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!

Thanks to Peter Dee Academy of Music and John Daley, on my left, with his arm on the vibes, for his support. The incredible turnout for this workshop is his feat.

These were from the recent vibes workshops in Sessenheim, the Netherlands during which Nico vanderPlas discussed making these beautiful instruments.

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!

I try to take walks every day, partly to listen to music and mostly because I'm out of shape and overweight!

I think I posted once before about this and I think posted about a Friedman CD. Hmmm, I came home today and wanted to post about listening to Rios on my walk.

Great walking music first of all. Sonically the sounds of the instruments are beautiful together. This made the walk fun.