Victor Wooten

Website: www.victorwooten.com

Victor and I sat down in Pizza Express before a Flecktones gig. The chat moved from music and education to wing chun and italian food…

What was the motivation behind writing your new book, ‘The Music Lesson’?

I’ve been teaching a lot and running camps now since the year 2000. In doing a lot of teaching, I’ve realized a whole lot about playing music, learning it and approaching it. I learned it because in teaching people, or sharing with people I realise that most people don’t have the time or the luxury to learn the way I learned.
When I found out how most people were teaching, I realised that, in my opinion, a lot of people are teaching in a way that takes a long time to learn. I wanted to find a way that would make someone understand what I was trying to say, right now. Not later, not ‘go home and practice it’, understand it now. I felt that I came up with some ways to do that, so my teaching style is different than what I found with most people.
So for years people have been saying to me, ‘you’ve got to write this down, you’ve gotta put this in a book’, but I knew they meant an instructional book, a how-to book. I didn’t want to do that, because a lot of the things I talk about and wanted to talk about, I couldn’t see fitting well in an instructional book, at least not yet because people would take it too much as a rule. When you put something as an instruction, it becomes ‘Victor’s Method’ or ‘Victor said do it this way’ and that goes against what I’m talking about. The thing is finding your own way – the same way you learned to speak was by doing your own thing. You heard it, you interpreted it your own way, no one sat you down and said ‘do this, do that.’ They spoke to you and you learned it quicker. I didn’t want to write an instructional book, so I didn’t know what to write.
I hadn’t planned on writing anything, I just planned on verbally sharing these things, until one day I was looking through a book that I had read many, many years ago. I was actually riding in the car with Steve Bailey and he had just purchased a book by an author named Richard Bach called ‘Illusions’ I read it when I was about 15 and it’s always been one of my favourite books.
I saw the book in Steve’s car and I was like ‘Wow! I haven’t read this in a long time’. I remember how much it blew me away and it still blows me away even today and that’s when it hit me, that’s what I should do. Write this book but do it in my own way.
So I wrote a simiar book. ‘Illusions’ is about a teacher and a student, a strange teacher and so I decided to do a similar thing and write it as fiction. I like that format because it’s taken lightly. I could write anything in fiction and no one would argue about it. No one says ‘Oh is that true or is that false?’ If they like it, cool if they don’t, no big deal. I wrote it as fiction, but the lessons are in there, everything I want to say is in there, but you can take it or leave it and I don’t have to defend it.

Did you find a lot of the students that you come into contact with had problems, similar universal themes that you felt needed to be addressed in the book?
Yes, and what it is for the most part – people are teaching us theory and technique. Theory and technique does not make you a good musician, no more than learning nouns, verbs, pronouns and the alphabet makes you a good communicator. You understand the language, what it means but it doesn’t mean that you’re gonna be able to really express yourself in a way that someone wants to hear. You may sound technical, you may sound schooled or scholarly but it may not make the common people want to listen.
Some of my favourite speakers,  if I listen to someone like Martin Luther King, is someone who spoke with passion, I’m not thinking nouns, verbs and neither are they. They’re speaking through experience, through their lives and that’s what brings the passion out. If we think about our favourite musicians, and I’m talking about musicians that last over decades, they’re the same way. They’re players that play through feel. For example, if I take a technical player, one of my favourites, like Steve Vai or Van Halen someone who can play a whole lot of technical stuff and makes great music. If they’re good, they’ll last for a whole generation, which means our generation will know about them, but not our parents, not our kids.
You take someone who plays from pure feel and I mean someone like Stevie Wonder or Ray Charles, they’re not technical. We don’t look at them and think wow look at their technique. They’re not thinking ‘theory.’ BB. King only knows four notes or something, but you know but my kids know him, I know him and my parents know him. They last through many generations.
Now those are the real, real musicians. I started looking at that and wondered ‘Why is that?’ In a nutshell, I realised that most of the people that listen to music know nothing about theory and don’t care about it, no more than when I’m listening to you talk, do I care about the theory of what you’re saying, as far as nouns and verbs, I just want to know can you move me? Do I understand? Do I like what you say?

In the book, you talk about people’s obsessions with the tools of their trade. I like the analogy you used in one of the chapters talking about the writer and his pencils.
Most of us learn in a way that gets us stuck at a certain level. We get stuck at the bass or at the instrument and the instrument starts to take on too much responsibility, too much significance. Just like a writer who’s so into his pencils.
It doesn’t make any sense. If I’m reading his book I don’t care what he wrote it with and music, to me, should be the same. The instrument is insignificant. No more than your voice – I’m not sitting here thinking whether it’s a bass voice, a tenor or an alto. I don’t care, I want to know what you’re saying and how does it make me feel.
So, how could I get musicians to that point quickly? The thing I realised first, is that what I was talking about, everybody knows what it is. If you know the difference between a good musician and a bad one, at least by your own definition, not mine, that means it’s in you somewhere. That good musician is in there, you already know what it is – you can’t know what it is if it’s not a part of you. So since it’s already a part of you, that means there’s a good musician in there somewhere. So how do we get that out? And if it’s already in there, that means we don’t have to start at the beginning.

I think the way the book is written addresses some pretty big and in some cases quite abstract ideas, but the fiction makes it more accessible for the young student than similar books, like ‘The Inner Game’ or ‘Effortless Mastery.’ Was this purposeful?
I wrote it this way because it’s very easy to digest and there’s no pressure when reading it, whether you believe it or not. My whole approach to music is identical to how we learned our first language. If I look at how I learned English, and realise that I was improvising after only a year and a half or two years of speaking it. I was already improvising well, I could jam with the best already. If music is a language, and I’ve never met a musician who disagreed, how come it takes me fifteen years, twenty years to get good at this one language and only two or three to get good at the other when we’re saying they’re both the same thing? So I started looking at those processes, looked at music as a language and approached it the same way, and most of the answers were clear.
That’s why I say we learn music in reverse – not that it’s wrong, it’s just backwards when you look at what a language is. If I have a child and I want her to play piano, my first thought is ‘who can I send her to for lessons?’ If I have a child and I want him to speak English, I talk to him, I put him around other people that talk to him and I allow him to jam back. I don’t put him in a beginner’s class; he doesn’t know that he’s a beginner. When he does something wrong, I don’t tell him he’s wrong, I think it’s cute. If he does it wrong enough then I adapt to his style, I start saying it the way this kid says it wrong. He never feels uptight or inferior learning the language, so they just explore it, they practice it, because there’s no baggage surrounding it.
With music we stick the beginners, like Michael says in the book, in the beginning class. They don’t get to play with the professionals for years and so it takes them a long time. So we just have to find a way of being able to treat music like we do a language, allowing them to jam. What if we set up a thing where, even once a week, all of us professional musicians in town donated our time and had a jam session. No right or wrong, just gentle guidance and we just sit down and have a musical discussion? That could make a big difference.

I suppose most beginners just want to learn the notes in their favourite basslines but miss how the notes are being played.
Listen to your favourite player – he’s not just playing the notes, which most of us learn how to do. We learn how to play notes and notes alone don’t make music. When we change our outlook and don’t really think of it as teaching, just showing, the way Michael says in the book, I can show you anything! I can show you what a good solo sounds like. I may not be able to teach you how to do it, but here’s one.. and then you learn and understand what one is then you can produce it.
Once you realise that, we’re really not teachers. I can’t make you get it, I can only show it to you over and over until you get it on your own. You’re the teacher, I’m the shower. Once I realised that, I thought ‘Wow! I could show you anything’.
A lot of people say groove can’t be taught, this can’t be taught, that can’t. Don’t teach it, show it to them, just show them a good one and a bad one. See what moves that person and show them that. Once we show them all sorts of different things, they’ll learn what they want on their own. Then we just guide them, we coach them.

Do you feel that teaching and exploring these concepts has helped you as a player?
Absolutely. Because, all of a sudden if you were asked to teach English to a class who didn’t speak any, you’d have to think about how you do it. When do I raise the pitch of my voice? You’ve just been doing it all of your life. I’ve been playing music since I was 2. I never thought about how I do it. All of a sudden I had to figure out how I do it. In figuring out how I do it, I realised how a lot of other people do it and how they thought about it. From seeing this, I felt that, at least in my opinion, there’s another way. I won’t say it’s a better way, but it is a faster way.

As a player with so many accolades and such a high level of musicianship, where do find inspiration and challenges?
I like to look at where the electric bass has come in such a short time. The instrument’s only a little over fifty years old, so I like to look at some of the pioneers of the instrument, guys like James Jamerson and Anthony Jackson, even Leo Fender. He probably had no idea that we’d be doing what we’re doing with it now, in only fifty-something years, that’s short. The bass has grown, it’s made leaps and bounds. So when I see a kid who just starting off now, his parents just bought him a bass, he’s getting his first lesson, in another fifty years, what’s he gonna be doing? So I use my imagination to get there and I realise this kid doesn’t know it yet but he’s already much better than I.

Like that saying ‘If I see further than you it’s because I’m standing on the shoulders of giants’?
Yeah, the work I’ve done, some of the techniques I’m known for, took me years to figure them out. Now, the beginner can just look at me and imitate it. It doesn’t take him years so he’s gonna get to where I’m at much quicker than I did, which is gonna allow him to go much further. And I think that’s wonderful.
So I put my head inside his and I advance him ten years, fifteen years, twenty and I get all these wonderful ideas. It’s something I tell people at my clinics, ‘I’m stealing from you already and you don’t even know what it is yet!’ But that’s how I look at it.

Do you ever feel that people obsess over your techniques rather than your musicality? Like they only see the icing but miss the cake…
It is just like with a cake. When we’re looking at a shelf for a cake, the icing gets our attention and we might even choose a cake based on the decoration.
But if we were to stick our fork in it and there was only icing, we’d be very disappointed. Ninety-nine percent of it has to be cake, the boring part, but the essential part. Music is no different, life is no different.
With music you have to have fundamental skills, you have to be able to play in time, groove, you have to understand dynamics, you can’t play monotone. The technical icing or how to solo over Giant Steps, by using theory and overlaying chords, that stuff is icing. You can play great music without it, but you can’t play great music with only it. You have to have the cake underneath, the substance.
That’s why I talk about listening quite a bit. Listening is a skill that should be practiced, but most people are only listening for that icing. Then, when we try to play that icing we’re like ‘How come I don’t sound like Stanley? Or Jaco? I’m playing the same notes – I can play it faster.’ But they’re not realising, there’s substance. Most of us don’t realise when we’re listening to and learning Jaco, there’s a whole lot more to it than just his notes. That’s why Jaco could get away with overplaying. Jaco overplayed on almost everything, he just plays a lot. He’s always throwing in harmonics and fills, but it sounds incredible because everything he plays is just perfect.

My favourite Jaco track is probably ‘A Remark you Made’ and it has one of his most reserved performances. Just all of the beautiful subtle nuances.
That’s the thing that your grandparents and your kids can understand and they don’t have to know a thing about music. The flashy stuff impresses other bass players but the real stuff impresses everyone. It makes you feel it whether you’re impressed or not, you have to feel that. That’s what’s made B.B. King and people like that survive for decades. It’s because people don’t have to know anything about it, they can just feel it. That’s a cool thing about music, you don’t have to know a thing about it to get it. You can just look at a finished product and go ‘Oh – wonderful!’ Music’s amazing that way.

As students of music I suppose we can all get a bit obsessed with the nuts and bolts of playing and technique and sometimes forget about all of simple things that hit an audience on a gut level.
At camp, when I get a chance to spend time with musicians, there’s always some very technical players who can play fast and because they can, they hide behind that. Every solo is fast, even on a slow tune. Their solos don’t change with the music. If we’re talking and all you know about it cars, if we’re talking about something else, don’t talk about cars! You’ve got to change what you’re talking about to fit the subject. Music’s the same. If the tune changes, you gotta change.
Some of these technical fast players, that’s all they can do. My goal for them is to get them to play a solo where they can’t play any faster than a quarter note, and it’s so funny that they can’t do it. They just start playing every quarter note dum-dum-dum-dum. I say ‘Wait a minute. You can play slower, you can leave space, you can play on accents, you don’t have to play on downbeats but just not faster. There’s still a whole lot you can do. All I did was take one element away – speed and if you can’t solo just because I take this one thing away, then you’re limited.’ It gets them to see it, because all of a sudden they’re down on the same playing level as the beginner. In our classes in camp there are 15 students in each group and there’ll be beginners up to professionals all on the same plane.

Let’s talk about your new website with Steve Bailey: The Bass Vault
It’s amazing. There’s a couple of different sections. When you get inside there’s a bunch of different headings. Click on concerts and it opens up live or in the studio. Click on the live thing and it could open the thing I did for Bass Player Live where I played with Stanley and Marcus, you can see that, live concerts of me soloing with the Fleckones, Steve in Russia, loads of stuff. Then there’s some stuff Steve and I have just filmed in a studio playing which you can watch and leave comments.
There’s a place we call ‘Cams’. There’s a backstage cam, an on the road cam, I have my camera with me at all times, in fact I should be videotaping this interview. I’m videotaping everything and making it accessible, because most people only get to see the finished product, you don’t get to see what’s behind the scenes.
For example, I just played a week with the Chick Corea Electric band in New York which was very cool. I videotaped the whole process of learning his music, from when it showed up in the mail. I was on tour, I had to learn it while I was touring with my own band and I videotaped the process all the way up until the soundcheck, even the rehearsal the night before.

That shows the ordinary player the hoops still that have to be jumped through, even by a player of your level.
It also helps people to realise that we didn’t get to this point just through practice. I’ve been asking this question at clinics lately: ‘How many people want to be a professional musician?’ Most of the audience raises their hands, so I ask them ‘What are you doing to get there?’ They all say ‘Practicing’. They’re in for a rude awakening if all they’re doing is practicing. If you think that playing your instrument is the only thing that’s gonna make you a professional musician, then you got it wrong.
Today, I’m a professional musician. I’m gonna be on stage maybe three hours, one hour for soundcheck and two for the gig. The rest of the day is interviews, on the phone making long distance calls, on the internet answering emails, there’s so much other stuff that doesn’t mean practicing. I wish I could sit around all day practicing. Those days go away as soon as you’re a professional musician.
It all matters who you are as a person, as to whether or not you can deal with that. We’ve seen so many professional musicians who can’t deal with it. I can stop being a professional musician but I can never get away from myself. I need to be working on who I am so that when I become that professional musician, I can handle it.

I remember reading an interview with Tony Levin where he advised young players to be aware that even when you’re a profile player, doors don’t just automatically open because you’re “Mr. Bass hero.”
Really, the only guarantee you have, is what you think about yourself. I don’t care who you are, you can’t determine what someone else thinks about you. You can’t determine if someone’s gonna keep the part you record, just because you’re Victor Wooten or whatever. You can’t determine whether someone’s gonna buy your record or come see you play live – you don’t know that. Who you are to you and how you deal with that is the only guarantee you have. That’s the thing you can directly affect and that’s what you need to be working on now, not later.

So back to the Vault..
We have so many videos, probably 15 hours of videos. There’s also a chat room where you can type to people but there’s also 4 screens so if one of the administrators is there, myself, Steve Bailey, Dave Welsch, or even Stanley Clarke, Anthony Wellington, if we’re in there we come up on the video screens so you can see and hear us. It helps us by not needing to type fast to answer everyone’s questions but it also means we can bring our instruments. You got a musical question? Well here it is ..and we can play.
I’ve even broadcast my shows, rehearsals and soundchecks into the chat room so people can sit and watch. I did a 12 hour studio session where I showed the whole thing in the Bass Vault. It’s very cool.
We also have a section that we call ‘Labs.’ It’s a new room. When you go in there you can click on ‘Thumping Around’ and my bass shows up. You can click on the neck and play the notes.  As you click on the notes on the neck, the notes show up on a music staff so you can learn to read music. Once you get pretty good at that, you go to the next section you can play a game where the note shows up on the staff and you’ve got to click it on the bass and there’s timers so you can time yourself if you want to.
You can play another game where six sharps show up on the screen. What key is it? You gotta click on the right note. Any day we’re gonna have a page up for ear training, so it’s a very broad site, that’s good for learning and just for enjoyment too.
People who sign up for a year also have the opportunity to get a soundcheck pass. They get access to our soundchecks, where we’re available. There should be a group of people here today at the soundcheck, who are year members, so I’ll meet them there and give them a Bass Vault Day Pass.

Like a little Gold Card members club.
Well, it helps them to see the reality of the life of a musician. The real life, not just ‘Oh I’m gonna practice all day, then play a gig and people are gonna scream and yell, then I’ll go home and practice some more.’ That’s not it.
So much of your day is spent waiting around, doing non-musical things especially keeping the relationships in the band working. It doesn’t matter how good you play, if they don’t like you, you don’t have a gig. And more times than not, it’s people you don’t care for in a tight quarters van or sharing a hotel room. And the problem is, not only do you not like them, most people don’t like their own selves. For a lot of us, that’s our reason for playing music, as an escape and to me that’s sad.

What about gear? How do you take care of that when you tour internationally?
All I have with me on this tour is a Fodera 4-string bass. I didn’t bring one of my main basses, like my Yin-Yang bass, I just brought a Victor Wooten model bass, this one happens to be a bolt-on. I carry my bass on the plane and I never know when they’re gonna force me to hand it over, so that’s all I brought. I’ll be using different gear over here. I don’t even know what it is today.
Back home, I’m still using my Ampeg BXT speaker cabinets and my Ampeg 4 Pro amp. I’ve also got some of the Boss Looping Pedals, the RC 20 and the new RC 50 and a Boss multieffects processor that I use a little bit but it’s mostly just my bass and the speakers.
Steve Bailey and I have an inside joke. We were doing a bass gig at a NAMM show in Nashville with a load of great bass players, guys like Bill Dickens and Oteil and we invited another very famous bass player to come up and jam with us and he said ‘Oh no, I can’t do it, I don’t have my effects with me.’ That’s been a long lesson for us. It’s a shame because it’s just a mental thing. I know he could do it but he wasn’t in his comfort zone.

How do you pull yourself out of your comfort zone?
I’m not afraid to try new things in front of people, to the point where I’d rather try them in front of people because I’ll do better at it if I’m in front of you, if I have the pressure of trying to make you like it, I do better at it. So I try new things all the time. But I have to say this – I’m lucky to be in a gig where I can do that.
I have the bass gig with the Flecktones, it’s like complete freedom. I don’t recommend that for everyone, but I’m just an open type of person. It’s really all mental and has nothing to do with the bass. Also, I’m amazed by everything. I hear a beginner play and I find something thinking ‘Man, when he gets that together…’, so I start getting it together. I’m always seeing new things, whether it’s musical or just other parts of life that keeps me challenged. It keeps me driving and wanting to move forward.

How do you feel the Flecktones are progressing on this latest album?
We decided we were gonna go back to just doing the four of us, no guests, just what we can do on stage. Some of our earlier records were based on that. We would only record what we could do live. One example is a song called ‘Vix 9’ where it had a bassline and a melody that I played at the same time, because that’s how I wanted to do it live.
We went back to the basics of what we do, but because each individual member of the Flecktones is still growing and really pushing their envelopes and working on getting better all the time, it makes the group get better. One of the ways we’re able to do that is that we all have our own separate projects so that when we get back to the Flecktones, we all have something new to offer. We’ve been doing this for close to twenty years and it’s still fun and there’s still places to go.

You guys always put on a good show. Aside from the music there’s lots of interaction, even comedy moments onstage. How much of that is planned and discussed and how much just happens?
Usually, if it is discussed, it’s discussed because it happened one night and we thought ‘That was cool, we should do that’ and we may even work on it to make it better, but a lot of times it just happens. Someone gets an idea and tries it – we’re allowed to try stuff. I can go over to Bela’s banjo and strum it and it’s cool, he’ll strum my bass back and then it turns into a thing that we’ll do for the next few months and then we’ll leave it and move on to some thing else, but it’s very organic. It’s the same way we talk, we’ll develop new words and new phrases. Sometimes we’ll practice these words but more times than not, it’s organic, we heard it somewhere, we hear it enough and it finds it’s way into the way you speak, but there has to be an unconscious element there, for it to happen naturally.
Even in the book I mention this. There’s a chapter where Michael tells the student about conscious and unconscious playing and practicing. The things that we are natural at, that we are best at and come quickest to us, happen unconsciously.
The way you talk, to me you have an accent. For me to get that accent right now, I’d have to work on it or, if I spent a lot of time here, it would happen automatically and the accent would be natural. If I practiced it, you’d tell ‘You’re speaking this accent with an accent’.
So, must of us practice consciously. We focus, we work on stuff, we wanna concentrate, to the point where we tell our kids ‘Focus, concentrate, stop daydreaming!’ and we’re pulling away from them their most beautiful asset, teaching them not to use their imagination, to the point where eventually, us grown-ups forget how to do it. When I’m on stage, I don’t wanna be focused, I don’t wanna be concentrating, no more than I’m focused and concentrating right now as I speak. If I’m focused on anything, it’s on what I want to say, but the words come out on their own and I don’t focus on them unless I have to. I know how to, so I can do it when I need to.
With music, if I don’t want to be focussed and concentrating on stage, why do I do it all the time when I’m practicing? I need to learn how to practice unconsciously. It gets me closer to seeing the big picture and controlling how much I want to focus while playing.
In the book, we mention the benefits of using non-concentration when you’re practicing and how you can get to that point where you can practice things in an unfocussed manner. It’s something to think about. It doesn’t explain it all, but I just wanted to raise people’s attention to that. That’s how you know that you know something, when it can happen unconsciously.
So how can I get to the point where I can get to that unconscious state earlier? I don’t wanna wait until I need it, I want to know it’s unconscious before then. Like in Martial arts, I don’t want to wait until I get attacked to see if it’s gonna happen unconsciously, I want to know now. So I need to figure out ways of practicing unconsciously and when I can do it unconsciously, I know, I’ve got it. That’s something we need to figure out.

So what’s next after the Flecktones tour?
I was up late last night working on the audio version of the book. I’m getting different people to read each character and there’ll be lots of music. I’ve got a few of the characters recorded and I’m adding my voice in around them, so I hope to get that done during this tour. When we get back we have a few days off then more Flecktones touring in the United States.