Hello everyone, Just wanted to let you know about the upcoming Percussion Festival at Berklee College of Music in Boston. The festival will start on Monday, June 21st and end on Friday, June 25th. There are several tracks that we will have for students to choose from. The tracks are vibraphone, marimba, drum set and hand percussion.

Vibe faculty will include Dave Samuels, Gustavo Agatiello and myself.

About the schedule:

Monday is registration along with several concerts and masterclasses after registration.

Classes and ensembles begin on Tuesday.

Can someone explain why the bars are backwards?
Funny stuff. Possibly the first recording of slap bass.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1tQNqQqIU8&feature=player_embedded

I just thought it was funny that nobody has seen me in anything but t-shirts on the site, so in fun, this image.

Now the singer is Joana Pascale, a phenomenal singer. Bass player is my buddy Madison Rast, a heavy bass player.

Bari-sax is Mark Allen a recent grad of University of the Arts, with talent and ears we would all kill for. He plays his ass off and he's 21. He is definitely a contender!

I think we should all feel really proud of ourselves. Look at the community we've created and look at all that's happening. I think we're all really doing something in a big way for the vibraphone. And this is cool. Yeah, I do the video and put up and lessons and set the page up, my partner handles all the programming aspects. But all that is useless without all of you guys. And we're coming up on 3 years and a lot of stuff is happening! This is great!

Just thought I'd mention that.

Following after Behn's footsteps. He just finished a lesson on Sus chords and used Maiden Voyage to play over.

So I thought I'd follow up with a couple other exercises to use on the tune Maiden Voyage.

Learn to play over suspended chords

This is to anyone who might be interested:
After considerable experimentation I've concluded that one way of playing vibes while seated is to use a hydraulic barstool and raise it to a point where the keyboard is slightly below the pelvic area. The swivel pedal, with a little practice, can be manipulated with the heel of either foot, after slanting the pedal slightly upward as opposed to its normal down position, with a wooden block or bed riser right next to the pedal and the toe rests on the block or riser with the heel slanted toward the center of the swivel pedal.

I was thinking about practicing and was asking myself how I could make practicing ii-V-I more interesting.

So I thought it would be cool to collect a list of ii-V-I licks from great players and work on them in all keys. Fortunately I've got the Charlie Parker Omni book and I'm looking through it and see a bunch of really nice lines over these changes. Transpose to all keys and use the Aebersold ii-V-I play-along and you've got a real interesting and structured way of honing your ii-V-I skills.

Check out Joe's solo here. It is smokin'!

Marie asked me if I could re-record the Bach Prelude 1 so that she could sing the Gounod Ave Maria on top of it. Of course I said "YES!".

With some planning over Skype, here is what we have to present to the VibesWorkshop.

I added tremolo to this version, and played along with metronomeonline.com with the headphones.

Turns out, after I recorded my track, I read that Gounod added an extra measure to smooth the chord changes, but Marie handled the Prelude version just fine!

Enjoy.

Barry