Sorry for the long silence! There were a couple of updates that I wanted to post earlier this year, but my photos documenting the projects got erased and life has gotten in the way of replacing them.
A couple of updates first - over 100 copies of the teacher edition of the book have been downloaded! That is huge! Thank you all so much for your support and I hope you are finding a use for the text in your classroom. Remember, the book is designed to be entirely modular, Take what you need from it and hack it however you see fit!
The main reason for this post is that there is a new product up today, as always, available for free on the store page. This four-mallet etude was written for one of my students when I ran into the need to address some issues that other literature wasn't quite serving:
1) It had to be playable on a xylophone or vibraphone
I actually don't have a marimba on my middle school campus, and getting students to show up to a different school to practice is difficult.
2) In addition to the fifth and fourth intervals, I wanted sixths to be focused on as well.
The sixth is neglected in a lot of early marimba literature, despite how useful it is. When playing on this area of the keyboard, it isn't much bigger than a fifth, so in it goes!
3) I wanted to jam in as many techniques as possible into a short etude.
This piece works on all common four mallet stroke types while also emulating patterns that are commonly found in early marimba literature and front ensemble writing. These included rolls with the inside mallets only, musical cells that develop in complexity with repetition, and finally locked intervals that move around the keyboard to create musical phrases.
4) It needed a lot of flats.
My kids constantly need to be reminded of key signatures, I wanted to write something where they couldn't avoid flats and have it sound even close to correct.
This is not the end-all, be-all of marimba lit but it is a great assessment for the end of a four-mallet unit and is attainable by even the most basic for four-mallet students. More advanced students can benefit from the dynamic explorations.
On a slight change of subject, if you enjoy the content on this page please consider giving a donation. All of the material here is hosted without expectation of pay, but it would be nice if I didn't spend a lot of money maintaining it! If you can't donate, please just consider sharing the site with friends. As always, feedback is appreciated as well! Thanks!