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I talk and think about this all the time. You'll hear me bring it up over and over and over again. I never totally liked the analogy of comparing the vibes to a piano. When every I'm playing solo it hits me like a brick in the head.

Now there is plenty to learn from the piano, after all this is set up like a piano. So cool. Also many other vibe players compare this to a piano. However many of them did not grow up playing classical piano and classical guitar. I did and I can do an interesting comparison between the two.

The thing about music is it's pretty logical for the most part. Most of the music you're going to play is going to fall in one of a few categories. That's why we have categories of different aspects of music because there's so much music that falls into them.

Take a tune like 'A Train'. That's AABA. Man if i had a nickel for every AABA tune I played, I wouldn't be doing this site, I'd be on some island with tropical girls feeding me grapes!

A lot of you guys are not doing music full time but you really want to get this down. So here are a few tips.

Here's an etude I wrote out for a student a while back. We were exploring Latin Rhythms on the vibes. It's a little tricky.

Here's a VERY difficult etude illustrating many ways to accompany yourself and play. It's the head to Joy Spring and then I take a couple choruses. It's really hard but can be played. I used to have it worked up and dreading having to work it up to record it.... so I'm going to stall doing that!

Free 2 months membership to anyone that videos this for me! :-)

below is a midi, file (with a piano sound. can anyone set the midi file up with a vibe sound?)

also i outputed the midi with a vide sound to an mp3.

all is below

Here's a slightly difficult etude that will really work on your independence. The left and right hand is separate for the whole tune. That is they work totally independently.

Here's my arrangement of Green Dolphin Street. It's an etude that explores three parts of playing the vibes, chordal playing, chordal playing and soloing and also single line soloing.

Just started learning the Friedman Etude No. 1. I need to work on getting more legato (dampen simultaneously with hitting the next note), dynamics and bringing the speed up.

Ahhh, welcome to the first etude of the Friedman book. You're about to embark on a really great journey!