That’s Victor Wooten to the right ‘cheering’ me on! The guy with the camera is Steve Bailey! And on drums Kelly Gravely (He played drums with Victor on Bass Day 98)
Wow! This was really fun! I spent 6 days deep in the Nashville wilderness in late June 2011.
The set was Wooten Woods and one of Victor Wootens amazingly fresh thinking camps. This one was called ”Music and Nature Camp”. As the name says the camp was a combination of music and nature classes or rotations. We learned that music and nature has a lot in common!
For more info please check out: wootenwoods.com and victorwooten.com
I will probably write more about the camp in this blog and my ”sister” blog gigbyte.wordpress.com in the future!
The camp covered a lot of ground and really made you think about how to approach music and life in general!
Really interesting. There were great instructors on this camp both on the music rotations and the nature ones. Among the music instructors, besides Victor Wooten, were Steve Bailey, Anthony Wellington, Bob Franceschini and a lot of really great nature experts.
You can read about the thoughts of which the camp in built upon in ”The Music Lesson – a spiritual search for growth through music” by Victor Wooten. Read or listen to the first chapter here.
OK. What has all the above got do do with UBass you might wonder?
When I planned the trip one thing I thought about was what instruments to bring. I decided to bring my Ibanez GWB35 Gary Willis signature bass as my main bass and the UBass as my ”spare” bass if anything would happen to the GWB. I ended up using my UBass on the final night – Jam Nite! See pic above!
…AND…
As a little tribute to Victor Wooten, Wooten Woods and all the wonderful people I met there, I made a video with a version of the now classic rendition of Amazing Grace that Victor have been playing for quite some time now. In his version he uses harmonics to play the melody and then plays bass notes (the root, third or other chord notes) underneath. This version is really, really nice and I wondered if it would be possible to play it on a UBass? With the stock Pahoehoe strings I found it hard to get the harmonics to ring long enough. But when I tried it with the Aquila Thunderguts I managed to get a slightly longer decay. So I put together a version based on Victors and added some shakers and a djembe part to spice it up a little. It’s quite hard to get those harmonics to ‘pop out’ with these kind of strings but hope you like my version 🙂
Play UBass! 
nice!
This will definitely be my next bass 🙂
I’m glad you liked the video! You should definitely get one, they are so much fun to play!