Vibraphone

🎵 New Series Alert – Play A Great Standard In One Month!

We've spent the last two series taking a deep dive into two of the most important forms in jazz:

• Play A Great Blues In 3 Months
• Play A Great Rhythm Changes In 3 Months

Those 14-week series gave us plenty of time to develop comping, voicings, melodic vocabulary, substitutions, and improvisational concepts over forms that show up everywhere in jazz.

Now we're ready to move a little faster.

👉 Play A Great Standard In One Month

🎵 Play A Great Rhythm Changes In 3 Months – Week 14

We've made it to Week 14 and the final lesson in our Play A Great Rhythm Changes In 3 Months series!

Over the course of this series, we've worked through rhythm changes from a number of different angles:

• Common four-mallet voicings
• Comping rhythms
• Guide tones and 3rds & 7ths
• Bebop, diminished, and chromatic vocabulary
• Chord and scale outlinings
• Substitute harmony
• Longer melodic phrases
• Transposition and register considerations

Still working on the blues... This is a transcription of the beautiful solo of Art Farmer on Blues for Diahann (Milt Jackson -Bag's opus). Lot of space in it.

I've a question about transcriptions : when do you consider you're done with a transcription ? Is it when you can play with the original song ? when you can play it in all 12 keys ? when you can play it in a jam session ?

I remember Tim Collins saying that he try to reuse some phrases he likes in his solos, at the same place than the original song, to be sure that he really got them. Do you practice like him ?

🎵 Play A Great Rhythm Changes In 3 Months – Week 13

Last week, we moved rhythm changes from B♭ into F, beginning our work on taking the concepts from this series into different keys.

This week, we're staying in F, but we're shifting our attention back to comping.

👉 More specifically, we're returning to the voicings from Week 1 and transposing them into our new key.

On paper, that sounds simple: take every voicing from B♭ and move it into F.

On the vibraphone, however, it doesn't always work that way.

🎵 Play A Great Rhythm Changes In 3 Months – Week 12

Over the past seven weeks, we've built a strong vocabulary for rhythm changes through guide tones, chord outlinings, scale motion, substitutions, and bebop language.

This week, we introduce something equally important:

👉 Playing in a new key.

If there is one thing I know for certain, it is that I don't know all the options out there.  I continue to learn.   Here's a good one...

🎵 Play A Great Rhythm Changes In 3 Months – Week 11

Over the past six weeks, we've steadily expanded our rhythm changes vocabulary.

We've explored:

I started a discord server for Vibes workshop. I think it's gonna be very cool. It's gonna have stages in it where we can play and have the coffee hang we can have impromptu talks we can have impromptu playing together, etc.. I'm building out slowly and will post this just for members here at Vibes workshop for you guys to join once I see a handful of people. I will start doing some things whether it's classes or question and answer things or performances. I will start setting things up. We have about 10 people so far.

Most of us are smart and careful. I am, but the other day I slipped and clicked on something someone sent me. I never do that. It hijacked my email and sent the same to my whole email list which is about 3000 people. 

Becareful when selling an instrument. Even with the vibes there are a lot of scams going on. 

I sell owner to people who come and pick it up and bring cash. It seems that with venmo and paypal there are a lot of ways to file a dispute a week later and then get your money back. 

So I think in this day and age, it's seller beware.