Marimba Exercises

My favorite musical workouts

Summer! 🥤🍿

I’m transitioning from my “exhaustion from semester” era to “excited to get working again” era. Actually, I’m recovering from a surgery that has left me unable to to practice for a little bit. I’ve got a lot of music I’d like to learn, but returning from a break often means spending most of my time getting my muscles back in shape alongside careful score study.

Marimba Exercises!!!

I’ve been writing out some of my favorite warm-up and technical development exercises, starting with marimba, snare drum, and timpani. I cited my sources for exercises that are direct quotations, although one should use these exercises as starting points for variation/improvisation. I intended for these exercises to fill in the gaps between most standard keyboard, timpani, and snare drum technical exercises. As such, they’re not comprehensive. In fact, what is?

Testing if something works is really vital. If you do download them, I’d love your help making them as valuable as possible. Let me know your thoughts: what works, what doesn’t, what’s missing?

Usage

• There are too many exercises here to play in one sitting. Pick and choose which might be helpful each day

• These exercises don’t have dynamics, tempi, character markings, articulations, etc. They shouldn’t, however, be played a-musically.

• Tailor them to fit your repertoire.

• Work on your developing your sound. More specifically, work on making your sound more malleable.

• For marimba, I recommend warming up with something from each of the 5 major stroke types:

  • Single Independent

  • Single Alternating

  • Double Vertical

  • Double Lateral

  • “moving without the ball:” playing while changing intervals

Other Things I’m Liking

1. Digging into Joe Tompkins’ 3rd volume of French-American Rudimental solos. I really appreciate that he gives exercises for each of the difficult passages of the solos before the solos. These exercises break down the difficult moments in the piece, providing scaffolding to build up from “easy” to “the piece.” I always recommend that we “turn our music into exercises,” and it’s great to see the composer showing us how he’d break down the passages in question. I tried practicing only the exercises for a bit before even looking at the

   solo, and it made learning the solo significantly easier.

   

   Thanks, Joe!

2. This mug!