One more version of Woody. This is slower. I've been still practicing it and trying to keep the tempo on the slow side and keep from rushing.

Hi Tony,hi all!

Inspired by Tony's blog on practising here in VW, I got a copy of "Effortless Mastery" by Kenny Werner. Werner describes how to achive a special kind of consciousness he calls "to be in space" each time he plays his instrument. He uses some kind of meditation and exercises to create this relaxed but focussed state of mind. It must be fairly similar to auogenous training.

I haven't really worked hard on this and so I wonder if one of you did so and manages to "enter the space" when ever he wants??

So where are the space men? Do pro's also use this kind of techniques?

by Horace Silver

Dimitri (JIM THE VIBES) is one hard working cat. He blows me away with his work ethic. And he plays great and is getting better and better. I know he works hard with everything on the site and he says it helps him, so he's a testiment for you guys to shell out a few bucks, come on in the inside and work hard with the rest of us.

Anyone know about the scene in New York? I'm planning on going there either this summer or fall. I'm not going to be in a university. I was just wondering about the logistics of it. You know, I'm either going to have to get a ground floor apartment, find an apartment with a big enough elevator, or find a storage place outside my apartment (I'm really clueless here). Or am I just tripping over nothing here? I think I've decided on using zipcar for transportation cuz I live in Fresno, CA and I'm not too big on driving my old van across the country, then pay for parking once I'm there.

I posted a few songs from the 2009 Mountain View concert series my group did on Thursday. We had played the same college 2 years ago resulting in the video of us playing Tin Tin Deo that up on YouTube.

Every once in a while I go and count the members on the site. We are getting near 1000 vibe players. OH MAN. Could you imagine if we could all get together. 1000 of us in the same room. That's amazing to me. Isn't it??

So I wanted to make a request. If we all sent out 5 emails to some mallet players that might not know about the site, we might hit the 1000 mark before the new year.

If you are at a music school, could you put up a flyer getting people to sign up?

The final lesson. I talk about wrapping things up. Have you done this before? Study something and then decide that you're done and then wrap it all up in your mind and put it in a compartment. This is the last lesson of the invitation series.

I"m thinking about all this talk about mallets and sound. So I was wondering how we would classify different peoples sound? I don't mean in a negative way.

I'm listening to Steve Nelson right now, Mike Dirubo's new cd. Ed mentioned glassy, that's definitely glassy.

I dug Ed's duet with Liebman. More round sound right? His new mallets. Who else has a round sound? Samuels right?

Elio Villafranca - Piano
Grant Stewart - Sax
Tony Miceli - Vibes
Luques Curtis - Bass
John Davis - Drums