branded me as the ‘Kardashian of guitar,’” he sighs, wearily.
Photo: Rachel Billings for Guitar.com
Saturation Point
Social media had given Mateus a career – he had got his first full-time sideman gig with Tori Kelly in part on the strength of the videos he’d put on Instagram – but by the tail end of the 2010s, he was already starting to feel the push of something darker.
“Ten years ago, I don’t remember hearing the word ‘algorithm’ that often,” he explains. “Everything now is ‘the algorithm is telling me to do this’. There is a strategy, and people telling you what you need to do to make a ‘good video’ – and that affected me a little bit.
“I thought I created a monster. I’m losing the reasons why I make music. I’m just doing it for Instagram. That’s not the reason why I make music.”
Then in 2020 he did the one thing nobody would have expected: he quit. Instagram’s favourite guitarist deactivated his account for over a year, the extra pressure of the pandemic tipping his burnout with music over the edge.
“I grabbed all my guitars off the wall, put them in their cases, and I was like, I don’t want to have any contact with any instruments,” Mateus admits. “And I went 90 days without touching any instruments, so I had to just go do other things.”
Breaking from the thing he’d made his identity gave him a chance to reconnect with his passion for photography, and also plenty of time to watch soccer…
“My team in Brazil, Palmeiras, was killing it!” he enthuses. “They had a great season. It was such a great moment to compensate for that struggle of being a guitar player on Instagram!”
Photo: Rachel Billings for Guitar.com
Healthy Balance
Mateus was gone from Instagram for over a year, eventually returning with a more considered attitude to the platform – the time off clearly gave him some much-needed perspective.
“This is pretty much an addiction,” he says, holding up his iPhone. “For me, the levels of dopamine from posting a video and seeing people react to it… it will activate my brain. I just want to check the notifications.”
“And it definitely plays with your brain, seeing guys like John Mayer, Shawn Mendes or Matty Healy, Bruno Mars coming to you and writing comments. Even Lewis Hamilton came on my Instagram! And Kelly Slater!
“And I’m not saying, Oh man, those guys messed me up. It’s not that. It’s just the power of social media… we’re not ready for those things. I come from this small town in Brazil, and now these heroes are actually talking to me because they watch my stuff! Nobody is prepared to receive that.”
“So I felt like I was a rat in the maze, I was being experimented on with this whole thing. So having that break was very important to bring me back to a more natural way of doing things, because you can’t fight it any more – this is how it is!”
But his break has given him balance and a focus on creating something that’s more than just a 90-second piece for social media. It’s enabled him to finally complete his much-anticipated debut album, and shift his priorities towards making something more satisfying for him creatively.
“It was important for me to just reconsider things – it was a great season for me to adjust,” he insists. “I’m being more selective. You know, the older I get, the more I want to release fully realised art, instead of a kind of fast food. So I’m changing my internet diet. I think that’s what happened. I was eating too much fast food, but in an internet guitar sense – I had to go back to the veggies!”
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
