Those of you who met me at the Delaware boot camp know I have a horrible time playing vibes in front of an audience. Part of that is just lack of confidence. And this is caused by not knowing what the hell I'm doing. So Ive decided to tackle this problem and start working live with vibes.

I booked a steady gig in duo for Wednesday evenings twice a month.
It will be a vibes and guitar duo.

Your help in determining how to do this without making a fool of myself would be greatly appreciated. Suggestions for tunes that are not too difficult in duo would be appreciated.

Okay guys, let's start working on lines. In this lesson what we will want to do is make very simple lines. In all these lessons we always want to hear the tune. It needs to be recognizable and obvious to everybody listening and obvious to your self when you record it and play it back.

Make sure you always begin this by playing the melody and chords and as I say, fill the room with the sound of the tune. That's very important so that any mistakes you make standout and you can recognize them. Make sure you're always playing and listening and for that fact recording and listening back.

Hi all!

I discovered that the way I am trying to play Work Song is a quite tricky mallet dampening etude to me when I try to let the chords ring for comping. Next time I'll use a metronome - promised.

any feed back welcome, cheers Stefan

My buddy Bryan who is a GREAT bass player came over late last night with Chris Ashman a great tumpet player, whom I taught at U Arts.

Bryan insisted on keep the metronome on while we played. I thought I would post this.

You guys have me all inspired with tunes, and I've been going nuts relearning everything I forgot. So thanks. We played some tunes and other keys and just really tried to push ourselves. I dig that and I dig playing with young cats. They are on fire.

Have I posted this already?

Do you know Lem Winchester? When you see Scott Davidson lurking about, he's writing a biography of Lem. Lem is a Milt Jackson with a tragic tragic ending. Anyone know how he died? Very sad.

Any stories about Lem from the pros?

Lem is on the left.

Tony! This is for you! I practiced your etude one more time and decided to post it. It's not perfect but I tried my best.
Haven't you said the one who records it get a gift from the store? Your new mallets? ;-)

Shameless promotion ;-)

Last couple of weeks we have been busy finalizing the new midi system for our instruments.
We have just completed our first LW35 with embedded midi, and have prepared the gigVibe's design to be able to also carry the midi.

The system is a completely new design, a.o. it is smaller, so it fits inside the endblocks.
As it is now, it is only available for our instruments, but in the very near future it will also be available for other brands.

Fortune's Fool is the story of the record industry from about 1990 to the present, mostly by following the career of Edgar Bronfman, who got bored being a scion of the Seagram Liquor fortune and decided to take the company into the entertainment business. He eventually becomes (and still is, I believe) head of Warner Music.

This is an etude I've written a while ago. If someone is interested I maybe can post the music.

As you know I "follow" a bit the new members when they arrive. From the day he registered some 9 weeks ago, I always wondered... "For God's sake, but who is Monsieur 405"?!

Can you answer Ben? (please)

- M

PS: in fact, I already know a few very interesting things, but hush... I will let him speak ;-)