This week we’re going to take a look at the unbelievable playing of Victor Wooten and the freakishly difficult Classical Thump. We’ll take a look at the opening few bars and a simple ‘move’ that might help a lot with learning this and other Wooten pieces.
Classical Thump Practice
Marc,
For a guy who professes to be bad at double-thumping, you sure do it pretty damn good. So much for your teeny, underdeveloped (almost dwarfish) thumbnails! Ha ha…
No, that thought just struck me and I thought you might appreciate some positive feedback. Hey, who doesn’t? As for future topic suggestions, you’ve already covered more things in Heaven and Earth (Horatio), what is there left – playing bass whilst floating about in zero gravity? That ‘future’ enough for you?
Okay well, I do have something that I’m curious about: Can you talk about how to sprinkle a little tapping into a fingerstyle or slap bassline? Does one use chord tones, (pentatonic) scale notes, chromatic steps, ghost notes, open strings, etc? (Everything under the sun, right?) And if so, HOW exactly?!
Finally, I would like to thank you, sincerely, for all of your very hard work. Thank you for showing up on my computer screen – seemingly every damn day – and for being such a perennially cheery and particularly gifted bass teacher. You have a mighty knack for making the “stupidly difficult” understandable (if not necessarily reproducible!).
Because you can dissect things like Victor Wooten’s Classical Thump (to name but one) and carefully portion it out in bite-sized and easily digestible pieces – plus the fact that you are a tireless crusader for the Gospel of Slow & Accurate (versus Fast & Sloppy) – it’s easy to forget that you’re a pretty damn talented bass player yourself!
We are very lucky indeed to have you grace our computer screens with your cheerful, skillful self. So thanks again and all the best to you, sir, from snowy Canada – JD