page_title: Marimba
section_title: Range
hierarchical_section_title: Marimba / Construction / Range
caption_attribution_description: English: Marimba tubes.
context_page_description: The marimba is a percussion instrument consisting of a set of wooden bars struck with yarn or rubber mallets to produce musical tones. Resonators or pipes suspended underneath the bars amplify their sound. The bars of a chromatic marimba are arranged like the keys of a piano, with the groups of two and three accidentals raised vertically, overlapping the natural bars to aid the performer both visually and physically. This instrument is a type of idiophone, but with a more resonant and lower-pitched tessitura than the xylophone. A person who plays the marimba is called a marimbist or a marimba player.
  Modern uses of the marimba include solo performances, woodwind and brass ensembles, marimba concertos, jazz ensembles, marching band, drum and bugle corps, indoor percussion ensembles, and orchestral compositions. Contemporary composers have used the unique sound of the marimba more and more in recent years.
context_section_description: There is no standard range of the marimba, but the most common ranges are 4.3 octaves, 4.5 octaves and 5 octaves; 4, 4.6 and 5.5 octave sizes are also available.
  4 octave: C₃ to C₇.
  4.3 octave: A₂ to C₇. The .3 refers to three semitones below the 4 octave instrument. This is the most common range.
  4.5 octave: F₂ to C₇. The .5 means "half";
  4.6 octave: E₂ to C₇, one semitone below the 4.5. Useful for playing guitar literature and transcriptions.
  5 octave: C₂ to C₇, one full octave below the 4 octave instrument, useful for playing cello transcriptions, e.g., J. S. Bach's cello suites.
  Bass range (varies, but examples range from G₁–G₃ or C₂–F₃)
  The range of the marimba has been gradually expanding, with companies like Marimba One and in Australia, ‘Marimba Australia’ - www.marimbaaustralia.com, adding notes up to F above the normal high C (C₇) on their 5.5 octave instrument, or marimba tuners adding notes lower than the low C on the 5 octave C₂. Adding lower notes is somewhat impractical; as the bars become bigger and the resonators become longer, the instrument must be taller and the mallets must be softer in order to produce a tone rather than just a percussive attack. Adding higher notes is also impractical because the hardness of the mallets required to produce the characteristic tone of a marimba are much too hard to play with in almost any other, lower range on the instrument.
  The marimba is a non-transposing instrument with no octave displacement, unlike the xylophone which sounds one octave higher than written and the glockenspiel which sounds two octaves higher than written.
caption: PVC resonators
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