Talk:Percussion mallet

message: Frankly, I'm appalled at the "B quality rating" given above by no less than two wikiprojects... this article needs major work even to get to that stage IMO. But the standards at Wikipedia:WikiProject Percussion/Assessment are quite a lot harsher than those at Wikipedia:WikiProject Musical Instruments/Assessment. It might scrape a B at Musical Instruments, but not at Percussion. Interesting that Musical Instruments rate this as Hign importance... Musical instrument articles that are extremely important to the understanding of the subject, such as major instrument classes (guitar, flute, dumaflachy, etc.). Agree with that. Probably should get a top at Percussion, or should we try to be consistent?   
 
Maybe the name is the first problem. Would the average reader really call my standard 7N jazz stick a percussion mallet? Maybe musicologists might, but this is a general encyclopedia, written primarily for general readers. See Wikipedia:article titles.
So do we need a separate article on drum stick? Doubtfull, I think it would just be merged with this article in time.
Watch this space. Andrewa (talk) 21:18, 4 February 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Rewrite

message: Still lots here that is just plain wrong... for example Though most performers prefer using metallic brushes more than plastic brushes because of their increased durability . Wrong on both counts, the two sound completely different, and steel brushes are relatively fragile, I suspect that's one reason the nylon brushes were developed in the first place. 
I also suspect that whoever wrote this is just guessing (or alternatively quoting some uncited source that is themselves in turn guessing) that steel is always more durable than plastic, and that drummers would therefore prefer nylon for this reason. If they had actually played them both then they would quickly know that the sound is very different, and that if you bend just one strand of a steel brush it's never the same again, or if you get them sweaty they rust, while my (rustproof) LP nylon brushes feel like they'd go through the automatic clothes washer without a problem (I don't intend to try it).
The problem is, how much more of this inaccurate guesswork is here? It's even worse than WP:OR, and very common in our kit drumming articles.
I guess the problem is that it's also common in what you hear over the counter in some suburban music shops, in my appalling experience. In my younger days I used to often go into strange music shops and ask whether they had any electric twelve string guitars, and the normal answer was "they don't make them", which translates roughly as "we don't have one and it's time for my coffee break". I owned two at the time, a Maton (Australian) and a Shergold, and the Easybeats (Australian) and Byrds had hardly kept them a secret, playing their Rickenbackers and Fenders. I demonstrated this phenomenon more than once to a touring band in a country town... the poor staff didn't really know what to make of these jeans-wearing louts who came in, asked an innocent-sounding question and collapsed into laughter when we got the answer I had predicted. Backpedal, backpedal! Anyway, drum shop jive is often even worse (and to be fair, camera shops and computer shops can be at least as bad). Getting better with the Internet but still much room for improvement.
Wikipedia is now part of the answer, and also now part of the problem. Andrewa (talk) 19:53, 8 February 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Accuracy