the Pedal!

I just did a lesson with a student. Actually a great student, his name is Behn Gillese. You'll hear about him some day. We talked about the pedal and about how vibe players really don't know how to use the pedal. It's really easy to stereotype a vibe player. Leave the pedal down and just play. There are so many subtleties with the pedal that it's an art in itself.

Guess I could try and write a book about it and make a few bucks. I don't have the time at the moment. Tom Beckham calls one style flutter pedalling. That's when you just flutter the pedal a little bit to give your sound a legato sound.

I flutter mine on the beat a lot. I never knew it, until someone pointed it out. Now that I think about it, I like that style, it kind of puts all the notes in a nice little package. Something like that.

Make sure you're experimenting with the pedal and that you understand that it's very unsimilar to a computer byte. 0 = off and 1 = on. There's a lot more to it than that.