Don’t Buy A Used Marimba – Learn How To Make A Marimba Instead

Hi, Jeremy here,

Before you spend money on a used marimba, consider the consequences of making a bad purchase… We didn’t…

This was a few years back, and at the time my brother-in-law could not afford to spend big money on a professional marimba (I understand it’s about $8,000-12,000 for the octave range he had in mind.) So he started shopping for a used marimba instead.

I’ll jump to the end and tell you that we ended up making a marimba ourselves for maybe $600-800 following the instructions he bought online. Mike (my brother-in-law) is a musician, and I’m a hobby woodworker. Together we tackled the project fairly easily, but even without my help he’d still been able to build it on his own. In fact he was so pissed off with his whole used marimba search, that he convinced me to make this website and help musicians looking for a marimba, or woodworkers looking for a new project.

By the way, click here, if you want to just jump straight to the complete step-by-step instructions.

Basically he wanted his purchase to be local, because paying a few extra hundred dollars to ship something of questionable quality was stupid. After all, a picture is not the real deal!

After he started driving around the city and surrounding areas; as he was responding to classifieds, Mike became more resolute in his decision NOT to purchase anything that he couldn’t feel, see and hear. I remember he told me that there must have seen dozens of used marimbas, that really were crap with a fancy ad.

Obviously there are no refunds on private sales like these, and he was careful not to get scammed. Often there were broken parts or physical damage that the sellers were trying to hide or cover up, and he was lucky to uncover some of those just before buying the marimba

On the other hand; the instruments that were in good condition cost about the same as new ones! Finding a fair price for a decent marimba became to be like looking for a needle in a haystack. So Mike’s hopes of finding a bargain quickly disappeared. Luckily for him I suggested that he could just make a marimba on his own!

Turns out it is VERY EASY and CHEAP to build a marimba!

Sure, ‘easy’ is a relative term, but I had no doubt that Mike could do it. And let me tell you, if Mike can build a marimba, then so can you, because he has two left feet and blind in one eye (I’m kidding about the eye).

So at the end he had ended up making a professional 3 octave marimba at one-tenth the price within a weekend!

At the time I had only hung a few shelves, and build a simple coffee table, so I was eager to help him out with his woodworking project. I don’t know if it went any quicker with the two of us working on it together, or if our chit-chat and brakes slowed us down, but I know it was a lot easier than both of us expected. You can see the kind of marimba you can make (very similar to ours) on the left.

Surprisingly there are not that many guides online that teach how to make a marimba, and the ones that are available are not written well. Either they were amateur projects; building marimbas out of pieces of wood you find on the beach or something, or they only offered partial information written by people that never have played a marimba before and didn’t build the resonators.

Eventually Mike discovered a guide by Jim McCarthy. He is a professional percussion player out of New Zealand or Australia (I remember we spoke to the guy over Skype), and he explained the lengths he went to to make his instructional ebook and videos.

Unlike the other tutorials we found, this one offered a full step-by-step process of the building steps, AND more importantly – the tuning! All the materials and sizes in the instructions were tried and true, with videos to show it. This means that if you choose to make a marimba, you’ll have an instrument you can actually play.

Click here to go to his site and see the plans

Our DIY marimba project went without a hitch, and about a year later, I think Mike gave it away, or sold it or something. Though I remember he used Jim’s plans again to make a 5 octave marimba with his son (concert size marimba?).

>Here’s what you’ll learn in the guide:
• The exact measurements of the bars.
• How to drill and mount the bars.
• How to build the resonating tubes.
• How to tune all the important harmonics (overtones) on the bars.

Jim’s Marimba plans really were excellent. I don’t know much about music, I just like the clarity with which everything was organized and explained in the ebook and videos. Both Mike and I recommend the plans to musicians and woodworkers, despite Jim’s ugly website. I mean this is one of my first websites, and I think I’ve done a much better job! Anyway, click here to go to Jim’s Plans