Blogging About Bass
For the past two summers I have had the great pleasure of spending an evening at Wooten Woods. For those who may not know, Wooten Woods is Victor Wooten’s Music Camp, located outside Nashville, in the Tennessee woods. Victor holds several camps throughout the year ranging from weekend camps, to an intensive 3 week music and nature camp. Although the camp does have a bit of a bias towards bass, it is open to any instrument and musicians of all skill levels.
Our last day of TMBG Bass Camp came much too fast. I can’t speak for the others but I feel like I’ve learned more in the last week than I have in the past 6 months. It’s been such a great week, I don’t want it to end.
We started out the morning with a great wrap session with Roy and Tim talking about things we should be working on and thinking about, as well as tips on how to take our playing to the next level. Both Tim and Roy are such a wealth of information, it was awesome to just pick their brains for a while.
Last night, after an intense day of learning, I decided to stay in my room for the evening to review all that I had learned and work on the song I plan to play Friday night at The Rutledge. The first two days of camp were jammed so full of information I really needed to take some time to process it all. When I finally decided to turn in for the night I found myself lying in bed running through the modes, so I guess you could say I had a very musical day!
What an incredible day we had on Wednesday! We started off our morning at fantasy bass boot camp with our guest instructor, Stu Hamm, discussing the importance of warming up before you play and how to avoid injury. Stu gave us a packet of materials which included excerpts from his True Fire instructional series as well as a few other goodies. He then reviewed ways to increase our dexterity before talking about how to play slap and how to tap. We finished up our session talking about rhythm, band dynamics and the bass players role. The rest of the morning was spent with Roy, continuing on with the discussions we started with Stu as well as working on playing tritones, and using scales to play over chords.
Victor Wooten, Steve Bailey, J.D. Blair, Reggie Wooten, Rod Taylor Live at Stanford University 9/23/11
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On Friday, September 17th, I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to watch Victor Wooten and Steve Bailey put on a Community Workshop for the incoming freshmen at Stanford University. Entitled “Learning In and Through Community” the program utilized music activities to introduce to the students the idea of broadening ones learning experience by living in residential communities. Put together with the help of bass player and Stanford Resident Fellow Rod Taylor, the program also featured drummer J.D. Blair and Saxophonist Bob Hemenger. All I can say is Wow! I was fortunate enough to meet and speak with all of the musicians involved, and found each one to be kind, down to earth guys. Most inspiring was their passion for what they do and their true sense of excitement to be a part of the program.