Building an African marimba in Kazakhstan

I have set out to build an African marimba.  I hope to build a set of marimbas so that I can create a marimba club at school.

Unlike concert marimbas, African marimbas are played as a group with each instrument playing a different range of notes.  My intention is to build a soprano and a tenor marimba to start, and if the project goes well, maybe build a baritone too.

Although I have worked in Africa and have had some experience of playing marimbas, I have never made one from scratch.   If you want to see the kind of instruments I played in Botswana, you can see some former pupils of mine with our marimbas on my wife's website, African Marimba Workshops.

Setting out to make a marimba from scratch quickly made me realise how shrouded in mystery this art is.  However, I was determined to see the project through without reverting to buying plans off the internet.

So, what problems was I likely to encounter?

Well, the first was that I had no tools.

The second is that the wood traditionally used to make the keys is not available here in Kazakhstan, so to make progress I needed to source a 'ringing' hardwood locally.

Thirdly I had no dimensions to work to even once I had found a wood supply.  I have a fair idea of what the keys should look like but tuning keys is a bit of an art so I felt that I needed to be scientific about the process to make it easier to repeat successes and avoid repeating errors.

Watching Youtube videos of people making marimbas it is clear that they all know the dimensions of the notes they are working to.  They must know because they usually start by making the rails on which the bars will sit.  However, given that I would eventually find some wood I still had no dimensions to work with, so unpicking this mystery was going to be my first challenge.

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