Most Popular Lessons

Let's face it, not every gig allows us to play the difficult and hip jazz tunes we all spend hours shedding. Even many of the best known standards are completely foreign (and possibly boring) to a large section of general audiences today.

So what to play for all those restaurant and casual gigs that might hire a solo vibes player as an alternative to a pianist or guitarist? It's surprising how well many tunes from the 60s, 70s, 80s, and even the 90s will translate to solo vibes. Tunes people will generally recognize and appreciate are great choices to sprinkle into your sets.

I was recently talking with a student about playing in slow motion. I think I've talked about it here before, but I thought I'd do a little reminder on the topic.

This was mentioned in the comments so I thought I'd post it as a new post.

How about this? You guys want to post a whole bunch of links here about the subject for others to check out?

Here are some ideas for using voicings made from 5ths and 6ths. There is a pdf file that goes along with this that gives most possible interval combinations. Some of the last few on the pdf are very dissonant but might have their use. If you come up with some more ideas for chord/voicing relationships, please "pass them on in".

Here is a video I made today just talking about learing tunes.

I guess there are a lot of drummers on the site that already know a lot of tunes on drums, but switching to the vibes is like learning them all over again.

Here I talk about something I'll be experimenting with myself and I hope some of you guys will find this usefull.

TJ