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Don't Underestimate the Power!

I just had a great lesson with my student/buddy from Ohio, Jon Letsky. It's great to do the online lessons because I can see what I post in action. He's practicing invitation and doing the quarter note solos, chord tone solos and playing the tune through the keys and he's kicking ass with it all.

It's not a requirement to post stuff, but affirmation, completion and closure are important. At least with private students I get to see the stuff in action. What I've learned is at these ways of learning tunes DO work. I've seen them happen way too many times for it to be anecdotal.

Internet Explorer Part 2

We've been working trying to solve the Explorer problem but the reality is that Explorer is a big problem on any site. If you look through any CSS or html book, you see these parts where they show how to do cool stuff with the programming languages and then they tell you if Explorer can do it and if there's a way how to hack it to work. This has been forever.

Nothing I can say about loyalty, if you're into Explorer then ok, but if you're open, get Firefox, check out the cool add ons and then have a much better experience on the Internet.

From a Half Step Above

Man I listened to some Bud a while back and it got me hooked on the sound of going to the one chord from a half step above. Like Db to C. I love that sound and have been pulling it out all over the place. It's pretty cool. It's sort of like getting to the tri tone sub all the time.

Then I played a little gig with John Ellis (sax) over the weekend. And man he is a line manipulator! Being in that frame of reference and then listening to him was a great experience for me. It gave me so much to think about. It's kind of like being chromatic in a diatonic way. Does that make sense?

Restructuring the online Books

Hey Everyone,

We are starting to restructure the Online Books that contain all of the lesson material, performances etc etc. The amount of stuff on the site is really getting so overwhelming that it seemed needed to restructure all the posts in a better way to be able to find stuff easily.

We are now trying to organize content in 5 books. In this way everyone will be able to find stuff.

The 5 books are:

1. The Member Book - check out our members!
- In this book we will archive all performaces by members. So audio and Video.

2. The Good Vibes Lesson Book

Upgrades and new instruments

Apart from the regular production, last couple of weeks we spent a lot of time on redesigning the electronics for the motorsystem of the LW-series, and finishing the new 3 octaves vibe model.

Both are done now, and the first LW with the new motorsystem goes out this week.
The upgrade is huge!!!

With the previous motor system, the software controlling the motor itself was spread over 2 parts/devices, being the touchpanel taking care of the user interface, and the servo controller taking care of everything involving driving the motor system.

Crowdsourcing

Hi Tony,

I've been thinking about the problem of the amount of labor it takes to run this site, and it occurred to me that we could probably help you out with some of the non-vibes-playing aspects of maintaining things. I don't know where your main time sinks are, but if they could be broken up into discrete, unrelated chunks, then the members could volunteer to do the tasks for you.

in space?

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?

Almost 1000 Members

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?

Glassy, Milk Bottles, Soft, Rubbery, Washy, No Attack, Bricks

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?