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Hey Tony,

I told you about the theater show I'm gonna do from January untill april, right?

Anyway, I got all the music and it's about 42 pages of music that I have to play by heart... and it's drums, Vibes AND marimba. The composer is this famous dutch classical composer and the music is really Heavy Metal Reggae stuff and also classical combined... I looked through the parts this week and man, it's some difficult stuff!
The vibe parts are ok, cause that's mainly beautiful sounds and stuff like that. But the marimba parts are some fast mo' fo' passages(excuse my language... haha).

Hey Tony,

A few days ago I got a call by some 60 + jazzband and I have a gig with them on the 2nd of november. They're probably not that good, but hey this is a good way to get a tune list going. They sent me a list of tunes, and that's the tunes I'll work on now. an, I love Rhapsody! Just downloaded a lot of versions of different tunes and I can also listen to them offline... Oh yeah, I'll post about that on the site also.

The conversation that recently took place regarding improvising on the blues has given me food for thought for a blog. I think intellectualizing music through analysis is a good thing if fully understood. The process of analyzing music helps to teach and learn new things about music and often helps to find weaknesses and holes in our knowledge.

I was having some thoughts on transcribing so I thought I'd post them here.

So I was transcribing the Steve Nelson solo on Beautiful Love today and I remembered some guys here talking about programs to slow down music to transcribe and stuff like that.

My thoughts on that are that you shouldn't even want to use that kind of stuff to transcribe.

I've been tied up with teaching, gigs and recording the next part of the Vince Guaraldi lesson! I need to get a little time and see what comments are going up. I'm glad Piper is around.

Anyway, I think I have a decent performance of the tune, now I need to talk about it and then that part will go up. I'm thinking probably Friday or so, I should be finished.

Hope someone is practicing the piece. I did more of my version which is similar to the etude and will give you an idea. I'm hoping one of you guys will record that actual etude and post it!!!

I have some old Good Vibes mallets that are warped out of line about 3/16". I have newer Mike Balter mallets that have a slight curve also so I am assuming this happens with all mallets.

Do you try straightening them (steam them?), play with them as-is or go out and buy new ones.

Thanks,
Barry

yo everybody,

Bruce is the male version of Marie EXCEPT for the fact that bruce plays vibes for real. Check him out on youtube, vibeman27. He plays good!! And Bruce is American not French.

He's active online, he's positive and in my virtual opinion he seems like a great guy. i'm so happy he's hanging out on the site. many of us know him well and want him to keep us up to date.

i bring that up cause if you see 'cancer update' and you start thinking.... huh????

so even if it seems a little off topic here, many of us on the site want to hear from him!

Marie-Noëlle doesn't play the vibes but she loves them as much as I think the rest of us do! She's joined our ranks inside the school and I'm sure will have a lot to say. She's pretty active over at thevibe.net a popular vibe site.

All the vibe players love Marie. When Joe Locke hit's Paris he's sure to meet up and say hello to Marie. She's a great person and a great fan of the vibraphone. And I welcome her to the inner core of the school!

I'd like to see more participation by members too. It's so fun to bring a society of vibraphonists together. I live in Texas and I don't travel much anymore so I don't see a lot of vibe players (though there are some very good ones here) but none of my neighbors and most of my friends don't even know what it is or how to pronounce it. I'm sure that many reading this are in that same dilemma. Keep in mind that it's very healthy for each of us to have some socializing with people who understand the value of the art and support each other during the struggle.

Barryk asked me to talk about how I composed the Vince Guaraldi piece.

Well, I'm not a 'real' composer, so I'm not experienced in developing themes and other techniques that a real composer would use. But I have written a few pieces and arranged a bunch of things.