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Victor Wooten's Groove Workshop: Help Understanding how to play without thinking.

#81
People like Hal Galper, Kenny Werner (Effortless Mastery), and Wooten think about music in an almost completely different way from most other people. And folks go "ohh, ahh", knowing full well they have no idea how to approach what they are talking about. I definitely don't have much of a handle of what they are talking about. It seems to make sense, but what does it really mean...

I had a cautionary tale from my teacher about taking advice from Super Heroes. I'm gonna leave out the details, but the impression I got is that you approach it much in the same way as you approach a growling dog that has its hackles up. It needs time to get used to you.
 
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#82
Spin Doctor said:
People like Hal Galper, Kenny Werner (Effortless Mastery), and Wooten think about music in an almost completely different way from most other people. And folks go "ohh, ahh", knowing full well they have no idea how to approach what they are talking about. I definitely don't have much of a handle of what they are talking about. It seems to make sense, but what does it really mean...

I had a cautionary tale from my teacher about taking advice from Super Heroes. I'm gonna leave out the details, but the impression I got is that you approach it much in the same way as you approach a growling dog that has its hackles up. It needs time to get used to you.
Click to expand...

Here you got the explanation, it's really based on neuro- scientific facts:

Victor Wooten's Groove Workshop: Help Understanding how to play without thinking.
 
#85
StatesideRambler said:
Hal Galper quoted Vinnie Colaiuta on his website: "Thought is the enemy of flow." There must be some substance to the idea that we need to get the thinking out of the way of playing music.
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IME/IMHO, what these statements are really saying is practice the thinking by absorbing the learning to the point where it becomes second nature, not to just stop thinking. More like conversational speaking than writing a letter or an essay. You don't stop thinking about the music, but you do stop thinking about the mechanics of producing the sounds from your instrument.

My eldest daughter is multi-lingual, but her first language is english. I was talking to her just the other day about speaking other languages, and she said in the beginning, when in conversation, she would have an internal translation going on in her head between english and whatever language she was using. Not just the words (our notes), but the inflections, cadence, accent and other nuances. Now, after many years, she says her mind functions almost entirely in the language of the moment, but that in a strange way this actually slows down, just a little, the process of switching between languages when in conversation with mixed-language groups. I think maybe the same goes for music.
YMMV
 
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#87
SteveCS said:
IME/IMHO, what these statements are really saying is practice the thinking by absorbing the learning to the point where it becomes second nature, not to just stop thinking. More like conversational speaking than writing a letter or an essay. You don't stop thinking about the music, but you do stop thinking about the mechanics of producing the sounds from your instrument.

My eldest daughter is multi-lingual, but her first language is english. I was talking to her just the other day about speaking other languages, and she said in the beginning, when in conversation, she would have an internal translation going on in her head between english and whatever language she was using. Not just the words (our notes), but the inflections, cadence, accent and other nuances. Now, after many years, she says her mind functions almost entirely in the language of the moment, but that in a strange way this actually slows down, just a little, the process of switching between languages when in conversation with mixed-language groups. I think maybe the same goes for music.
YMMV
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I've studied and functioned in several languages and the way to know that you're becoming fluent in a language is that you find yourself thinking in that language, completely without translating from another language. I suspect that helped me in my music as well.
 
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#89
I was not ready for Ed's groove book the first time I read it. I was looking for licks to groove. Months later I picked up the book again and I realized that I can groove the licks that are already in my bag of tricks. I just have to feel which one to use and why.

If it is not jelling, put the book down and come back in 6 months. I really needed to get ready for this book. I was not ready the first time I read it.
 
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#90
DuckSoup said:
So my Bass teacher is having me go through Victor Wooten's Groove Workshop DVD. I'm about half way through, and Victor talks a lot about playing what you feel. Not thinking about what you want to play, or playing the correct notes, or finding the key of the song. Just play what you feel. I'm having trouble understanding this though. I can feel a type of sound I want to play, but my issue is that...Where is that sound. I can't just randomly start hitting notes in hopes that what I feel comes out. In theory you need some kind of foundation right? Victor even mentions that he isn't a master of music theory, and I'm not a master as well.

I just have trouble wrapping my head around this concept of playing without thinking. I've practiced this a couple
of times where I either play to a backing track, or not play to anything at all. In both situations it either sounds
like garbage (Because I don't know what I'm playing) or I stay to patterns I know. (R, 3rd, 5th) or just minor pentatonics.

It's like there's a secret that everyone else knows but me.
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Victor's been playing a long time. There are 3 levels: 1st learn the fundamentals, theory, scales etc; 2nd learn as many songs as you can in all genres; 3rd forget it all. You develop a bag of tricks that you don't have to think about.Takes a long time. Hope this makes sense.
 
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#91
gfh218 said:
Victor's been playing a long time. There are 3 levels: 1st learn the fundamentals, theory, scales etc; 2nd learn as many songs as you can in all genres; 3rd forget it all. You develop a bag of tricks that you don't have to think about.Takes a long time. Hope this makes sense.
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I would make an educated guess that Victor flip-flopped steps 1 and 2 in his own learning. Like most beginner players (including me), he probably learned a bunch of songs and started gigging, then went back later and filled in the theory and stuff. Victor started gigging at age 6, so it can't take that long!
 
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#92
gfh218 said:
Victor's been playing a long time. There are 3 levels: 1st learn the fundamentals, theory, scales etc; 2nd learn as many songs as you can in all genres; 3rd forget it all. You develop a bag of tricks that you don't have to think about.Takes a long time. Hope this makes sense.
Click to expand...
Check out Vic's often-told story of starting to learn music at age two. He did a lot of learning and playing before pedagogy came into his life, as have we all. The sequence is rarely (if ever) all that cut and dried. Most of us have played for years before even hearing the phrase "music theory" and longer still before studying it. Plus, there's nearly 100% overlap among the "levels" you cited. Some of us have taken more formal journeys than others but we all still play a lot of music. I've remarked often, music theory doesn't tell you how to play, it explains what has been played.
 
#93
The only way that I can understand being able to play what you think, is knowing your fretboard inside out and backwards, so that you know where every note is, and understanding all the intervals in relation to each other.
Only then can you play what you think or feel, because you know exactly where to access the notes as you think about them.
 
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