Tuesday 2nd of August

Today was Charles' third day of classes and Christina's second.  As usual we went to the cafe over the road for breakfast before going to classes.

This morning Chrissy had a lecture about the history of the marimba and xylophone, plus a lot about how they are made and how they differ.  Turns out there's no difference between a marimba and xylophone, except that the xylophone sounds an octave higher than written.

At lunch time, we ate pizza and then Charles and I went to have a play.  Bob Becker was hanging out in the xylophone room playing all by himself!  Charles asked if we could play for him and we played our duo version of Triplets.  He thought it was pretty good!  He suggested that we perform it at the "Vibes Hang" session tomorrow night.  Yay!

After lunch, the group split into two to rehearse people's individual solos with the marimba band accompaniment.  Here's a photo of me playing!

I think I did pretty well.  Some people were not very well prepared or had no idea what the marimba band would sound like.  I'm lucky that Gary makes us play so many rags.

Charles' Day:  First we talked about technique and grip for a while, which was pretty boring.  The tune of the day was C Jam Blues so everyone has to learn it by tomorrow.  After lunch there was a boring malletkat session (Charles already knows everything about malletkat!) so he practiced instead with some new friends.  In the afternoon, a violin player came in to talk about how she plays jazz with a vibraphone player.

For an early dinner, Charles and Christina and their new friend Carolyn went to a place called "Home Grown".  It had really nice food!  We had a really nice time talking.  Then we all went to the vibes evening session where the violin lady played tunes with all of the students.  Charles played "In Your Quiet Place" and it was really lovely.  We both went to practice after that session, and stayed in until about 10pm, when we got too tired.

That's it for today!!