Blog

Hey Everyone,

We are starting to restructure the Online Books that contain all of the lesson material, performances etc etc. The amount of stuff on the site is really getting so overwhelming that it seemed needed to restructure all the posts in a better way to be able to find stuff easily.

We are now trying to organize content in 5 books. In this way everyone will be able to find stuff.

The 5 books are:

1. The Member Book - check out our members!
- In this book we will archive all performaces by members. So audio and Video.

2. The Good Vibes Lesson Book

Apart from the regular production, last couple of weeks we spent a lot of time on redesigning the electronics for the motorsystem of the LW-series, and finishing the new 3 octaves vibe model.

Both are done now, and the first LW with the new motorsystem goes out this week.
The upgrade is huge!!!

With the previous motor system, the software controlling the motor itself was spread over 2 parts/devices, being the touchpanel taking care of the user interface, and the servo controller taking care of everything involving driving the motor system.

Hi Tony,

I've been thinking about the problem of the amount of labor it takes to run this site, and it occurred to me that we could probably help you out with some of the non-vibes-playing aspects of maintaining things. I don't know where your main time sinks are, but if they could be broken up into discrete, unrelated chunks, then the members could volunteer to do the tasks for you.

Hi Tony,hi all!

Inspired by Tony's blog on practising here in VW, I got a copy of "Effortless Mastery" by Kenny Werner. Werner describes how to achive a special kind of consciousness he calls "to be in space" each time he plays his instrument. He uses some kind of meditation and exercises to create this relaxed but focussed state of mind. It must be fairly similar to auogenous training.

I haven't really worked hard on this and so I wonder if one of you did so and manages to "enter the space" when ever he wants??

So where are the space men? Do pro's also use this kind of techniques?

Every once in a while I go and count the members on the site. We are getting near 1000 vibe players. OH MAN. Could you imagine if we could all get together. 1000 of us in the same room. That's amazing to me. Isn't it??

So I wanted to make a request. If we all sent out 5 emails to some mallet players that might not know about the site, we might hit the 1000 mark before the new year.

If you are at a music school, could you put up a flyer getting people to sign up?

I"m thinking about all this talk about mallets and sound. So I was wondering how we would classify different peoples sound? I don't mean in a negative way.

I'm listening to Steve Nelson right now, Mike Dirubo's new cd. Ed mentioned glassy, that's definitely glassy.

I dug Ed's duet with Liebman. More round sound right? His new mallets. Who else has a round sound? Samuels right?

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)

So I'm messing around with Woody n You and I'm having trouble getting ideas. This melody is different from many others I play. So I'm trying to think about 4 mallets and what I'd do. Wasn't making much progress.

But my cat is dying, and I've taught her to talk to me. So she started talking to me and I brought her down (basement) (feeling sad) and sat there with her and was petting her and talking to her, and she was replying. Then I gave her my good chair and went and worked on Elio Villafranca's music for a bit, and then I came back to Woody n You and everything was different.

So I just finished the first chorus of Bill Evans's solo on Nardis from his Blue in Green Live album. It took me about 3 hours to get it right. I think that is a pretty long time for one chorus, although the solo is pretty challenging and it goes pretty fast.

The only other solo that I've transcribed is Milt Jackson's solo from Miles Davis's Bags' Groove album. But that solo was 10 choruses long. This Bill Evans solo is only 3 choruses, so maybe I should go ahead and spend the extra hours and just get it done?

In the book 'This is Your Brain on Music', I'm reading about what it means to be an expert. Many scientists use the 10,000 hour theory. That is generally speaking to become an expert at anything you have to spend 10,000 hours working on it. That translates to 3 hours a day for about 10 years.

I thought this was interesting because at least this gives us an idea about practicing in a general sense. He brings up things like Mozart writing a symphony at age eight and argues that you don't have to be an expert to write a symphony.