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Ireland Workshop 2011 - Reminder

Time

Just a reminder about our workshop in Ireland, we have one place left for Vibes so if there are any Europeans interested in attending let me or Tony know asap. Its going to be a great week. Here is the schedule

Tue 19th July to Sun 24th July

Class times 10am to 3.30pm Mallet players

6.30 to 9pm General instruments

Will finish on Sun night with a performance in our Jazz Club. There are practice rooms available to work your butts off.

John

First steps for beginning pan players

The theme of this lesson is to find something that YOU like when you play. Forget about judgement, and just listen. Find patterns that sound good, pick out melodies that sound familiar or make up new ones, experiment with different ways of striking the instrument. Try anything. Record and/or remember the things that you really like, and then later you can learn WHAT it is you played so that you can do it again, or be free to change it however you want.

Speedy Gonzales (Bill Dobbins) - arranged for vibe/marimba by Ted Wolff & Ed Sterbenz

This tune was written by Bill Dobbins many years ago. I first heard it performed as a piano/vibes duet. I recently recorded it for bass and vibes. But I'm sure it would sound great on vibes and marimba. The audio clip is slightly different than the attached pdf manuscript. Some stuff has been added and some taken out, but you'll get the idea.

We did the tune at a moderately bright tempo, but I've heard it played super fast, as the tune's title suggests.

Forum Topic: Sight reading

Hope this is the right topic / place for this question...

I'm new on the vibes and my sight-reading is very very crappy. I'm looking for suggestions for (a) material to use for practice in sight-reading, and (b) approaches to practicing.

Right now for sight-reading I'm just reading Real Book heads and Bach Inventions (one part at a time). I've also just started with Bartok's Mikrokosmos for very very simple two-handed reading (stuff like unison lines, very simple parallel motion, etc).

Building a Voicing Vocabulary - Part 1

Here is a lesson on building a voicing vocabulary. This is a exercise with offers a method for familiarizing yourself with every possible inversion and alteration of any given chord with a 4 note voicing. This first lesson just deals with close position voicings. I plan to expand to include drop 2 and other more spread out voicing in the next lesson. As always, I'd love to hear your feedback and welcome any questions or comments on the material.
-Tyler