Blog

Hey Guys,

I've been feeling bad that I'm not around much, especially since there is soo much stuff going up, my recent activity page has a few pages of all new stuff I wanna check out, so I'll try to do that now and then.

Man, Dana, you're really putting stuff up, I love that you're contributing so much. Great stuff. And I love the way this site is evolving. More and more students putting stuff up and putting themselves in the open.

Man, I started messing with Dana's Videos, the Mark Levine book and bam, 3 hours later I'm flipping out cause I wanted to hit the sack early tonight.

I think I'm getting it. It's about the 2 outside lines and then how you harmonize THRU a chord.

First the outside line. If you play closed you usually have thirds in the top. Now you move that second voice and you have 10ths. Instead of seconds you have ninths. It's a beautiful sound. More open and spacious.

I couldn't wait for Tony's etude so I started working with the Sword of Whispers lead sheet on Joe's site. This is a demo recording to put down some ideas. I was mainly trying to get the notes and some harmonies. I need major work on my rhythm. I tried playing along with http://www.metronomeonline.com/ but it only can help so much.

Anyway, you know where the Stop button is.

Barry

I am curious how many players put bass in the right channel vs. the left channel. How many don't care either way. Having played keyboard forever, I feel bass should go on the left, but I hear many (most) other vibes panned the other way.

I've heard that a reason to pan bass to the right would be for an audience perspective but, especially for lessons, it would make sense to me to pan for the player's perspective, i.e., bass on left.

Barry

I started working on the Cherokee Etude. Here are the first 32 bars. I cheated a little bit, splicing in a couple sections and removing pauses. Eventually I will get it smoothed out.

My sticking is different from Tony's suggested sticking. I am exclusively using the inner mallets, always alternating, for the bass line and mallet 4 for the melody. I haven't tried the second half yet, so I don't know if I will be able to use the inner mallets, alternating as I do in the first half...

Barry

This was recently posted to YouTube. I never heard of Chuck Redd before. He's played with some big names. Sounds great.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFP_jpjZnBs
http://www.chuckredd.com/recordings.htm

Barry

I was watching a video of a concert by Bobby Hutcherson and Joey de Francesco and in the middle of the concert there was this interview made to Bobby Hutcherson, I was blown away by his words. I just wanted to share this with you because I thought that this just describes what's important in life in general. Here are some of his words:

“Music is not the image is only the reflection of who you are in your life.”

“Music reflects and tells the story of what is going on around you.”

“The rules of life are very simple. They are just not easy.

I just read that Joe Cuba died yesterday on Sunday, February 15th. I only knew of Joe from his hit "Bang Bang" and that was the result of Cal Tjader covering it on Cal's Primo album (David Sanborn also covered it among others). The obituary mentioned that his bands were vibraphone-driven, so that piqued my curiosity to go to Youtube and see what was there to be viewed.

Hey guys Last night I went to dizzys club in new york and saw joe locke perform and it was really amazing! Joe has such a beautiful sound and approach to the vibes and the music. If you are in the area you should go see the show! He is there through sunday!

I was logged in the site this morning and I was just amazed of how much information is up now. There are so many things to work on that is just overwhelming.