I haven’t had much experienced with playing marimbas, balafon, xylophones etc. but I love their sound. Unfortunately they’re often very large and expensive so they’re not an instrument I would have ever thought of owning!
The idea to build a midi marimba / balafon initially came from playing around with a sample pad ( a digital drum with 9 pads that can ‘trigger’ any sound you put in it, be it percussion sounds, bits of songs, sound effects, anything... ) and starting to make my own samples. I was lucky enough to get some old electronic drum kit parts from friends who had them lying around, and then started connecting these with the sample pad also.
I then had the idea to make a set of electronic Batá drums ( see the full post here ) The real instruments are hard to come by in Australia, so an electronic set was a great way to be able to start to learn them! Here’s a photo of the real instrument.
I was able to build a prototype set but a friend of mine with experience in these drums (Uncle Bobby of Uncle Bobby’s hot sauce fame) pointed out that to get the true character of the drum, I needed to be able to trigger different samples based on how hard I was hitting (aka velocity), to get all the tones of the instrument. He suggested looking into MIDI for this.
- You can read all about that in this post -
I’m still experimenting with it - but here’s a quick photo of the progress!
Anyway - when I realised that I could make anything into a midi trigger using a piezo pickup, I started thinking of all the cool instruments I could make that I wouldn’t usually buy.
My partner, the gorgeous and hilarious Delta, mentioned how much she enjoyed playing marimba in school, and I thought that was a great idea for - they’re really cool instruments with a great sound, and they’re usually super big and heavy and expensive, so I’ve never had the chance of playing them and would never buy one.
The more I thought about it, the more I loved the idea of a MIDI version. Being able to trigger any sample with it, basically just gives me an instrument with lots of notes, that I can play percussively with sticks - but could be playing bass, or organ, or anything.
Plus there are so many great instruments of the same family - the original African marimbas and balafon, the vibraphone, the xylophone, glockenspiel, Latin American versions - giant bass ones etc.
The best part about making a MIDI version is it takes away the hardest part of building a marimba like instrument - shaping the wooden bars to the notes you want, and having huge resonating pipes or gourds.
All it would need is a series of bars (or tone plates), with piezos underneath.
Shortly afterwards I saw a Venetian door out in hard rubbish on my street - the slats of the door would make perfect keys, and there were plenty of them!
I took the door home and tapped out all the slats, and the process begun!
Laying the slats out on some old garden stakes, I became really excited about the project.
I made a prototype with two keys and it sounded great, it’s such a fun way of playing an instrument and with MIDI sampling, the possibilities are endless, not to mention running live effects such as delay, reverb, tremolo etc.
So I had my keys. Initially I was going to use a large piece of wood that I had lying around the house as the bits for the frame, until I realised that the other pieces of the door frame were pretty much what I wanted. I showed the wood to a friend of mine who’s a cabinet maker, (part time muscle machine, full-time great guy, Aaron) who said the wood was in fine condition, and was kind enough to cut the first pieces up and start the sanding with his belt sander.
So now I had the bits for my frame.
Next step - learning how to put it together ( I have no prior woodworking experience) and getting into the electronics side of things how I was going to trigger all the different keys.
