'Infant Eyes' through my eyes, incorporating the MalletStation with vibes and adding a groove to the well known piece by Wayne Shorter. This has been a pretty intense creative process: I was surprised to welcome Beethoven in it and it made me kind of emotional to realize that my teenage memories of Pink Floyd were still so vivid, awaiting an opportunity to be manifested!

"Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans? - dedicated to the late great pianist and music educator Ellis Marsalis. Having fun playing some traditional jazz on the marimba and hats.

This weekend at the first-ever online vibes bootcamp, David Friedman spoke about the importance of following the movement of the bassline and the harmonies when choosing chords for My Funny Valentine (and the same goes for many other tunes). That reminded me of a lesson Tony posted back in 2011, but it was audio only so I made this video to show at the vibes coffeehouse.

Pretty self-explanatory. Tony thought there weren't enough gongs on my last post.

Well... gong solo this time.

Need I say more?

My apologies to Juan Tizol. It was a great tune before this happened.

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.

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.

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?

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" 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.