Blog

What a week. That's all I have to say. To see people practicing from morning until night is amazing. And by that I mean from 8 in the morning until midnight. This was an intense workshop. I would imagine one of the most intense ever. I can say that without trying to brag, because I think Harvey Price really made this happen. The facilities here were incredible.

With each person having an instrument that enabled everybody to work non stop. My dream is to have the workshops, Harvey's was all the rest. Harvey is amazing.

These guys have been working hard! The school is open until midnight and I leave between 10 and 12 and I always see people in there practicing! We are ready for David Friedman to come in tomorrow!

Today I had violinist Diane Monroe come down. During the afternoon class we played different tempo and different style tunes and talked about playing with out a bass. We didn't perform the whole tunes, just parts of them. Saving the actual performance for the evening class.

With these workshops, I've taken a little break from posting lessons. Mainly because I'm away from my studio. But I'm home Sunday and next week we'll get back to work!

I've really had a great time here in Delaware and also in Ireland. Man we are building something great here and it's showing. Vibe players from around the world are coming to hang out and to play and to study. It's really fun to be in the same place as a bunch of other vibe players for several days. It's a lot of vibe talk!

What a great day we had today. Mike balter sent us 52 pairs of mallets! There was a pile of sticks on the floor and after we took a break, half of them were gone! They were going through them and comparing them.

We worked on tunes and forms of tunes today. Mario took us all in for an incredible demo of the Mallet Kat, it was really fun. He is the master of that instrument (he owns the company). I think everybody in the room was blown away!

We have 19 vibraphones in this school for the workshop. Can you believe it! Everyone has a practice room and a set of vibes. Really cool. We're going to get a photo with all the vibes, should be a cool photo!

Hey everyone!

It's officially today! It already had a few months of existence as beta site, but on August 1st 2008, Vibesworkshop was officially open!

I got into the users list, and found that at that date, there were already around 20 members! (today we are... 1382!!) Among them -appart from Tony and his partner Stephen- we can see:

- Tjaco,
- Barry,
- John Daly,
- Behn Gellice,
- Gilbranimo,
- Alan Watt (amazing Alan from this year Ireland workshop!),
- Jinwoo (our Korea very silent member!)

A few others would follow soon, like:

- Bruce Wells,
- Tony Fontana,

hi!

I just realised that the vibes have one more advantage beside the cool sound, the cool attitude, the excluiveness and the fact that vibesplayers get all the chicks: you can play it with a baby wrap! no way of doing this with a guitar!

So folks get youself a set of vibes - the chick and eventually an offsping might follow BUT you can still play!

Cheers Stefan

BTW its a boy named Louis, born 9.7.2010

Earlier this year my wife decided that it was time to get a master's degree so we sat down and looked at a few places. We visited the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. The faculty that evaluated her audition were gracious enough to admit her into the program. She is a great player!

Last week we made the epic road trip from Muncie, IN to Vancouver, BC. I've been emailing people in the area about finding a job, playing gigs, and teaching gigs.

Man about what we did this summer. We got 7 vibe players to come to Ireland and work on the vibes. We have 17 (19? I forget) vibe players coming to the University of Delaware and we're rounding up about 15 sets of vibes and a bunch of marimbas. Oh man!!!

I figured when I started this that if we could all come together and work hard together that we could really make some cool things happen. I always think that the better we get the better it is for the instrument. It's a cool instrument to start with and when we play it well it's cooler!

Thursday is our unofficial anniversary celebration! I will try and stream as much as possible, including the Vibe Hang. I will also try to stream David's afternoon workshop for everyone to see.

It's unofficial because I was going to talk it up this week, but no, our server crashed!!

Let's see what I can do this week to talk it up.