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I've been recording a bunch of tunes the last couple months. And I've let them sit for all this time. Now I'm going back to them and it's a great experience to do this.

I'm see myself play one tune over and over and work through problems that I don't think I was conscious of but was picking up on listening back to everything. Pretty cool to look back and see yourself working through problems.

I buy a lot of music off of Amazon. You know they give every use storage space. I think it's 2 free gigs and then 20 for 20 bucks a year. Something like that.

I just liked at my account and I have unlimited storage for music! So I'm now backing up 19,000 songs. And I have another 30,000 to go. I wonder if it will take it all??

I also signed up for Google's cloud service (free). I have 20 gigs there. I uploaded a ton of stuff there. Mostly music. I'll take the music down and then start storing docs up there.

I was thinking about a lot of the blues lessons we've been putting up lately. And this thought popped in my head.

We don't always focus directly on technique, but anything well played is an etude, a chop builder and an all around technical exercise in many ways. At least that's what I think. If you can swing and play a blues and do interesting stuff you have technique.

Just thought of that and thought I'd pass it along, see if you guys agree.

I mentioned about pausing the TOTM and do a huge chord and harmony study. 2011 Vibesworkshop Chord and Harmony Festival!

I'm digging that more and more. Here's the thing. If we all work together we could create a HUGE compilation of all this, study our butt's off, and grow like mo' fo's' musically.

I have a bunch of pros who will create some lessons for us and I think I'll pick a theme for each week and we can all talk about the theme.

I'll wrap up the blues this week and next week we'll start the Chord Fest!

I was thinking that after this TOTM (blues) is over that maybe we should spend at least a month studying chords. How about an intense month of chords???

What do you guys think? Everything I and hopefully some of the other guys can think of about chords.

Let's pull up all the old chord lessons and make new ones.

What do you think?

I went shopping for a van ramp this morning for my Hammond organ. Although I haven't made a purchase yet, I wanted to share a little bit of what I learned.

Past threads have discussed moving the vibes assembled (my preference) versus assembling/dissembling the instrument every time. To move the vibes already assembled, you need a van of some kind, so this is for those of you who own a minivan and might be interested in this topic.

Thanks to Nicofarr for posting his video of his new VanderPlas Baelio. I posted a comment with his audio jam and that comment has helped me a ton. I told him to use the pedal more and get more ringing. So I put my stuff out there and kept thinking about it. I started listening to Gary Burton last night and checking him out playing solo. I thought man, that's why he's the cat. Look at how he blends the ringing with the melody. He's got control of that instrument. Ed's another cat who has tamed the vibraphone!

Didn't do SH** today. And that pisses me off big time. Any other pros get pissed at how much BS we have to do. I'm a struggling musician that still has to do 1-3 hours of office work every frickin' day. Add to it, running the site, teaching and buying my son dinner because he's broke and some days I want to kick and punch something or preferably someone... anyone.

So today I hate being a vibes player.

We're welcoming back the University of Delaware percussion department. So why don't you guys introduce yourselves. Tell us what year you're in and where you're from!

It seems to me that 9/11 had a profound effect on the music business. I've never heard that talked about. As I remember it was after 9/11 that all the New York gigs fell apart. No one was going outside. All the clubs started doing the door for musicians. I heard of one club where you had to tell the guy at the door you were here to see the band or the money would not go to the band!!