What's the deal with the motor?
i just started turning my motor on. i have not used a motor in 20 years and i can't tell if i like it or not. so give me your 2 cents on the motor. if you love it tell me, if you hate the vibes without a motor tell me why. if you hate the motor tell me why. do you use it sometimes?
i was thinking that it's especially good with single lines and not so good with chords.
just thinking out loud.
i was thinking that it's especially good with single lines and not so good with chords.
just thinking out loud.
posted by Tony at
10:05 AM
5 Comments:
I like the motor for certain things, but I did notice something I thought was interesting. I own two different vibes sets - a Deagan Traveller and a Musser Pro-Vibe. I like the motor on the Deagan a lot more since the resonators are narrower, especially on the low end. The tremolo is too thick for me on the Musser set, but just right on the Deagan. I've taken lesson on a Deagan Aurora, and I noticed the same thing as well.
By
Anonymous, at 10:17 AM
I like the sound of it with more "atmospheric" songs. An interesting thing to try is set the muffles where 1 is close and one is open. Then when you play sustained chords, block or arpegiated, it fades back and forth from naturals to accidentals. A "special effect" to be sure, I dont' think it's too usefull for soloing.
By
dthree, at 6:43 PM
When I first began playing vibes, I was taught by an early Gary Burton protege, who always played without his motor. I couldn't understand why it sounded so cold to me, and even when I listened to Gary himself on records it seemed to have a sterile feeling to it, which I could not explain. This is not to demean Gary, whose conceptual playing I've otherwise admired. Over time as I developed a personal concept, the motorless sound became more of an option than a preference, and when I now choose to utilize that sound I create warmth by using a softer set of mallets with a fairly large core and I leave the pedal farther open for a less dry sound. Without the motor, and using very hard mallets and minimal pedalling, the result will surely be a cold, flat, dry texture, which can easily overemphasize the inherent brightness of the instrument. After hearing Milt Jackson play live on his Deagan Imperial sometime ago, it seemed that his use of the motor at a slow pace gave the vibes an added dimension. Now when I use the motor I make sure it pulslates as slowly as possible so as not to blur any technical passages. Players such as Bobby Hutcherson, or Steve Nelson, who use the motor at an only slightly faster speed, and often play cascades of notes, probably compensate by using less overall damper pedalling. Even better than using a motor, I've come to enjoy the use of boundary type microphones, angled carefully under the keys to prevent "bleeding", and with the signal going thru a combo amp, in conjunction with a special effects guitar pedal with phaser, flanger, or tremolo stops, which provide a very slow vibrato (a sort of a wave) which gives a great tonal coloration. With this combination the vibes still manage to sound predominantly acoustical, as opposed to what would usually happen get when using a pickup system.
The new vibe mikes would probably lend themselves really well to this way of playing.
By
Anonymous, at 9:26 PM
I personally have never used the vibes without the motor except by accident or when the belt breaks or slips off the pulleys. The motor IS the vibes otherwise you have a metal marimba. My first exposure to motorless vibe playing was Len Blessing of Vangard I believe. It was the worse sound ever (probably because he was still experimenting with it). It was too shallow, flat and emotionless) (for the vibe that is). While I acknowledge the great facility of many players who do not use the motor, I cannot help but ask the question "Why do you have to tinker with it?" And please don't come back with "Why Not"? I sometimes feel the reason so many motorless vibists play so many clusters of notes is because of the shallow or empty sound a single note imparts. And no matter how hard you try, the vibe will never be a piano.
By
Anonymous, at 11:34 AM
In a 4 mallet set, it sometimes works well for the left outside one to be larger in order to make chords sound balanced. If the top 3 are medium hard, but sufficent to cut in the upper range, it will give a motorless vibraphone a more "pleasant" sound. The belt can be slowly and manually rotated after playing a comping chord, and th texture will be most unusual as the vibrato appears and disappears. A vibe motor rotating at the slowest available position can be imaginatively suspenseful in any musical genre, Jazz included.w
By
Anonymous, at 3:19 PM
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