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I am honored to have been a part of this beautiful project.

A little warmup on the marimba this morning playing Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Chega de Saudade” before putting in a full day of teaching at Berklee in Boston. Using my signature (M39) mallets from Vic Firth.

"Deborah's Theme" by Ennio Morricone. A beautiful theme from the movie "Once Upon A Time In America". This is an arrangement that I wrote for my upcoming book Pedaling and Dampening for the Vibraphone. I loved the theme when I heard it and so many others of the great composer. The piece involves a variety of dampening techniques that will be covered in the book including slide dampening, hand dampening and pivot dampening. Much of the exercises, etudes and pieces are written and I just started to chip away at the text. Fun but challenging stuff.

by Chick Corea (with intro)

I restructured my website bilingually and started a new "Do It Yourself" - section.
A first DIY tutorial is creating pickups for mallet instruments.
www.wyndorps.de

Good luck!

"A Place in Time" - solo vibraphone version of a new song inspired by two of my favorite composers - Ennio Morricone who wrote the theme for the movie "Cinema Paradiso" and Luis Bacalov who wrote the theme for "Il Postino". The song has some unexpected harmonic twists and was a bit of a challenge to pull off in terms of keeping it consistent and maintaining the mood of the piece.

Short excerpt from a practice session yesterday playing “Solar” which is a 12 bar blues. One of the ways I like to practice is to play non stop with sort of a “stream of consciousness” approach with little planned as possible. Sometimes some good stuff and sometimes not so much. Ha!Ha!

Check this photo out. This was my M55 back in the day and it has the custom pedal, Mbraces and the bladder damper pad. This is the only photo I have of the instrument that I know of. The pedal was very cool. It had a horseshoe-shaped object with two spurs similar to bass drum spurs that were adjustable. The spurs would come down on each side of the pedal (right and left) and poke into the floor for greater stability.

"Skating in Central Park" - A beautiful song in 3/4 composed by pianist John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet. I've been working with songs in 3/4 for my solo vibraphone book that I'm in the process of writing. I'm making headway on the book with many of the music examples finished. I just started formatting the layout of the book along with the accompanying text for the music examples. Still along way to go though. Meanwhile, my book Voicing Concepts for the Jazz Vibist is available from Amazon.