Donationware - How it works

Copyright: we retain the copy right on our arrangements for public performance or any other commercial application but grant you the right to download it free of charge for your own personal use.  Donation: If you enjoy the music I would be grateful if you would make a donation to the charitable Trust Fund run by Croydon Whitgift Rotary Club.

A selection of our

Marimba MP3

Recordings

Steel Drums and Marimba

On this page we have brought together a selection of our Marimba MP3 recordings. The antecedents of the Marimba instrument, xylophones with resonance chambers, can be found in West Africa and it is thought that they were brought to central America by pre Columbian slaves where they were refined and adopted as national instruments in places like Guatemala and southern Mexico. Similar resonant xylophones appear in South East Asia but there is no recognised route for them to have been transported to central America at the relevant time. When they travelled north to the USA manufacturers replaced wooden resonance tubes with metal ones and now we have remarkable synthesizer versions including the version we have used from the Modular Moog emulator in our Marimba MP3 music. The long duration resonances are very realistic and processor hungry and initially that limited the selection of pieces where we used it but that constraint no longer affects our use. JS Bach's        Toccata No2 in C Minor BWV 911 Debussy's      Jumbo's Lullaby Beethoven's  Bagatelle No2 Handel's        Concerto Grosso Beethoven's  Military March Scarlatti's      Harpsichord Sonata K430  Allegro

Marimba and Gamelan Gongs

The recordings we have made of ragtime music where the marimbas work with Balinese Gamelan Orchestra Gongs and several different drums are illustrated in these examples: Agitation Rag  Dizzy Fingers Gee Whiz Two-Step    Silver Heels Yankee Bird March

Orchestral Marimba

Handel’s Concerto Grosso was one of the first works where we attempted to replace a full orchestra.  Since then we have gone on to record symphonies and concertos where the marimba stands in for the cello and double basses sometimes with a little sustaining synthesizer support but usually on their own and here are a couple of examples: Shubert’s Unfinished Symphony: Movement 1  ** Allegro moderato,  Movement 2 ** Andante con moto Mozart’s: Violin Concerto No5 (The Turkish) ** Mvmt No 1, Mvmt No 2, Mvmt No 3 Mendelssohns: Hebredies Overture Fingal’s Cave