Lesson

What's great about this site is that a week can be a month or a year!!!

Check out this Parker lick. I thought it would be interesting for your guys to play it through the keys and learn from it. Very simple and to the point, but it weaves through the changes like Bach!

I won't tell you guys any more about it, why don't you figure stuff out and post it in the comments.

I'll give a free pair of my mallets to the first person who posts a record of them playing it without stopping and through all the keys.

We got a who is. Why not a 'Why Is It....' Series.

Things that are difficult and unexplainable... sort of.

At least from the perspective of the person posting.

My first 'Why Is It...' is:

Why is it so hard to play four mallets on a swing tune where the melody is in the upper octave.

I've been playing 'Long Ago and Far Away' for a while now. I'm in G and trying to voice nice chords underneath the melody which I'm playing in the upper octave.

ALSO the frickin melody starts on the root. That makes it ever tougher to voice.

There's the first why is!!!

I broke down My Romance into sections. Try this approach, take little chunks of the tune and work with them. I have six sections below that cover each little part of the tune. See can understand the harmony of each one of these sections, and be able to move the harmony around in different keys. The idea is that you study one little section and that section makes sense to you, and then he studied the next, and then when you put it all together you you understand the whole tune.

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This is likely to be old news for most on the site but hopefully helpful for those who haven't worked through these yet. I don't think I mentioned very clearly that you can replace the fifth of each voicing with the 6th for more color or variation.

Ok here's a video on the etude: Holyhell937. I perform it and I talk about it.

I hope someone else tries to play this, misery loves company!

Here's the link with the actual lesson and pdf:
http://www.vibesworkshop.com/node/4435

This is a beautiful lesson by friedman. Wait until you hear this solo! It's an incredibly melodic solo, which is the point of the lesson. So Watch: Lesson: Learn! And if you have any questions, ask David!

It's funny who you meet online! I met a person on youtube (Holyhell937)(Does this mean there are another 936 people who have used Holyhell as their youtube name???). He seems to be in high school, or junior high. I dug our brief dialogue online on the youtube page. He ended by saying, 'Hey why don't you write a piece for me to play in school'. I told him to subscribe to the site that there are plenty of pieces there to play!

Then on the way home from my dad's I listened to this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AFU7qDitTc
(Barryk - Is that a Theramin in this piece!)