Victor Wooten's "You are here" game for finding the key by ear

Victor Wooten 🎶 game: "You are here." Difficulty: moderate (maybe advanced?) Put on a song. Strike a note on your instrument. (You can move one semi-tone up or down if it feels totally "wrong".) Then keep hitting only that note and try to feel where you are in the scale.

Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv · Jan 19, 2019

"When there's a note that doesn't work, there's a note on either side of the note that DOES work." NOBODY TELLS YOU THIS. "It's always easy! but we make it hard!". "A minute ago this note didn't work, but now it does. I can *erase* the wrong note by *making music*." Amazing

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Aug 23, 2020

I've been kind of doing this implicitly for awhile. Just had another experience of striking the non-dominant 7th note in a minor key song (as in the QT below), this time a G in the Am key of Linkin Park's Burning in the Skies

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean · Jul 1, 2020

Just now, listening to Inner Peace by @ClozeeOfficial, from her 2016 Shambhala set, and I'm like fuckyeah and just whack a C. Hmmm yeah, wants to jam up to the D, and that feels like home. So I noodle on down the D minor scale. But this isn't theory: it's Dm, not "Dm"

While writing the previous tweet, I tried out an E in When They Come For Me (I've got Linkin Park's Ten Thousand Suns album on 🥰) and it was weird, so I dropped down a semitone to Eb, and just kept playing it and I was like "mmm yeah this wants to go down to D then C" - Cm! ✔️

Lest you think I've got perfect pitch, I had some trouble with Robot Boy just now, though I just looked up the chords and it's kind of fucky, with both Bb (Bb chord) and B (G chord) in it. No wonder my initial F# then G felt weirdly natural but also foreign.

tried out a C in Waiting for the End... nope. B... yeaaaaah B feels pretty chill, pretty stable, can just hang out here and hit this B a lot and it works with whatever's underneath... but it's not home. Home is... E. Yup! Song is in E.

Anyway, this skill took me a lot of noodling around on a keyboard over the last year to develop, and this after years of other instrumental explorations, piano & guitar and otherwise.

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean · Jul 1, 2020

1yr after having a 🎹 keyboard next to my desk listening to the first few chapters of Victor Wooten's Music Lesson, I've developed a WAY closer relationship with musical scales. I confidently hit a note, & can often just FEEL where in the scale it fits. twitter.com/visakanv/statu…

But internalizing the bit from Victor Wooten made a huge difference! There's no wrong notes, just… notes that take a bit more ummm explaining to do if someone walks in on you.

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean · Jul 1, 2020

But I wasn't thinking about a "note" in a "scale", I just knew that that Bb sounded dirty as fuck. It was so raunchy I felt like I was violating a sexual taboo. It felt like I was getting away with a crime. It was so right, and so wrong. Fucking amazing 👅

I have no idea if this skill is accessible to other musicians at whatever skill level or just a weird quirk I've developed over the last year. Based on some of the recent videos I've watched that analyze jazz, my sense is that jazz would train this 10× as much as most genres.

The beginner version of this game ofc is just "put on a song, and hit notes on your instrument until you know what key you're in." This is also a lot of fun and is improved by a wootenesque philosophy that says there are no wrong notes.