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The theme of this lesson is to find something that YOU like when you play. Forget about judgement, and just listen. Find patterns that sound good, pick out melodies that sound familiar or make up new ones, experiment with different ways of striking the instrument. Try anything. Record and/or remember the things that you really like, and then later you can learn WHAT it is you played so that you can do it again, or be free to change it however you want.

Here is a lesson on building a voicing vocabulary. This is a exercise with offers a method for familiarizing yourself with every possible inversion and alteration of any given chord with a 4 note voicing. This first lesson just deals with close position voicings. I plan to expand to include drop 2 and other more spread out voicing in the next lesson. As always, I'd love to hear your feedback and welcome any questions or comments on the material.
-Tyler

Hi everyone,

This etude is similar to the last one; another mallet independence etude, but with a few different things. Pdf is attached. Enjoy!

Behn

This is a very interesting and demanding interlude,written by the great composer/arranger Frank Zappa.It is a incredible exercise on playing a single line melody,using uncommon intervals.
This version appeared on the "Apostrophe"album,as part of a tune called "st Alfonzo's pancake breakfast".It begins approximately at 1:09 and it was performed by the great Ruth Underwood.

It is a standard piece in the Zappa repertoire,and it was played by all the percussionists that played in the Zappa band.

Stole this off our sister site www.trumpetworkshop.com. There's a whole series over there. Is this helpful to anyone? If so I'll steal more!

Just a quick tip here. Dig by Miles is a great melody to study. Try playing it and tapping your feet on 2 and 4! Try playing it by yourself and just making it swing. All the offbeats make it a challenge.

I think it's great to study melodies and to work on phrasing them. Actually I think it's an Art the way some players play melodies. I know I too often overlook them and take them for granted. But there's so much to learn playing and studying melodies.

I was working in a lesson with Nathaniel and we were working on here's that rainy day. I've been messing around with stuff we worked on and thought I'd pass it along. We were working on these sort of clusters and voicings. Here's a PDF with some of the stuff we were talking about.

This might actually be a GREAT TOTM (tune of the month).

Just banged it out. Let me know if anything is weird.