The Natural Way of Learning Music
Five-time Grammy-winning bassist Victor Wooten shares his thought on the way of learning/playing music.
According to him, “whether it’s playing music or interviewing or talking or walking, when I’m playing on stage I don’t want to be overly focused,” he said. “Just like talking, your thoughts are not on every word. The thoughts kind of happen on their own. So we’re all trying to be natural in whatever we do."
“But in music, we teach people to be unnatural at first through a very unnatural process. And it’s a standard process. We show you something and then we tell you to go practice it … That’s a standard and it seems right. And it does work, it just takes too long and it’s very unnatural.”
He gives an example of learning to talk when we are babies.
“But the natural process of how we learned to talk can also be applied to music. And there’s a lot of things that seem like they wouldn’t work, but it’s exactly how we learned to talk. Basically by jamming with professionals is how you learned to talk. You didn’t even know you were a beginner when you were a baby because no one ever corrected you. No one ever forced you to practice, and no one ever told you what to say first. You learned what you wanted to learn first, which is why even today you have your own voice without even trying.
Victor learned to play the guitar from his older brother. "It was the natural process. And I learned to play music through that exact same natural process from my brothers. And so we share some of that.”
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