Vibraphone

For the "veterans" of thevibe.net, do you remember Polish born vibist Les Blachut? I have a good memory of a pleasant and funny guy, his six mallets theory (and practice!) and of that fun picture of him holding 8 mallets! Ha! :o)

He recently contacted me through Facebook: what a good surprise! I saw that he is here as member, but too busy to participate (so far)… between his work and his… twin babies! ;o)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MARIE!! MARIE IS SECOND IN CHARGE HERE ON THE SITE. WE'RE SO LUCKY SHE HANGS OUT WITH US!!! Marie is one of my best friends! And I'll meet her in about a month!!

Click here to sign her card

We've been studying Joe Locke's tune 'Sword of Whispers'. We've all learned a ton from Joe and his tune.

Here's a pretty complete reference of what we've done.

If you put your version, please let me know so I can add it to this page!

Check out the comments to see what we were thinking!

Anyone near Dallas interested in a mini workshop early February?
click here for more info

Gary playing some Piazzola! He gets house on his solo!!!! Great solo!

I'll be playing with Elio Villafranca quartet Featuring Grant Stewart on sax.

I'll be covering the following topics:

Sound production
Phrasing, with and without dampening
Thoughts on sticking
Practicing concepts
A non-traditional scale approach
Arranging jazz standards for the vibraphone

(I'm glad I'm going! - tm)

Here is another of my tunes that we ran a trial run of at our last concert. It's called Waltz for Dasha...

Enjoy!

James

Here's the next tune for the Tune of the week series.

I saw Barry's post and thought it would be nice to do Mood Indigo this week.

Try to do a version like Barry did, so playing block chords. Voice the melody with four voices. If I have time, I'll make a video lesson on block chords. I think Tony has a lot of video's where he talks about this and also the drop 2 lessons by Dana are also a study in block chords.

I'm pretty busy this week, but I'm still gonna try to do as much as I can.

CU

TJ

For my (Tony Miceli) part of the workshop I'll cover many of the things that I cover here.

Stride Vibes
Lines (clarity)
Learning Tunes
Playing Tunes in 12 keys (How easy it really is)

I'm always interesting in talking about getting players to break down there playing and see where they are at. This is great for practicing, that is learning how to find where you're at with something and then build on it. Too many players jump right in and build on confusion. To me that's no good.