If you have arrived here via a link from Andy LaTorre or one of the mallet keyboard forums, then you already know the treasure you will find on this page.

However, if you have come to this page through the Bernett Communications website, you may need a short explanation.

This page is being provided for all the mallet instrument players who are interested in building their own 4 octave chromatic marimba.

The plans that are available from the following link are made possible by the wonderful foresight and generosity of Mr. Andy LaTorre, currently of North Carolina.

Andy had the incredible vision to save these marimba plans when he saw them in a September, 1956 Mechanix Illustrated magazine.

Now, he has been kind enough to share them with us so that we can post them here for anyone who would like to have a chance to experience the rewarding process of building your own high quality musical instrument.

From a personal standpoint, as I prepare to use these plans for my own instrument, I would like to offer a small bit of insight from my 30 years of experience as a professional musician and audio video producer....

Instead of using a piano to tune the marimba "by ear" as described in the plans, I would like to suggest that you rent a chromatic tuner to assure that your marimba ends up perfectly in tune instead of just "close".  Tuning keyboard and mallet instruments requires "stretch" tuning, which cannot be performed by the simple instrument tuners available at most music stores.

If you plan carefully and have everything ready, you should be able to accomplish the final "fine tuning" in less than one day. Several places we checked with will rent a chromatic tuner for less than $100 per day.

In addition, you might consider purchasing "stretch" tuning software for your computer. An internet search will show you numerous choices, some of which are even shareware.

Either way, one of these paths will allow you to assure that your mrimba is tuned precisely instead of just trusting your ear. After all, if you're going to perform the labor of love necessary to building this instrument, why not do it right?

Two Links

There are two links below.

The first is the link to the marimba plans. These are scans of the actual pages of the 1956 magazine pages. The scans have been cleaned up significantly and reproduced as an Adobe Acrobat PDF file at a resolution that can be successfully printed out for use in building the project. (Note: you must have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed on your computer to view and print these plans.)

The second link is a PDF containing a letter, an email, and two photographs from a gentleman named Paul Tadeushuk, who acquired the plans from Andy and actually built a marimba in 2001... Paul's tips may prove valuable to you.

We hope you enjoy and appreciate this access to Andy LaTorre's treasure, and we hope that if you build a marimba that you will contact us so that we can include your successes here.

Best wishes,
Tom Bernett
ttbernett@nc.rr.com

Marimba Plans
Please note that this PDF file is approximately 1.5 MB.

Paul's Instrument
170kb