Practicing solo vibraphone today on Body & Soul. A few things that I was thinking about during this practice session included: enhancing the harmony via added tensions, Upper Structure Triads and a variety of voicings, varying the harmony with chord substitutions, staccato articulation via deadstrokes, incorporating dampening as a means of adding to the variety of articulation as well as helping to make the counterpoint sound clean, varying the four mallet techniques.

Here's a link for a video of The Neighborhood Trio performing "Shag" on MN Original.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7RR-4RRQrXU

I keep checking out the Gyil players and that makes me want to work on my independence. I think we did an independence month a couple years ago. But what about a month of independence and ostinato work? I would love to bust my butt on all that for a month!

Thoughts?

Tony and VW guys, I hope the Virtual Day of Percussion went well today. I'm sorry that I couldn't be around for that. I was involved in a promotional video shoot for Berklee. The session included an array of percussion, drum set, steel pan and mallets. The piece was arranged by drummer Mark Walker who also played on the session. Dave Samuels played marimba and I was on vibes. The piece was titled Island Hopping and featured 6 segments of various grooves including Tango, Samba and Calypso. Lots of fun.

HERE IS THE PLAYLIST FOR PART 2 OF OF THE DAY OF PERCUSSION FEATURING THE VIBRAPHONE.

Playlist for Part 2

I'm trying the hangouts. i think you can get to it here: Google Hangout Page

At 5pm the site will be open to all. From 5pm to 7pm

I have been checking out the Gyil players and thinking a lot about what they do. I don't know how far i'll dive into it but I dig it a lot! I might actually try and transcribe some stuff, we will see.

But I wanted a first try at importing some of that in my playing. Maybe it shows, maybe it doesn't, but it is influencing me. it's more separation in the hands. That leads to more double sticking and even triple sticking. Sometimes it's a bit of a struggle to keep the melody in my head going. I think for me single sticking a lot is best for that!