Where Are My Balls?

“Alexa, what is the temperature in Madison, Georgia?”

“Right now, the temperature is 59 degrees. Today, expect a high of 82 degrees.”

“Damn, winter is here.”

Now that the cold weather has arrived, it is time to begin the indoor activities appropriate to winter. Yeah, right, you know I'm kidding. The summer's too hot to do outdoor activities anyway. I'm pretty much a creature of the indoors all year round.

I play the vibraphone. Perhaps I should rephrase. I attempt to play the vibraphone, and I quite enjoy the noise I make with my overgrown set of door chimes. And, as with every hobby I have ever undertaken, I tend to study it to death.

I know a few professional vibraphonists, and the conversations I have with them invariably gravitate toward the mallets they use. Vibraphones are fairly expensive. Once you buy one, you keep it until the frame rusts away. Any variation in the sound you get from the instrument thus boils down to technique and mallets. Technique is something I'm still working on. But mallets, well, that's easy. Just buy different mallets and you will get different sounds.

That seems so easy, and it would be if one were rich. But since we're talking the life of a musician here, we can rule out the prospect that one is wealthy. Mallets come in sets of two or four. I buy four, as I play with three and can always use a spare. They generally sell for around $20-$30 per mallet. That gets expensive after awhile.

There are three parts to a vibraphone mallet: the shaft, the core, and the winding. The best shafts are rattan. They have a little, but not too much, flex to them. Wooden dowel rods, on the other hand, have no flex to them, and are not preferred. And don't even mention plastic shafts. Vibraphonists are such snobs!

The core is key. The core is generally rated by its hardness. Hard mallets have a hard plastic ball as a core, and produce a louder, and “pingier”, sound, if “pingier” is indeed a word. Soft mallets use soft rubber balls as cores, and are generally lower in volume. Unfortunately, they also tend to muddy up the low notes. Then there are the composite mallets. My pair of composites has a core that is a hard plastic ball, which is covered with a bit of Tygon tubing. The tubing softens the sound, when compared with the hard plastic ball.

The winding is also critical. The core can be covered with yarn of various types (cotton, bamboo, wool, etc.) or cord. This generally attenuates the sound one gets from just the core. I've tried winding with cord. It isn't easy, and I can't make the mallet sound the way I want it to sound, so I stick with yarn. Of course, just settling on a yarn can be problematic. There are all sorts of different sizes. Do I use number 3, number 5, or number 10 (the three sizes I can find in a Wal Mart)? And let's not even talk about colors!

I once made a set of mallets using dowel rods (not ideal) and rubber stoppers (ground down from a trapezoid of revolution to a cylinder) from Lowes. I like the sound they produce, but I want a little more flex in the handles, and I would prefer a circular, as opposed to a cylindrical, core. So, I visited the Internet, and bought two pounds of rattan. I have no idea why they sell it by the pound, but they do. These two pounds comprise two different diameters: 7mm and 9mm. The 7mm has a good bit of flex to it. I will probably try the 7mm first.

In my imagination, I figured out that I could wind a soft rubber ball very tightly, compressing the ball, to produce a mallet that was not as hard as the hard core mallets (goodbye metallic ping), but harder than a soft core mallet (bringing clarity to the low notes). This should be the easiest thing in the world, yes? I just go down to Wal Mart and buy some rubber balls. How hard could that be?

As it turns out, it is practically impossible.

I suspect the problem is that we are all too stupid to realize that a child can choke on a small rubber ball, thus someone, perhaps the government (conspiracy theory, anyone?), has decided that the only way to save small children from choking on vibraphone mallet cores is to ban them from Wal Mart. Based on the size of the heads on my wound mallets, I am looking for rubber balls anywhere from ½ to 1 inch in diameter. These seem to be missing from Wal Mart. The larger ones they carry. The Lowes employee gave me a very funny look when I asked for rubber balls, and the Tractor Supply lady just said “Huh?”

Back to the Internet. Unfortunately, in order to get the size balls I wanted, I had to order a few hundred. So here I sit with two pounds of rattan (some of which needs to be straightened with a propane torch), waiting for a few hundred balls to appear on my doorstep. I've already bought all the yarn that Wal Mart carries.

I'm beginning to see why vibraphone mallets are so expensive!