Steel Pan

I was looking at some things today on the site. I found out a couple things. We have over 6,000 individual posts on the site and over 24,000 comments.

Those are very rough figures but they give an idea of what's here. There is a LOT of information now on this site.

Just remember to also check out the vbooks (http://www.vibesworkshop.com/book). Things in there will stay there in the order they are in. While not everything is in there yet, a lot of the early lessons are there.

Just thought I'd pass that on. 6,000 posts and 24,000 comments is a lot of talking about the vibraphone!!!

Video from show at the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage earlier this summer.

I've recently discovered an excellent new software product for music notation that (I think) competes favorably with the expensive packages like Sibelius and Finale. It's called Muse Score and it is distributed as a free download. You can find it here: Muse Score.

The interface is logical and seems to be well thought out. You can save your files in a variety of formats including .pdf and .xml. As far as I can tell this product will work for anything you want to create, from a simple lead sheet to a full orchestral score.

The major scale, circle of fourths/fifths.

Here is our first EOTM by David Friedman. I'm hoping David will become our EOTM man. He has all these creative ways of playing scales and doing exercises. So let's see if we can get him to be our EOTM CEO.

Here's the first one. This is a great idea actually. If you practice one of these exercises each month and just for the month I would argue that technically it will alter your playing for the better. I'm going to do it also!

Check out the pdf below.

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.