all-levels

Hello all,

My third "How to Play Vibes Like" video is going to focus on Bud Powell, one of my favorite pianists whom I have studied the most. There's a lot that us vibes players aren't able to compete with Bud Powell on -- our range is limited, we have fewer notes, he has two fully independent hands, etc. However, in these videos I'll try and show you what exactly I think we can translate over -- whether we have to change it a bit or keep it identical -- so that we can add some new devices to our collective skillset as vibraphonists.

"I Hear A Rhapsody" - from a social distancing session yesterday in the home studio with Mark on bass, Gustavo on piano and myself on vibes. Lot of fun. After that we hung outside on the deck (with Lisa and Pam) and had takeout from Li's (our 10 year gig run and still going hopefully after this is over).

"How Insensitive" - from a social distancing session yesterday in the home studio with Mark on bass, Gustavo on piano and myself on vibes. Lot of fun. After that we hung outside on the deck (with Lisa and Pam) and had takeout from Li's (our 10 year gig run and still going hopefully after this is over).

Rando practice vid--

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0zZt27c53g

I guess I'm "deciding" to be a musician again after a long hiatus of philosophy study and whatnot--- basically distracting myself from what I really need to elevate and live my best life.

Back to playing, back to content stuff..

Hope everyone's well!

Shawn

Determined to continue my "Choro in my apartment" series in April, I began arranging another Pixinguinha classic "Segura Ele" for a host of great Brazilian musicians who happened to be scattered in far parts of the globe do to the shelter in place situation. It was fun and I learned a lot. Love this jam!

This is Claudia by Chucho Valdes. Such a beautiful tune. Found it in the Latin Real Book.
https://www.amazon.com/Latin-Real-Book-Hal-Leonard/dp/0634006916/

Me on piano and vibes. Squawking birds by nature :-(

Enjoy,
Barry

Late night musings on “I Fall In Love Too Easily”.

The short answer is that it isn't just that they make you louder. They do make you a bit louder, but loudness is a psychoacoustic phenomenon. There is more to it than just that. In the Saturday session I mentioned the principle of acoustic masking. That's a big piece of it.

The tool I used for this (Insight) is part of Izotope's mastering suite of software. This is not its normal use, but it provides a nice visualization of acoustic energy in real time across the frequency spectrum. Something went awry with the way that Quicktime did the screen capture, so by the end of the video, the waveforms are appearing significantly later and out of sync with the sound, but you will be able to still associate them and see the differing harmonic content. The frequency is represented along the bottom of the graph.

I'm always wondering how to play a busy bebop tune and add chords.

I also don't think we have to play a lot of chords with a busy melody as busy melodies usually have a lot of information in them.

So I tried here to simply add only notes for the function of making sure the harmony was clear. I personally like this sound a lot.

Try to play it and see what you think.