In one of the classes that gave David Friedman, taught us an a very good exercise to improve the tempo. The exercise is record yourself, a simple melody, solo or comping and after trying to play up the recording!! It seems simple, but it's hard!

Very good exercise!!

Hi guys,
Some years ago I had in my hands during a couple of hours a study book from the great guitarist Ted Greene. I copied quickly the notes of one of the exercises, and I re-discovered it yesterday when having a look on my old paper books....
It is based on chords with tonic, third and 7th only(no 5th). It makes sound great the harmony, makes the brain work and teach nicely how to deal with voicings. Notice how the third of a chord becomes the 7th of the following one, etc...

Here you go Carolyn!

This is another of Chick Corea's great compositions. I'm sure Gary and Chick have recorded it but I don't know which CD it might be on.

The full version of the tune has an interlude section too, but I didn't include that for this recording.

Hey everyone,

I had the great opportunity to do a Skype lesson with Tony, Dimitris, and Denis today (who knew Babu's real name was Denis...learn something new everyday!). Denis mentioned a lot of the reasons why it was cool in his post, but I want to highlight some things:

1) You don't need a camera on your computer to participate. If you only have a microphone on your computer, that's totally okay!

Hello,

It was (I think) more then 5 years ago since I listened to this song, but last week I put it on, and kept thinking : "this vibes score sounds do-able for me". So I listened a couple of times to find out what the vibes exactly do, and then try to copy it. Here is the result.
Sometimes the original vibes interfere with my playing (or vice versa :-) ) in this recording. But I can't hit the bars at the EXACT same moment as they did when recording this. But overall I was happy with this.

You can hear that my playing is not fluid enough, but I hope you like it.
Greetings,

Hey guys, we just had (Dim, Carolyn and me) a skype lesson with Tony. All went good, sound clear.
That's fascinating to be able to meet people from several countries (USA, France, Greece in this case), as if everybody was in the same music room... Technology at it's best.
I think this is the future for music teaching. No one vibist will be let on his own, trying desesperately to learn alone... The vibes's malediction is over !
And all that because of M. Tony Miceli's vision years ago, hard work and generosity. One more time, thanks Tony !

Who doesn't love Dex!? Today is his birthday. What are your favorite Dexter tunes/albums. My favorite album is Doin' Allright. I also really like the blues on that album Society Red. Check out how behind the beat he sounds on the whole solo. It swings hard. That is Freddie Hubbard on trumpet.

Doing this whole lesson took me 30 minutes tops. Doing my version of How Deep took me about 4 minutes to record, well 6, I had a screw up in version 1. Not that this is a great version, but I wanted to quickly make an acceptable version of the tune. NO editing, just uploaded the tune. The tune part of this took total 15 minutes with probably a few to spare. So there's really no excuse to be active and post. Well except that you're too busy playing and jamming with people. That's about the only one.

Hey everyone,
The Wuppertal workshop 2013 it was one of the greatest so far. Amazing lessons and players from around the world. I would like to thanks personally Tony and David for their lessons because everytime I participate in such a great event my playing is totally changing to the better. So thank you guys for being such a great inspiration in my life.
Also I would like to thank Mathhias for his hard work organizing this workshop. Without him this could never become true...so, thanks Mathhias.