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Victor Wooten has a theory about how you learned to talk.
Nobody sat you down as a toddler and taught you grammar. You didn’t drill vocabulary or conjugate a single verb before you were allowed to say your first word. You got dropped into a room full of people already talking, and you listened. You babbled. You got it wrong for a good while, nobody minded, and then one day you were fluent.
That’s how all of us learned our first language. By ear, surrounded by people better than us, getting it wrong until we got it right.
Wooten’s whole thing is that music works the same way. It’s a language. And we teach it completely backwards.
Victor Wooten on music as a language
He laid it out in a TEDx talk called “Music as a Language.” Here’s how he puts the language half:
“But with language, to use a musical term, even as a baby you’re ‘jamming’ with professionals. All the time. To the point that you don’t even know you’re a beginner.”
And nobody corrects you. When a two- or three-year-old says a word wrong over and over, he points out, “instead of correcting you, your parents learn your way.”
Music goes the other way. Beginners mostly aren’t allowed to play with the better players. In Wooten’s words, “You’re stuck in the beginning class.”
How the Wooten brothers taught him bass
He isn’t guessing. Wooten is the youngest of five brothers, and he says he was born into the family band. His older brothers already played, and they knew they needed a bass player.
They didn’t start him by putting a bass in his hands. They played music around him. By about two, he had a toy guitar to hold while they played. When he was about three, his oldest brother, Regi, took the two high strings off one of his six-string guitars, and that became Victor’s first real instrument. Regi showed him where to put his fingers to play songs he already knew. By about five, he says, the brothers were on tour opening for Curtis Mayfield.
He learned English and music, as he puts it, “at the same time and in the same way.”
You already learned one language by ear
Now look at how most of us got taught. We hand a kid a music stand and a book of rules before they’ve ever made a joyful noise. Name the notes, spell the chords, pass the quiz. Try teaching a baby to talk that way and they’d never say a word.
Wooten has a line for that, too: “Teaching a kid to spell ‘milk’ before they’ve been drinking a lot of it for a few years doesn’t make sense does it?”
But here’s the good news hiding in all of this. You already speak one language fluently, and you learned the whole thing by ear. So the machinery works. You’ve just never been allowed to point it at music.
So point it there. Pick one of those lines you’ve always wanted and never got, and pull it off the record by ear, from a cold start to the last note. Here’s how I transcribe a bass line by ear if you want a process to follow.
Go deeper
Play What You Hear
Six lessons on learning songs by ear: sing it, find it on the piano, then play it on your instrument.
