Blog

The workshop seemed to be a success! Its not everyday that you get to meet guys like Joe Locke, Tony Miceli, Mike Pinto, Dana Sudborough, and Randy Sutin. It was a bit nerve racking to have to follow these performances at the vibe hang. Those guys are real heavy weights. Hopefully next time I'll be able to hold my own.

Joe Locke is THE hippest guy I've ever met. He has now become one of my major role models. Meeting and talking to him was such a blessing. I hope I can meet him again sometime.

I really enjoyed visitng Tony's workshop @ the University of the Arts this past weekend in
Philadelphia. I enjoyed what I heard and it was a pleasure meeting all of the vibists who attended. The atmosphere was casual and relaxed, but I liked the fact that everyone came to work, and were serious about learning.

Tony's making a great contribution to our instrument with www.vibesworkshop.com and now also with events such as the Philadelphia Weekend Workshop, which affords vibists the opportunity to meet and grow in real-time.

I had a great time at the Philly workshop and this was for many reasons. First just hanging with guys and talking about the instrument for 2 days was great. However I also like being an observer and watching Joe, Dana and Mike do their thing, and see people getting excited.

Just to see the participants digging the classes was a thrill, because I know that guys are going home to practice, and I know that they left inspired. That's a huge deal.

Earlier today I was recalling my experiences with French jazz violinist Stephane Grappelly. I made one recording with Stephane and while it is far from earth-shattering, it remains a sentimental favorite of mine. I met Stephane rather serendipitously at a Newport Jazz Festival, and at the time I knew very little about him. I associated his name with the Hot Club of France, a legendary French jazz group led by guitarist Django Reinhardt, a group that came to fame in the 1930's and ended in 1939 because of World War II .

So I've played for a few years and never had a problem breaking strings (although I've only been doing professional gigs for about 8 months). I got a set of Albrights recently and have broken the string on the vibes 3 times in the past month. I had a gig last night where we played 4 sets and I was using a set of med soft albrights. they are pretty soft so I have to hammer the notes out a bit, but not ridiculously. During the second set I realized that the string between my F# and Ab was near failure.

Today I took Bud Powell, NHOP and I forget the drummer on my walk. These walks are great for me because I get to listen to a whole cd and I get exercise both of which I don't do enough of.

One thing I do when I listen is take an instrument and imagine it was being played on the vibes. Would it work? Do I need more mallets? I just imagine.

Bud in a way works out. Those simple voicings in the left hand are perfect. Most are 2 and 3 voicings. We can whittle one note out of that and even 2 if we have to.

I love science fiction and there was a show on last year called Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles. This was an amazing tv show full of great characters, emotion, story, robots, and MUSIC. Like all good things, it got canceled.

so here is my version of the theme song!

www.mikepinto.net

How can you make a note or notes get louder while they are ringing out?

Attached is an example.

Barry

James Whiting posted a real pretty piece where he manually rotated the fan blades. Dr. Bob commented that he would like a crank on the side to override the motor and have the blades pop back to the open position. That made me wonder what I could make from things around the house to do that. Here is the result. I used a 7.5" Jumbo Rubber Band, Spring-type door stopper, shim, and a quick clamp. I screwed the door stopper into the shim and clamped it to the vibes. I replaced the original belt with the rubber band, gave it a twist so it would stay around the door stop.

Twitter is one of those web apps where it's kind of hard to find some meaning and usefulness. I always feel a little vain when I Tweet. But I recently found a good use for it especially if you don't mind sifting through some stuff.

Put in Coltrane or Milt or Hindemith (like I did) in the search box and search through this gigantic database of 140 character tweets (as they say). I found out some websites, some great cds and a few facts about Hindemith.

I'm starting to think that it's a really great tool for getting info.