Hey Everyone--

I love talking about all my favorite vibes players and the albums they've made as leaders and sidemen. I am curious, though, what everyone gravitates to when they're not listening to the vibes. (Up to you, but I'm not really talking about albums where people are mainly playing marimba.)

My favorite albums clear and away are "Together Again; Tony Bennett and Bill Evans," and "The Tony Bennett Bill Evans Album." Probably always will be. I'm also very partial to 'Miles in Tokyo' 'Unity,' 'Speak No Evil' and 'Egberto Gismonti and Charlie Haden in Montreal.'

If you post here on the site, you'll see some reorganization starting. The first thing you'll see is in the boxes where you post. We're rearranging the 'Type' categories. Everything is still there, just being moved around.

Over the next 2 weeks, there should be a shift in the front page and some other things. Please hang in there with us. I think it will make the site a little better for us all.

Any questions, just let me know.

I didn't know this one, it has some cool and unseen features in it !
Check it out

Cool to see some transcriptions of Bobby going up around here. About 10 years ago (!!!) I transcribed a LOT of solos, and I think I probably did more Hutch than any other vibes player... there's just so much IN there.

There are less recordings of him playing standards than with, say, Milt, but the examples you do come across are just gold. This one's from a cool little album called 'Color Schemes' from 1986. I love recordings from all through Bobby's career, but from the mid-80s up through Skyline, his command of his instruments (especially marimba) is frighteningly strong.

I like to tinker with my instruments to get different effects. I used to put tacks on the hammers of my piano to get a honkey tonk sound (not good for your piano, though). John Piper joked about Tony putting spider egg sacs over his resonators to get a buzzing sound like a Gyil (see above reference).

Well, I couldn't find any spider egg sacs for my vibes resonators, so I used a plastic grocery bag (HDPE #2) between the bars and resonators.

General information on Keys, modes and relative keys.

General information on Chords and Chord Scales.

Understanding Tritone Substitutions
by John Mark Piper

To understand the basics of tritone substitutions and how they typically function is an important aspect of music. Having good command of them can help a musician's reading, hearing, performing and memorizing music.

I usually rig something up for Halloween. This year I decided to put an inflatable halloween decoration under a pile of leaves. When the kids come to the door for trick-or-treating, I'll turn on the blower with a remote controlled outlet switch and have it pop up out of the leaves.

Attached is a video of my setup with an overdub of me playing theme music on vibes. I tried doing some dampening. I had trouble with my Piper (43R) mallets as they bounced when I tried dampening so I used Mike Balter 12Rs instead. Any suggestions on controlling the bouncing when dampening.