all-levels

Henry Wilson is an up-and-coming vibes player who studies with me at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. He came to me with lots of excellent skills and we've been diving into solo jazz repertoire as well as some groove ideas inspired by my African and Balafon styles (many balafon lesson videos on the VW site to explore).

Down the road, we hope to post some videos of Henry in action. For now, please enjoy and comment on this lovely rendition of Prelude to a Kiss.

Attached is me (Vibes) and my Dad (MIDI Accordion) playing a Latin tune called Cumana written by Barclay Allen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumana_(song)

In the late 80s, I bought a kit to retrofit MIDI into my Dad's electronic accordion (_lots_ of soldering). We resurrected it recently, and it still works! I also created a MIDI Thru box that splits the MIDI to allow it to control up to 4 different instruments, which can be turned on/off via switches on the accordion.

OK, a bit of a clickbait title, yes, but it's true! All three voicings I'll show you in this video have no third, which is usually the one note we absolutely need! We shall explore why that's the case.

Hello everyone,

Here's another lesson about voicings. The common theme of all these recent lessons is trying to extrapolate as many different possible voicings as we can out of a sing idea. You take any four notes, and you can do all these things we've talked about so far:

-add extensions
-alter notes
-invert the chord
-use drop 2s, drop 3s, drop 2+3s, etc.

And now we'll add planing to the list! This is when you move a chord through a scale, or just move it chromatically.

Hello everyone,

In the last lesson, I explained how to methodically go through all possible extensions for a chord, and, in this one, we will look at the different options for rearranging those notes. You can use inversions, and spread techniques, including drop-2, drop-3, and drop-2+3.

Hello everyone!

This is a lesson geared towards beginners, but useful for everyone! I explain my method for going through all possible standard extensions and voicings for a dominant chord (there are 32 in total for any dominant chord!). The same applies to major, minor, diminished, etc.

Some choruses based upon Tony Miceli's written out chorus which is available for download from The Vibes Workshop. The first chorus is Tony's written out solo while the subsequent choruses are improvised using some of Tony's specific notes, phrases and ideas from his written out solo. Tony's solo was posted as "Orthinology Simple Solo" very recently.

Here is what I decided to call a tool box.

There is a solo, a chord study and a bass line for you to use as accompaniment.

Work hard on this there is a lot here!