Vibraphone

I was hanging online with barryk and I found used mussers for 4500 and 4800 dollars over at www.malletshop.com.

I couldn't believe that so I inquired why are they were so high priced. I thought I'd pass along the malletshop's answer:

I wonder what Nico thinks about all this.
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I am working on "Somewhere In the Night" by Milton Raskin and Billy May. I first heard it on Cal Tjader's "Soul Sauce" album. See "Check This Out" link. I can't find the sheet music so I am trying to figure out the changes. I stopped listening the recordings and just played some chords that I thought sounded good with the melody. I don't know if I have the changes right or not. I'll work on that more another time. I put these chords into BIAB and started jamming with it. Spent a couple hours tonight. Had fun. Here is a snippet from my jamming and the backing track.

When I practice it takes me a good hour before I can really start to get somewhere. It seems like for me that that first hour doesn't really even count although i have to do it to get past everything else. Get past what? The day, the crap, the business, the other side of the brain stuff.

I think of that and I want to pass it on. I can't imagine I'm unique, most of us must have this buffer that we have to get past. It's probably important to find out where your buffer ends and make a note of it.

barryk found this video. Here's an example of the traditional grip and a great rendition of a Piazzolla piece 'Nightclub'.

I thought about one thing about Piazzolla and his success. First of all the music is beautiful. I also thought that maybe for classical musicians it was a rare opportunity to play around with 'jazz' harmony. I can't think of better word, but you guys get the idea. The Tango and the Bossa Nova and Samba all use jazz harmonies and I know classical players like to play arrangements of them.

What do you guys think?

We're starting the new week with a load of work ahead, unfortunatelly hardly any work this week is scheduled for production of the vibrahones themselves.
We're gonna spend a lot of time on finishing our pre-production glockenspiel which we made in conjunction with Fall Creek Marimbas. About 95% of the instrument is done, just a few things still to be produced.

I've designed the instrument such that all parts are machined in our magical CNC-machine in which we also produce the vibraphone bars. This reduces the labour to just assembling the glocks.

Here are a couple videos from vibraphonist, Andrei Pushkarev. He uses the traditional 4-mallet grip

, where the inner mallets are on top, versus the Burton grip where the outside mallets are on top.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNWTXDD53EE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGy2cZAl46M

This cat can play! Who is he?

Just some quick tips I was thinking about with chord voicings. You know the goal is to be quick with all the voicings. So you have to practice moving around the instrument and getting familiar with the voicings. That takes a lot of work and time, but once mastered comping gets a lot more fun!

I'm thinking about how to do a day online in August where maybe different vibe players do concerts all day online. I think we would need about 6 or 7 people, start at noon on a Sunday and go until 6 (Philly time). That should get most of us in there. Each of us would play about 45 mintutes.

Any ideas or takers? It would be the first online Day of Vibraphone!