If you're a member you get to hang out with some really prestigious players here. You see them online and I'm sure it's exciting when you see some of the pros online. I dig it!

If you could see what's happening on the inside of the site. The practicing, the posting, getting comments from the pros about your playing, trying etudes with other members of the site.

This is pretty cool.

Some Early thoughts on Ed's tune 'Life's Blessing'.

Hopefully some of you are working on it and will post your versions. Ed has a video version of it coming he told me! That should be great!

dear tony,
maybe it would be nice if you give us a little bit of information about you. from the site i only know a few things. but i would like to know about your musical background...where did you study, how you came to the vibes,do you play drums also, your teachers etc.

on the site there are some bio´s of some great vibe players but i am missing yours "the chief" of the site...you should fix that!

I emailed Teddy tonight and invited him to the site. I hope he takes my offer to be our guest. It would be great to get his insight on this instrument!

Keep your fingers crossed.

Here's some of the Teddy Charles talk on the site.

If you find that I missed something please post it in the comments with the title 'Update Teddy Charles' and I'll add to this.

Check out our own CD library. Here are a lot of great vibe cds by the real masters!!!
http://www.vibesworkshop.com/book/cd-library/tonymiceli/031308

There's a been a lot of talk on the site centering around Tango and Gary Burton. Gary has posted a few comments about all this.

So I've organized some of it here in one place. Check the links out above.

If I've missed anything, please post in the comments below and I'll update all this.

Reading the posts about Teddy Charles reminded me of my own relatively short but equally intense time of study with this great jazz iconoclast and master vibes player. When I was at Juilliard in the 60's, my teacher, Morris Goldenberg, decided at one point that it would be more appropriate for me to study with another teacher. I was already getting into jazz vibraphone and Moe was mainly a studio xylophone-percussion player. Don't get me wrong, he was great at what he did but he recognized that I needed something else that he couldn't give me, so what did he do?

Thanks everybody for the birthday greeting. I was touched and would have hugged every one of you(especially Tony and Joe! Thanks guys!!!) had we been within arms reach. It was a difficult birthday because I was in Barcelona for a workshop which I had to cancel because I got the flu on the 2nd day! So I spent 4 days in Bed, flew back to Berlin, saw Tony's email and checked out the site! That really cheered me up!!!

Best to all of you!

David