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Gary Burton is giving a huge contribution to the site. You should find everything about him in those sections: awesome stories, great photos, thoughts and discussions, lessons and tributes from us fans. Enjoy! :o)

Here's all the lessons and performances of Ed Saindon's tune 'Life's Blessings.

We spent the month of March studying Ed's tune and we had a blast. Check out all the comments. There's a lot of valuable information here.

Hi Everyone,

I've attached a chart I made of the appropriate tensions for each chord in Life's Blessing. Ed checked it out for me and made the necessary corrections and I thought this could be of use to anyone working on the tune. The tensions can be used either in voicings for comping or lines while soloing. Good luck everyone!

Jon

Here are seven choruses of improvisation on the progression of Life's Blessing.

Again, as I mentioned in the other video playing the melody, the left hand is functioning as accompaniment as well as helping out the right hand to execute lines.

Try to fill out the 8th notes between both hands as opposed to trying to carry everything with the right hand. Also, try to keep the left hand moving. Try to keep changing the spreads of the mallets in each hand as much as possible. For example, in left hand, you can play a whole step and then invert that interval to play a 7th.

Two choruses playing the melody along with the accompaniment.

Feel free to change the rhythms of the melody and try to embellish the melody with grace notes, passing notes, fills, etc.

In terms of the accompaniment, try to get the harmony (including tensions) across either with voicings or counterpoint.

Try to get both hands to help each other out. The left hand can come up to help the right hand play the melody and the right hand can go down to fill out a voicing along with the left hand. Also, dampening is important when playing counterpoint against the melody.