The monitoring of rolling element bearing is indexed as a critical task for condition-based maintenance in various industrial applications. It allows avoiding unscheduled maintenance operations while decreasing their cost. For this purpose, various methodologies were developed to ensure accurate and efficient monitoring. In this context, this paper proposes an approach for bearing fault early diagnosis based on the variational mode decomposition (VMD), used as a notch filter for dominant mode cancellation, and a machine learning approach, namely the one-dimensional convolution neural network (1D-CNN), for detection and diagnosis purposes. Specifically, the proposed approach first performs features extraction using VMD for fault detection, and then triggers to multi-scale features extraction using CNN convolution and pooling layers for classification and diagnosis. The proposed bearing fault detection and diagnosis approach is evaluated, in terms of robustness and performances, using the well-known Case Western Reserve University experimental dataset. In addition, performances are evaluated versus well-established demodulation techniques, in terms of fault detection, and machine learning strategies, in terms of fault diagnosis. The achieved results show that the proposed VMD notch filter-based 1D-CNN approach is clearly promising for bearing degradation monitoring.