Vibraphone

Twenty or so folks, mostly ladies in wheelchairs, at the rest and rehab hospital last night for a sing-a-long with Jocey's soprano voice leading and me on MalletKat synthing vibes. We did a dozen songs in an hour. I played each melody line through once, then came in with chords in the left mallets and the melody line on the right with everyone singing from song sheets we passed out.

Ted Wolff posted a video titled 'Never Seen Vibe Playing Like this'.
http://www.vibesworkshop.com/video/never-seen-vibes-playing/tedwolff/10…

I thought I would counter his post with this one!

I CAN say that watching Ted's video and this one, there's a lot of things that each of these vibe players can do that the other can not.

[All in jest people]

A friend of mine sent me this youtube clip. There is a wild vibe solo that starts a minute or 2 into the video. It's a lot of fun to watch.

Dream about them, think about them. Imagine them. Let's get ready to study them for a couple months. Chords, harmony, voicings, colors, shadings. Let's strip them down and build them up. Let's really work hard on chords and harmony and see where we wind up.

Great Cal solo at 4:10-5:44. Hadn't seen this one before.

I've been recording a bunch of tunes the last couple months. And I've let them sit for all this time. Now I'm going back to them and it's a great experience to do this.

I'm see myself play one tune over and over and work through problems that I don't think I was conscious of but was picking up on listening back to everything. Pretty cool to look back and see yourself working through problems.

I posted this over at www.trumpetworkshop.com.

I think it's great for us to hear as well. John is a master of the line. He had a big influence on how I work at the vibes. I think you first have to be able to make lines that weave through the changes. Once you can do that, playing with four mallets becomes very easy!

So check it out!

I buy a lot of music off of Amazon. You know they give every use storage space. I think it's 2 free gigs and then 20 for 20 bucks a year. Something like that.

I just liked at my account and I have unlimited storage for music! So I'm now backing up 19,000 songs. And I have another 30,000 to go. I wonder if it will take it all??

I also signed up for Google's cloud service (free). I have 20 gigs there. I uploaded a ton of stuff there. Mostly music. I'll take the music down and then start storing docs up there.

John Swana is a phenomenal musician! He played trumpet but had to stop because of lip problems. But he's an amazing musician none the less, and now he plays the EVI. This is a great lesson!

I was thinking about a lot of the blues lessons we've been putting up lately. And this thought popped in my head.

We don't always focus directly on technique, but anything well played is an etude, a chop builder and an all around technical exercise in many ways. At least that's what I think. If you can swing and play a blues and do interesting stuff you have technique.

Just thought of that and thought I'd pass it along, see if you guys agree.