Vibraphone

I spent a week here in Ireland and we had a great time. I worked with some hard working players and we really dug into the vibes. I learned a lot from hanging and working with these guys!

So off the Delaware. Another 21 players studying acoustic and electronic vibes! It's always pretty amazing to me to see all these players who love this instrument and want to work so hard on it.

Ireland was incredible! We worked 5 days, from morning until night on the instrument. All the players Played the vibe hang and did a concert last night. So this was a great week!

Greetings everyone,
Just took delivery on a new Musser M55. I'm geting back to mallet playing after a long, long hiatus. Very excited!

Could use some advice on a setup question. The highest F on the instrument rings even when the damper pedal is up.

How best to fix this?

Thanks!

jazzdad6705

This tune by Pat Metheny is titled Letter from Home and was featured on a CD of the same name that Pat put out in the 1990s.

The left hand accompaniment is mostly single line arpeggios which provide rhythmic movement and keep the piece flowing. The right hand uses octaves occasionally, which really sound good on vibes.

This is the First time This tune has every been played out and the first run thru for us .. the night was feeling good, so i pulled it out. I think i posted a lead sheet of this on the site back in 2009 ... its only 2 minutes long and was the only video that was taken at the gig .. via a cell phone so the Quality isnt that great .. but hey .. ya all get to see wat TMac does in southern oregon ....

Working up this piece really forced me to re-examine my technique, and improved it a lot. I started playing out of David's "Vibraphone Technique: dampening and pedaling" when it was first published. Still a phenomenal resource!

Note: Example tune is All The Things You Are, I only played part of the melody.

This was from a while ago, but I wanted to share it since we are talking about solo playing. I tried to cop the Miceli style of solo vibes, which is much different than the Burton or Friedman styles. Ed Saindon has a style that is more similar to Tony's, but uses the stride concept more. When I think of the great solo vibes players, those are the four that come to mind. Where Burton and Friedman tend to use more countermelody lines, Tony tends to use more "jabs" like a pianist would. Tony does the whole countermelody thing to, and is great at it...

Just a little advanced notice that we'll have an open house on thursday August 2nd, at the University of Delaware during our vibesworkshop workshop.

So if you're around plan on coming down and meeting everyone and hanging with us. Dave Friedman will be there, as will Bob Becker and some other players. Maybe some guys like Randy Sutin, Or Behn will show. All are welcome!!

(@Bruce Wells - the date i'm pretty sure is correct! I didn't screw this on up)