A Percussionist's Notebook

 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 det...

When I first started playing percussion one could always easily find snare drum sticks and maybe a small assortment of keyboard mallets. But in my small town finding anything other than a Ludwig timpani mallet was next to impossible and they were only available by special order. At the time Ludwig mallets were made with a hard felt center core covered by soft felt, sort of a quasi general mallet. I used these mallets during my high school years. It wasn't until I got to college that I had access to professional timpani mallets and fortunately my instructor Stanley Leonard had us use Street mallets. William Street was his instructor at Eastman at that time. These were a set of three pairs of mallets: General (wood core with German felt), Recorder or staccato (same as the General with a thinner covering of German felt), and Scherzo (cork core with the same thickness of German felt as the Recorder). All of them had rattan handles. I later added Roll model (soft) mallets. When I beg...