About 4 years ago the Colorado Springs Children's Choir asked the Youth Symphony Percussion Section to play cricket and frog parts for one of their songs. I had some cricket and frog carvings that friend's had given me so I started experimenting with them.
The first problem that I found was that these instruments didn't provide a loud enough dynamic to blend with the choir. The second problem was the mallets (sticks) that came with the instruments didn't create a consistent sound when they were played.
The solution for the dynamics was to use woodblocks instead of the carvings. I had multiple sizes creating different pitches. Using woodblocks, however, required different mallets since they weren't 'scraped' but 'struck'. This new mallet had to provide 3 or 4 strokes in an extremely fast succession. I glued different sized wooden balls (from Hobby Lobby) to various lengths of very thin gauge piano wire (from Ace Hardware). After the glue dried I determined the proper length of wire needed to create the optimum bounce on the woodblocks. I found that the proper length was determined by the combination of the weight of the wooden ball and the gauge of the wire. Marking the proper length of each wire I cut it 1 inch longer and glued that into a dowel for a handle.
Ultimately they used 4 different woodblocks and 4 different mallets to perform the piece.
Eventually I found that these new mallets worked better than the original mallets on the carvings.
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| A collection of various instruments and mallets I use for Cricket and Frog sounds. (including a commercial 'cricket sound effect' bottom left) |
Good project!
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