Marimba

This piece is the 1st movement from Bach's violin sonata # 1. There's lots of opportunity for mallet dampening. The goal is to get it to sound full and resonant, but very clean. As you move from chord to chord use good dampening and/or pedaling to make sure no notes from the previous chord ring into the current chord; making it sound sloppy.

The tempo is really slow, with an 8th note set to about 50 on the metronome. A pdf of the manuscript is included HERE

Hello guys, I just created a new YouTube channel to post some clips for marimba. We just posted clips on marimba of Duke Ellington's blues Things Ain't What They Used To Be and Carlos Jobim's O Grande Amor. I'll be posting some more clips including Clapton's Tears in Heaven, Morricone's theme from Cinema Paradiso and an excerpt from Bach's Sonatas and Partitas that I improvise on. The marimba is such a beautiful instrument. I'd like to put some more marimba clips out there that show other possibilities for the marimba that I don't think the marimbists are taking advantage of.

Hello guys, I just created a new YouTube channel to post some clips for marimba. We just posted clips on marimba of Duke Ellington's blues Things Ain't What They Used To Be and Carlos Jobim's O Grande Amor. I'll be posting some more clips including Clapton's Tears in Heaven, Morricone's theme from Cinema Paradiso and an excerpt from Bach's Sonatas and Partitas that I improvise on. The marimba is such a beautiful instrument. I'd like to put some more marimba clips out there that show other possibilities for the marimba that I don't think the marimbists are taking advantage of.

Recently upon reviewing some transcriptions I have done, I stumbled across a very simple and clear example of why transcription is so important I thought i'd share.

The transcription is of John Coltrane playing his composition "LazyBird".

Another lesson by John Swana that can benefit vibes players AND trumpet players!

John's not a vibe player but this is great stuff!

I was looking at some things today on the site. I found out a couple things. We have over 6,000 individual posts on the site and over 24,000 comments.

Those are very rough figures but they give an idea of what's here. There is a LOT of information now on this site.

Just remember to also check out the vbooks (http://www.vibesworkshop.com/book). Things in there will stay there in the order they are in. While not everything is in there yet, a lot of the early lessons are there.

Just thought I'd pass that on. 6,000 posts and 24,000 comments is a lot of talking about the vibraphone!!!

For this month's "chords and harmony" topic I've written up an article focusing on tensions and several ways to use them effectively when comping. Some of the areas discussed include:

• using tensions to indicate major or minor tonal center
• available tensions for maj7, min7, min7(b5), dom7, and dim7 chords
• adding tensions to a blues progression

Hope you find it helpful.