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Dana talks about a Mexican Marimba, how it's made and how to hold 3 sticks in one hand.

This is to go along with Dana's Video. See above for the link to the video.

So, this is my first blog entry and I just wanted to let you guys know how much I appreciate this site. I have learned a lot from this site since I joined not too long ago. What a great Atmosphere!

Alright so I'll get to the point. Earlier I posted a few videos of myself playing some 2 mallet stuff working on lines and such and I got lots of great critique and pointers. One specifically was to ALWAYS use 4 mallets (If you want to be good at 4 mallets that is). I took that advice and now any time that I play I am holding 4.

This piece can be done solo (both parts) or as a duet. Because the melody is mostly arpeggios you can leave the pedal down a lot and get a nice full sound. There isn't much mallet dampening you need to do, again, because of all the arpeggios that make up the 2 parts. The tempo marking can be adjusted up or down as you need. The piece sounds pretty good either slower or faster, which makes it a great piece for players at all skill levels.

I was practicing You and the Night and the Music, tonight and thought I'd whip something up for the site.

So here's a sort of duet. I figured out the vibe part and started messing around and adding some other parts and it turned into a sort of duet.

Also here is a practice take of me playing the vibes! I wasn't happy with the ending as you'll be able to tell by how I drop the sticks. Anyway, check out the etude and play along with the duet. It's lines and comping. You can listen to the midi part to see what it sounds like together and then play along with the 'no vibes' mp3.

Here's an interesting study. Print this etude out and learn it. At some point you should realize what tune it is.

Then realize that there are no roots in the chords except at the beginning and at one spot where I added it by mistake. Hopefully this should give you some insight into some of the things we've been talking about. That is playing chords without the roots and using the upper extensions to make the harmony.

Ok for subscribers, here's the PAS article.

i´m a little upset.i got relative good recording mics and euipment and the sound of my video´s in the uncompressed original format is always good.but if i compress it to make it fit to youtube the sound always gets bad.anyone of you has any idea if it´s possible to compress just video quality but leave the audio at best level.i tried different programs but couldn´t get anything for free which makes the job.tonys videos always have a good sound qualitiy.