Vibraphone

Our next Pop Up Class is this Wednesday and we will talk about the Diminished Scale.

This ties in with our last class which was on "Have You Met Miss Jones". All the dominant chords in this tune are 13 b9 chords. That's the diminished scale. So we will talk about this this week and then the following week we will do an online performance where we will each try our hand at "Miss Jones"!

If you want to attend the class make sure you are a paying subscriber and email me me your user name and your email address (Which of course is in the email heading!)

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.

Hello all,

This is my second lesson in the "How to Play Vibes Like" series. Among pianists, Red Garland is known for two things -- his left hand comping rhythm and his revolutionary block chord style, which, shortly thereafter, everyone from Oscar Peterson to Chick Corea copied. This lesson focuses on these huge block chords of his, and how to translate them to the vibes.

Suggested listening:

I am always asked how good or bad my € 100 DIY-pickup-system is.
http://wyndorps.de/Englisch/E_Pickups.html

This question is difficult to answer, since a lot has to do with personal listening impression and personal preferences. I now had the opportunity to record my playing simultaneously with two computers. The recordings were made with the freeware audacity on the computer.

The only change I made to the recorded signals is that I normalized all levels equally to -5 dB to make the sound pressure comparable.

Playing ballads is always a challenge; phrasing and tempo are crucial for expressing a song's essence. Fortunately, we can draw upon the way vocalists confront this for guidance. Billie Holiday, one of my favorites, recorded and performed a Duke Ellington classic, "Solitude", throughout her career. Here's my take on it.

Michael

An Oldie But Goodie - "Mack The Knife"

"Moon River" - Solo version from a hang with Joe Locke and Gustavo Agatiello. We’ve had quite a few of these weekend sessions and for me they have been so much fun, informative and inspirational. We can spend at least eight hours a day in the studio, come up for lunch and dinner, and then go back down to the laboratory, as Joe calls it, to play and talk about music. Lots of laughs along the way too.

Very simple but gets you improvising in minutes. And it's kind of fun!