My comeback is going well, better than I expected. For the last month the speed has been coming back, real speed: fast lines, clean runs, the passages that felt like walking uphill in sand a year ago. My hands remember. After 25 years you learn that form isn’t lost, it’s just parked somewhere, and every time it takes a little longer to find the parking lot.
That would normally be the whole post. But something else happened in my head, and it made the chops story feel small.
A legend playing a beat-up first bass
A friend and I were talking about that Victor Wooten video going around, Victor playing his first bass. Not a boutique instrument, not the famous one. The beat-up thing he started on. And it looked almost exactly like the bass I had as a kid: an Orfeus, made in Bulgaria. If you grew up in Eastern Europe you know exactly what I mean. Heavy neck, questionable electronics, action you could park a truck under. That instrument taught me more about grip strength than about music. And it’s still the one I fell in love with the instrument on.
For anyone who did not grow up there, I should explain what an Orfeus actually was. It was not a budget option next to a Fender. There was no Fender. Bulgaria built these things and shipped them across the whole Eastern Bloc, and for most of us that was the entire market: you played what the factory made that year, or you played nothing. Nobody chose an instrument. The instrument arrived. Mine had a neck like a fence post, frets that ended wherever they felt like ending, and a gap between string and fretboard that made the twelfth fret a serious physical decision. You did not set that bass up. You negotiated with it. And it quietly taught me things I still use, mostly about how you actually hold the thing so your hand survives an hour. A four-hundred-dollar bass today plays better than that Orfeus did on its best day. I am still grateful for the bad one.
So we’re watching a legend play his childhood bass, and my friend asks something I couldn’t answer and still can’t: is Victor happy? Did he get the thing he was reaching for?
I know “happy” is a vague word and everyone defines it differently. But the question stuck, because Victor Wooten didn’t just get good at bass. He rewired what the instrument is allowed to do. In my own head the line has always gone Larry Graham to Marcus Miller to Victor Wooten: vocabulary, then language, then physics broken. There’s a before-Wooten and an after-Wooten in slap, and all of us live in the after. I’m not trying to diminish that by one gram. Living in the same era as him is a gift, I mean that plainly.
Two scoreboards, and nobody tells you there are two
But then you look at Nathan East, Sean Hurley, Will Lee, Leland Sklar. None of them are trying to win the technique argument. They played the part the song needed, in tune, in time, with a sound that made the whole record sit down and behave. And their names ended up physically inside music that hundreds of millions of people know by heart, people who couldn’t name a single bass player alive. They didn’t invent a technique. They became load-bearing walls in other people’s music.
If those names mean nothing to you, that is exactly the point I am making, so here they are. Leland Sklar is the bearded man on an absurd number of records since the early seventies, from James Taylor to Phil Collins, the guy who shows up, plays the correct thing, and leaves. Nathan East spent decades as Eric Clapton’s bass player and also happens to be the bass on Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky”, which is to say he is on the song your neighbour hums and on the song your father owns. Will Lee sat in the Letterman house band for over twenty years while stacking session credits the rest of the time. Sean Hurley is the bass under a lot of John Mayer. Four men, thousands of records, and if you played their names in a bar nobody would look up. That is the job. The reward is not that people know your name. The reward is that the record works and they call you again.
What Wooten actually gave me
The funny part is that the most valuable thing I ever got from Wooten was never technical either. It’s his philosophy and the way he teaches. He talks about music like a native speaker talks about a language, something you’re already allowed to speak, badly, today. His whole approach points past the instrument. The bass isn’t the point. The bass is the thing you’re holding while you do the point. That reframing is worth more to me than any lick, and it’s what I try to pass to my own students.
The answer came from the session guys
Which brings me to the thing that finally answered the question, at least for me. Watch the interviews with Sklar and the other studio mastodons. These men have nothing left to prove and, I’d bet a lot, nothing left to earn. And they’re still on the road, still loading in, still playing gigs at an age where most people have stopped doing anything that requires standing for two hours. There’s only one honest answer why: they like it. Not the recognition from it, not the money from it. The thing itself.
So maybe the question was never about Victor. Maybe I was just using the wrong variable to predict happiness, achievement instead of enjoyment. People ask me how long it takes to learn bass, and I now think that is the same wrong variable. And I don’t think this is a bass thing at all. I think it’s true of every field where people build something over decades. Music just makes it easier to see, because we get to watch seventy-year-olds choose the road over the couch.
I teach the way I am trying to play now: enjoyment first, scoreboard second. That is the whole idea behind everything I have put together for my students. The Ultimate Bass Vault is for the long road, 8+ hours of slap, groove and technique. The 32 Grooves Pack is for the other kind of day, when you just want something good to play tonight. And a Video Review is there if you want someone to look at your hands and tell you the truth. All of it, plus 1-on-1 lessons, sits on my courses page. None of it will turn you into Victor Wooten. That was never the point. The point is that in thirty years you are still holding the thing, and you still like it.
Do you agree?