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Late Night mallets

Recently purchased the Late Night mallets which arrived today. The heads are larger than I expected, which makes them a tad unwieldy, but used them for a while and I think I'll get used to them. Its sure nice to play my vibes with the resonators on in my apartment and not worry about volume. Btw; they sound amazing on suspended cymbal! These will be my go to mallets for orchestral cymbal work. No impact; just the sound of the swell. I'm sure they'll sound nice on low end marimba too.

Late Night mallets

Recently purchased the Late Night mallets which arrived today. The heads are larger than I expected, which makes them a tad unwieldy, but used them for a while and I think I'll get used to them. Its sure nice to play my vibes with the resonators on in my apartment and not worry about volume. Btw; they sound amazing on suspended cymbal! These will be my go-to mallets for orchestral cymbal work. No impact; just the sound of the swell. I'm sure they'll sound nice on low end marimba too.

Who's Funny Valentine! For Our Vibes Bootcamp This Weekend (May 16-17)

This weekend is our VW Bootcamp.

David is working in his class on the My Funny Valentine. He put up a version and so did Hauke so I wanted to do one as well.

I have not played the tune in a long time but I thought I could bang it out. I couldn't. I had to remember the parts and assemble it again. Hence my comment in the beginning, which I decided to leave in.

Don't any of us who record have comments like this or worse on some of our recordings?

This Interests Me -V

I'm always looking to see and hear how people play in different situations and whether it holds my attnetion.

David Patrios is a great mallet player. Just look how he plays in this duo!

He's on a .... is it a Balifon? Or do I just call it a marimba? I don't know.

But he makes great melodies.

This just reminds me what we need to make music. We don't need 4 mallets going on all the time. For most of us that's a good think. We need strong melodies with chords interspersed!

Send In The Clowns by Stephen Sondheim

"Send In The Clowns" composed by Stephen Sondheim in 1973 for the play A Little Night Music. A beautiful song with deep lyrics sung by many vocalists including Judy Collins, Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand and Betty Buckley. All great versions but my favorite is the one by Dame Judi Dench performing it in 2010 on the BBC program for Sondheim's 80th birthday celebration.

Friedman Etude #8

This one took me three takes because at the end on the Bb chord, I kept hitting a C in my top mallet instead of a high D. That's one of the harder chords for me to reach in this book. I also strayed a little from the Gregorian chant-like quality it's supposed to have, which is funny because I was actually really into Gregorian chants as a middle schooler. Anyway, all of the etudes I'm doing are on my YouTube channel if anyone wants to listen to them!