Voicing a Marimba Keyboard

   My ideas about voicing marimbas are the same as for any high quality musical instrument such as a piano, a violin, or a marimba.  It is highly desirable as you play chromatically up and down the instrument that the sound is very even and balanced in terms of the ring time of each note along with the amplitude of the harmonic content. 

One of the first important lessons I learned when I began building marimbas in the early 1980’s was that to build a single good keyboard you need to have many extra bars from which to select your keyboard.

One of the ways we approach keyboard voicing here at marimba one is that we maintain an inventory of 75 to 100 sets of keyboards at all times. By having thousands of bars from which to select each keyboard, we can guarantee a marimba that is masterfully voiced.

All of our keyboard voicing is done by our master tuners.  We match the resonance and harmonic character of each bar to its neighboring bars so that every keyboard we create sounds and feels as if it is from a single piece of wood. 

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Do you have a question for Ron? Email him at percussion@marimbaone.com.