A Two Octave Chromatic Marimba

In 2019 I got a 3 octave DeMorrow marimba. It was a great instrument at a fair price and I highly recommend it. These are considered student instruments because they have only 3 octaves instead of 4 or 5 and lack resonators, while offering a much better sound than a typical student level bells kit.

During this time period in my life I had retreated from going to Irish sessions or old-time jams and was staying at home making up my own little melodies. Marimba was great for this because it made me think about music in a different way. The chromatic keyboard layout with its black keys and white keys is so different from left-handed tenor banjo or mandolin tuned in 5ths or left-handed guitar tuned in 4ths.

Three octaves is considered small in size for marimba, however, it was still pretty huge when compared to a tenor banjo or mandolin. It was over four and a half feet wide! I played it for about a year and a half before selling it. I don't recall exactly why I opted to get rid of it but I'm impulsively fickle like that. It was probably because of space considerations.

I'm now considering getting a marimba again, but this time I only want it to be two octaves - 25 chromatic notes from C to C in the soprano range so that the lowest note is middle C. That should make it about three feet wide. Much easier to transport and find space for. The layout would be similar to the image below. I like the symmetry of the two / three / two / three black keys pattern.

Two octave chromatic marimba

When I moved to Oregon in 2024 I went back to learning and playing Irish tunes. My current repertoire consists almost entirely of tunes that are likely to be played at an Irish session, or what they call a Pan Celtic session. The payoff is that others are likely to know most anything I learn how to play. Since I am near Portland, there is a lot of crossover between the traditional Irish trad repertoire and the contra dance melodies as found in the Portland Collection books, which I love. 

By my estimate, at least 80% of the tunes played at an Irish session do not have a melody note lower than D. Maybe 90%. In other words, most of these tunes don't require the low G string of a violin to play them. And on the high end, only like 1% of the commonly played tunes have a note higher than B. This means that most of these tunes would fit in a two octave range from C4 to C6. 

I have a theory about why the Irish session repertoire is limited to this range. I think it's because these aren't "fiddle tunes", per se. Other instruments such as flute, D-whistle and uillean pipes have equal footing in the community, and on those instruments the lowest note is D. And on fiddle the highest note you can hit without leaving first position is the E-string B note that fiddlers play with their pinky. These tunes have evolved over the years to fit within that span.

On the rare occasion that a traditional Irish melody ventures down to a violin's G string, flute and whistle players use a technique called "folding" where they rearrange the portion that is too low for their instrument by playing in a higher octave. From what I understand, how much of it you fold up is determined on a case by case, player by player, basis. Sometimes it might just a note or two and other times entire phrases are moved to the higher octave. On occasion they may also use a harmony note like a third interval if that sounds OK. Failing that, perhaps you just sit that one out or play it on a banjo or mandolin.

A marimba would usually be 4.3 to 5 octaves. This allows marimbists such as Jenny Klukken to play low end notes and enjoy the full spectrum of sound that the marimba is designed for. In my case, I don't play with any sense of chords or harmony and I'm not playing music meant for marimba. I only play melodies. The fact that this folding technique exists for certain instruments in the Irish trad world gives me confidence that the same strategy could be applied to a two octave marimba.

I've tried some other instruments but none of them have worked. I got a melodica in October and quickly developed a lingering cough from inhaling some type of dust or bacteria from the tube that you use to blow air to make sound. F-that. I very briefly tried an English Concertina but I felt like that was going to give me wrist problems. None of these offered the same satisfaction of hitting a tuned percussion note with a mallet!

I probably won't be learning many reels on marimba. But jigs, slides, polkas, barn dances, and mazurkas are fair game, as well as slower airs and harp tunes.

To sum up, like I alluded to before, a marimba or xylophone can be a great second instrument for a string player because it takes you out of your comfort zone. Perfect for ear training and music theory - seeing and hearing things in a different way!

Incorporating Suzuki and Orff Into Your Own Music Practice

I wanted to write an article titled “Incorporating Suzuki and Orff Into Your Own Music Practice”, and hey look I did! The problem is I didn’t know anything about the Suzuki method or the Orff approach to music when I began formulating this post. So I had to do some research before I could complete the task. It might not have been worth the effort, but here it is.

Suzuki and Orff are both designed for children, with an emphasis on playing by ear. So for adult learners who might be starting their first instrument in their thirties, forties, fifties or sixties, extrapolating aspects of each is going to take some adaptation.

The Suzuki method is modeled after a child’s innate ability to learn their native language, the “mother-tongue”. Believing that the easiest way to learn is by ear and that talent is not born - that musical ability can be developed in anyone.

Suzuki relies on lots of listening, repetition and imitation of a structured common repertoire. Students learn by ear at first. Sheet music is not brought in until later, similar to how as a child you learned to speak before you learned to read.

Pieces are introduced in a logically progressive order, chosen because each new piece introduces a specific skill while reinforcing an old one. Suzuki is taught with specific instrument proficiency in mind. Commonly used instruments are violin, piano, or flute.

Orff, while also ear-based, is more about creativity, improvisation, collaboration and participation. Musical creativity is encouraged as the ultimate goal with the knowledge that making music should be an inclusive, playful and fun experience. Students learn by doing, acting as co-creators in the learning process rather than passive recipients of information. It’s not about being told or shown, it’s about being actively involved in the music making - making it your own without worrying about theory.

Students engage in an ensemble setting, working together to develop their sense of timing and harmony. The basic elements of music, like form, rhythm, texture, harmony and melody aren't learned the traditional way, but through experience.

Common Orff instruments include xylophones, metallophones, and glockenspiels. Some are just pentatonic or diatonic, while some might be fully chromatic. These relatively simple instruments allow students to focus on creativity, improvisation and musicality rather than technical complexity. Instruments are seen as tools for exploration and expression, not ends in themselves.

So what can we learn from these two somewhat opposing processes?

Adults can benefit from the methodical structure inherent in Suzuki - the clear, logical progression of pieces. However, Suzuki is really just a choice of repertoire. You could just as easily use Irish trad tunes set up in a gradual progression: polkas > slides > jigs > reels > hornpipes > slip-jigs might be one way. Gradually working up in difficulty and introducing ornamentation along the way. Adding pieces based on what techniques each new piece teaches or reinforces.

The Suzuki method is well suited to single-line melody, which makes fiddle tunes and Irish traditional music a logical choice. When you play Irish traditional music, you can also find camaraderie in this common repertoire, bonding over a shared experience and knowing that music is not a competition. That is in line with the Suzuki philosophy.

Whereas the Orff approach may inspire you to see what kinds of melodies you can come up with on your own, and to have fun while learning and not be worried about making mistakes. Maybe you get into melodic variation, exploring a hundred variations of a tune. Or maybe you experiment with different ways to play a rhythm.

Or maybe you simply internalize the various rhythms by adding movement and singing to your practice, using onomatopoeia mnemonics such as “buy the band a beer” for hop jigs, “I saw three ships a sailing in” for slides, “humpty-dumpty” for hornpipes, and “pineapple apricot” for jigs.

Orff's emphasis on improvisation and participation will definitely come into play when you are at a session or a jam. A major benefit of playing with others is your sense of timing and rhythm will improve, and you can react in real time to what's going on around you rather than being locked into rote memorization or what's written on a page.

I hope that does it!

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Review - Sonor Orff Meisterklasse TAG 25 Tenor-Alto Chromatic Glockenspiel

Here's a quick review of the 25-bar Sonor Meisterklasse Chromatic Glockenspiel. I decided to get the Sonor TAG 25 tenor-alto glockenspiel (range C2-C4) instead of the SG 25 soprano model (range C3-C5) because it was lower pitched and seemed like it would have a more mellow sound. 

What I like about it:

-Fairly compact size. 20 inches wide side to side, 18 inches top to bottom (left hand side) and 9.5 inches top to bottom (right hand side). A traditional 2.5 octave G to C glockenspiel would have been more like 24 inches wide. I don't know the dimensions of the SG 25 chromatic soprano, but it's got to be even smaller.

-Removable bars per the Orff approach. I mostly play in Irish keys/modes with one or two sharps where the lowest note in a melody is often going to be no lower than D and the highest note is never going to be any higher than B. The two octave C2-C4 range fully captures these notes with one or two to spare on each end. With removable bars, I can take off the bars that don't get played at all or hardly ever such as A#/Bb, D#/Eb, F natural, the low and high C bars, and so on.

-Sits in lap. The beechwood resonator box that the bars are situated on is fully enclosed so it can be played on your lap while sitting in a chair or on the couch. It also easily sits on a table.

-Comes with two sets of mallets: a rubber head set and a wooden set. These have different sounds. Check out the sound sample video below! I play a brief melody with the rubber mallets first, followed by the same melody played with the wooden mallets.

-Cool design. It looks better than most other bells or xylophone type instruments.

What I don't like as much:

-It resonates forever!!! The notes ring out for a loooooong time so they are still ringing when you go to play the next note. This can create a cacophony of sound as one note blurs into the other. Plus any "wrong" notes are going to be ringing for a while as a reminder of your mistake, LOL! I don't know of a way to dampen this. My first instinct was to send it back due to the alarming amount of sustain.

-It kind of sounds like a doorbell chime ringing at different pitches. Now that I've heard it in person, I kind of wish it had fiberglass xylophone-like keys with a quick attack instead of these aluminum alloy bars. Maybe I'll get used to it.

-The e3 note on mine doesn't ring quite as well as the other notes around it. This is probably related to the rubber pins that hold the bars in place. The good news is that these pins are easily replaced.

These glockenspiels are available from West Music and other retailers.

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Which Irish tunes types are the easiest to learn?

Which Irish tunes types are the easiest to learn?

Well, polkas are probably the easiest to learn. They are among the simplest types of tunes with straightforward, often happy melodies. Polkas sound relatively normal to Americanized ears, along the lines of nursery rhymes or basic folk songs. Barndances with their moderate tempo, and marches with their stately, unhurried style are also fairly easy to pick up.

Jigs. What makes jigs difficult is not necessarily the notes but the rhythm. However, once you conquer the “pineapple apricot” rhythm, jigs can become fairly easy to learn. For one thing, jigs have fewer notes per measure than most other Irish tune types, which adds up to fewer notes to have to remember across 8 or 16 measures. 

Slides are also pretty easy to learn, probably because they are very whistleable. Slides can feel fast, but if you slow them down and bring out the dotted swing of the rhythm you’ll often find that slides are melodically more simple than jigs. The 12/8 time signature seems like it would be complex but it doesn't have to be.

Reels can be intimidating due to their fast tempo and blazing runs of notes. With practice, you may find that reels are the most “fiddle tune” like of the Irish tune types. For example, the bluegrass or old-time tune Liberty could definitely pass for an Irish reel. Once you become familiar with how reels are structured, including repeated patterns that show up time and time again, you can eventually hack your way through learning them.  

I find hornpipes to be among the more difficult tunes to learn. I think this is because hornpipes have some intervallic leaps unique to their structure which require stable technique to pull-off. Hornpipes also commonly feature built-in triplets that can make the standard melody more challenging to play. One other aspect of difficulty could be attributed to the more complex chordal structure found in hornpipes. 

Lastly on my list there’s slip-jigs. These "hoppy" tunes are in 9/8 time which can seem the most baffling and unfamiliar from a rhythm standpoint. The unusual timing makes it very hard to stay in sync with where the “one” is and know where to place the emphasis as phrases begin or end. Never fear. With practice and familiarity, once mysterious tunes such as The Butterfly will become ones you can play in your sleep!

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YouTube to MP3 Converter + Cloud Music Player

A few months ago I found a free (donation-based) Ad-free online YouTube to MP3 converter site called CNVMP3. You simply paste a YouTube URL and it'll convert it to mp3 and save it to your downloads folder. I've been using this converter to make audio files of the Irish tunes played in the Portland, OR area sessions. My favorite posters of Irish tunes on YouTube are those who make short videos of just the tune being played two or three times through with no preamble or extra talking. These include:

• Dulahan Ireland (my overall favorite!)
• Irish Music with Gavin McNutt 
• Liz Faiella 
• mandolinuk 
• peakfiddler
• pluckinstrings 
• ROUX Recordings
• Tergal14Mandolin
• The Irish Mandolin

Now that I had all these files saved, I was looking for a convenient way to get the music onto a player on my phone with a random play option. I finally found iBroadcast Media Player and it couldn't be easier! It works exactly how I wanted it to. On your PC you simply create an account and upload a folder containing the mp3 files. Then download the app, log in to your account and boom the music will be right there on your phone. Earlier today I drove around town running a few errands and had one of the playlists on shuffle play.

 I also uploaded a folder to iBroadcast containing all the tune sets I could find on the Trailjams.org site. About 70 of them! Now I can put these files on random play and play along with them. This is exactly what I've been looking for. Hopefully you find this helpful too!

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The Tarbolton Reel in Numbers and ABCs

I plan on learning the Tarbolton Reel next month. In preparation for that, I am trying a different tactic than I've been using. I've written out the head melody for the tune in both numbers and letters. I hope this helps with learning and memorizing The Tarbolton. It's part of a larger set with Longford Collector and Sailor's Bonnet.

The numbers version is based on where the notes fall within the major scale. Since I'm classifying The Tarbolton as E-Dorian (Harmonic World #2), the numbers are two for E, three for F#, four for G, five for A, six for B, "sev" (one syllable) for C# and one for D. Interestingly, this tune also has a C-natural note in the 7th measure of both the A and B parts. Since C# is being called sev, I call C natural "dev" which stands for diminished seven. Here is The Tarbolton written out with scale numbers.

For the letters version, I wrote the actual note names of each note. Pronounced ee for E, eff for F#, jee/gee for G, ay for A, bee for B, "shee" for C# (shee as in sharp C), and dee for D. The C-natural note that shows up in measure seven of the both the 1st and 2nd parts is simply "see" for C. And since it is pretty much assumed that all F notes played in Irish music are actually F#, I refer to F# as "eff" 100% of the time. To prevent this from getting too confusing, in the rare case when a tune such as Chief O'Neill's Favorite actually does have an F-natural note in the melody I would call that note "feff" instead of "eff" for flattened F. Or maybe it could be "neff" for natural F. For the sake of completeness, if/when a tune had a G# note I would call this note "geesh" for sharp gee. That doesn't apply here though. Here is The Tarbolton written out as letters.

For singing the melody I think I prefer letters over numbers. It's a little bit easier to sight read the letters as well. If writing out a confounding tune this way helps me learn it, then I might implement this process for more pieces down the road. In case you're interested, here is The Tarbolton in regular sheet music notation.

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Back to the Basics of Playing Irish Tunes

This may be at odds with my Learn It Fast To Play It Fast post from last month but I think the time has come for a back to basics approach to Irish tunes. I've been fudging a lot at the Irish sessions I go to. I might have about 80 to 90% of the tune but there are sections where I fudge through what is unclear to me. 

Now that I'm reading Molly Gebrian's Learn Faster, Perform Better I realize that the best way to handle mistakes is not to plow through them but to locate precisely where the mistake is taking place, where you are going wrong, then slow down to make sure that you play the passage correctly, gradually bringing it back to tempo, and make sure to play it many more times correctly than incorrectly to reinforce the correct pathway.

One thing about regularly going to sessions is that I can make note of tunes that I supposedly "know" but don't actually know. Case in point: The Maid Behind the Bar. Despite having played that tune for years, I felt very lost in the B-part of that tune when it was played last Sunday. It became apparent that this was one that I needed to investigate so the other day I took a focused look at where I get off track and identified that measures 4 and 5 of the B-part was where this was primarily taking place.

In measure 4 I wasn't sure where or when to go to the high B note and I hadn't been remembering that the sequence of notes is G E B E G E E G. In measure 5 of the B-part there was one note different from how I learned it all those years ago, and that one note difference was throwing me off. So I'm trying to remember how these specific measures go.

One important factor that I think gets forgotten about is to know exactly how the tune is supposed to sound. Be able to hear it (visualize it) in your head and also try signing the melody. The sections that I fudge tend to be sections that I can't "hear" clearly. 

So one of my goals for this next year is go back over the dozens of tunes that I've become more familiar with over the last year that I currently fudge and fine tune my understanding of those so that I can play them three times through from memory exactly as written with no mistakes. At a reasonable speed. No ornamentation, variations or improvisation. Exactly as written. If there is a Trailjams version available I will use that as may source, and if not perhaps Aiden Crossey has a mandolin version or Hatao will have flute version with the music.

I feel like if I get the basic tune down with the correct notes and correct picking technique, then A) I can gradually speed it up and B) any variations or ornamentation will be more under my control rather than being used as band-aids to cover up not knowing what the actual notes should be.

Another tune I found myself unclear on was The Foxhunter's slip jig, so I am going to stop typing now and do an investigative refresher on that one.

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