NOTE: First, reserve your seat by clicking "ADD TO CART". It will ask you for your email address and phone number. That way, if there's a cancelation, I can let you know. You'll immediately receive an email confirmation thanking you for your purchase (FREE). The Email you'll receive has a "DOWNLOAD" button. Click that to download  the address of the BlackBox Concert. 
 
Experience the intimate magic of a PIPERvibe Black Box House Concert, where live music meets personal touch. I work daily to create new and innovative vibraphone expressions of music for YOU. Without you, it loses purpose. Come and enjoy this unusual experience of listening to live music in a way you've never heard before. Hear about the vibraphone, music, and my unique experiences in the Fire/rescue service working at the South Pole and McMurdo Station Antarctica LIVE at my BlackBox House Concerts!  
 
What is a PIPERvibe BlackBox Concert?
It starts with the sound. My sound is entirely my own design from the ground up; instrument, music, mallets and performance
The music: All the music I play is uniquely composed or specially arranged for solo vibraphone by me. An example is "Dolphin Dance" where I musically explore a day in the dolphins life starting in the deep of the ocean and comes to surface. This is an exploration of how music can accompany our imagination in a similar way that it does in a film score. In "Pop Goes the Wiesel" I tried to duplicate the feelings a toddler has when they see the clown pop out of the jack-in-the-box for the first time.
 
Like many artists, I believe that one of the things that make music unique to any artist is their own personal experiences in life. I have so many unique ones that flood my thoughts and those thoughts are within the expressions of my music.
Like a chef, I like to "clear your palate" between songs. In the upcoming BlackBox Concert, I'll share many of my stories between pieces to give each song its space to clear your aural palate.
 
The Instrument:
I designed the patented PIPER vibraphone frame so that it is a "Frameless Frame". That means it makes no unwanted noise and is very comfortable to play. It's a souped-up vibraphone with my patented shock absorbing bar mounts, a special aluminum harp that allows the beautiful 1960/70's Musser bars to sound their absolute best.
 
The resonators: I tuned the resonators to my personal taste so that the harmonics I like the most are perfectly amplified into the tonal mix. I learned a LOT about resonators through experimenting and curiosity. Resonators are actually an acoustic, organic mixing board. To learn more, Musser made a special set of bars with a hole drilled through the center of them so I could drop a tiny mic down the resonators that are mounted on the vibraphone frame and listen with headphones as I change the position of the mic inside them. This taught me many things about the sound and how node points in a resonator is where the mixing occurs. I learned how resonators respond to different heights of the bars in their relationship to them so all my frames have resonator height adjustment for fine tuning.
 
The PIPERvibe gel pad is a special two layer silicone that mutes the bars closer to perfection than any other option for the damper bar.
 
The Mallets:
I originally designed the Piper Mallets way back in the 1990's to sound the way I hear the vibraphone bars in my head. After much experimenting, I found a type of yarn from Dupont that I felt perfectly initiated the tone from the bars. In order to buy yarn from them, I had to purchase an entire pallet as a minimum order! I was so focused on creating a sound that was pure and void of extraneous noises that I put pencil grips on the shafts of my mallets so they couldn't create those occasional clicking couldn't be added to my sound. Though it only occurred once in a while, for about 0.1 percent improvement, I went for it and forced myself to get used to the feel. After playing for a couple weeks that way, I found that with a slight adjustment to the Burton Grip, I could actually use them as a physical advantage as well. Now many people use grips on their vibe and marimba mallets. In the 1980's and '90's. I knew of no one doing that. Michael Balter then started making my signature mallets with the grips the yarn, the rubber shore durometer to accommodate.
 
The Room/Venue:
When you hear music at a bar or restaurant, they rarely give music the respect it deserves and the music bounces around the room in the most unpleasant way and people are competing for the sound space by speaking over it. This disallows the nuances of the music to speak. Those nuances are where the true expression of music are revealed. If you can't hear the entire note; the harmonics, the attack, the full range of volume, sustain and decay, you've missed 99 percent of what it has to offer.
 
I've treated the walls of my little BlackBox recital room with sound absorption so it's a pleasant environment for the entire scope of music. I don't over play my welcome. When the audience has had enough, so have I. The concert is over.
 
Join me at my next PIPERvibe BlackBox Concert.