Finished reading Victor Wooten’s The Music Lesson this week. Mr. Wooten is perhaps known best as bassist with Bela Fleck & the Flecktones. 

I like to underscore in pencil favorite book parts: words I’m learning for the first time, phrases I think will make good song titles or songs per se, new concepts/ideas. When I want to highlight a book part I might want to find again in the future I underscore the part, and next to the part in the book margin I write a small checkmark. When I really want to remember a book part I underscore the part and, in the margin, write the word key.

My copy of The Music Lesson has plenty of underscoring, plenty of checkmarks and places where the word key is written in the margins. For example, here’s a paragraph from a chapter on technique.

“Notice you did not develop your speaking technique through diligent practice, at least not the type of practice you are familiar with. Your parents didn’t lock you in a room and make you work on it three hours a day, and they didn’t make you take lessons.  You learned to speak through a natural process. Musicians could benefit from looking at this process.”

So, thank you, Victor Wooten for a keeper book.