Lesson

This piece is the 1st movement from Bach's violin sonata # 1. There's lots of opportunity for mallet dampening. The goal is to get it to sound full and resonant, but very clean. As you move from chord to chord use good dampening and/or pedaling to make sure no notes from the previous chord ring into the current chord; making it sound sloppy.

The tempo is really slow, with an 8th note set to about 50 on the metronome. A pdf of the manuscript is included HERE

Brazilian music.

With the chords festival, the topic of grooves arose and one of them is brazilian rhythm(s).
I personally lived (in the 80th) some years in Brazil as a professional musician and since then I lead a MPB (Musica Popular Brasileira) group and a Batucada (street percussion band), both playing samba, samba reggae, partido-alto, afoxé, maracatu, and bossa-nova , musica-cansão, baião, choro, in addition for the MPB group. I had the opportunity to play with numerous brazilian players and singers during my career and I keep doing so. That’s for my credentials…

More questions on comping.

1. What rhythms should you use? There are all of the charleston variations. Stride quarter note feel. Then there is the modern broken rhythms like you hear Chick and Herbie use a lot. But when and where do you play these?

It's funny. I don't even know the Charleston variations! You know I just bought some cd's and listened to a few of the guys play and tried to imitate it. Then since then I just kept listening to things and picking up things. My advice is just listen to a few of the stride players and then try and recreate it on the vibes.

Here's a lesson on modal comping.

Another xylo lesson that would definitely help beginning improv vibe players.

Another lesson by John Swana that can benefit vibes players AND trumpet players!

John's not a vibe player but this is great stuff!

Hey Guys,
Staying in line with the Chords and Harmony idea this month I remembered I did a 3 part series on Upper Structure triads a while back.

Upper Structures are an easy way to achieve a rich harmonic sound.
Before (or after) going through the links below as a simple exercise for comping, lets pick a couple upper structures to practice playing with 4 mallets through all keys.

Lets start with a dominant chord. G7 and move to Cmaj7.
(Note you should play the root by itself before playing the upper structure so you can hear the upper structure against the root of the chord.)