Marimba One Celebrates 30 Years of Marimba Making

It was the soundelusive but hauntingthat drove Ron Samuels, a 25-year-old college student a few classes short of a degree in psychology, to build a marimba from scratch.

Not knowing how to begin, he started by merely tracing the shape of the one marimba at Humboldt State. "It was not the way to do it," Ron Samuels laughingly says today.

Now 30 years later, the world's top players are coming to Arcata for an international marimba festivaland to play Samuels' top-of-the-line instruments.

Back then, Samuels, who had played classical piano since the age of five, thought that the concept and theory of playing the marimba was the same. But the technique is completely differentand you still had to coax the sound from the rosewood keys.

Originally coming from Africa as a folk instrument, the marimba was likely one of the first musical instrumentsjust imagine a caveman hitting one piece of wood with another.

Samuels' first marimba "looked cool but it was pure happenstance; only one or two keys sounded right." But he was compulsive, taking a lowly job sweeping and sanding at a shop in Arcata while learning about woodworking.

He also took six months of marimba lessons, learned how to use an electronic tuner, forgot about the college degree and met "two old guys"Lowell Montz and Dell Roperwho gave him a one-hour tuning lesson.

That was enough to get him going, with "confidence, cappuccino and craziness" and two hand-hewn instruments, to the Percussive Arts Society international convention in San Antonio in 1987and he received two pages of comments and suggestions from the world's best marimbists.

The following year, he drove his pick-up truck to the festival location in Nashville with two newer marimbas. This time, he took only one page of notes and suggestions, got lots of encouragementbut no sales.

Undeterred, the next year he flew to Philadelphiano longer would he drive across the country. The teacher who bought his marimba told Samuels "I'm taking a chance on you" because Ron showed how much love and care he put into his acoustic breakthrough product.

Samuels still shows the same love and care in building a superior concert marimbathe refined ear that understands sound and the ability to engineer a scientifically precise resonator. With a large temperature-controlled production facility and a large staff, he doesn't work alone any more.

But thousands of marimbas later, his goal remains the same as when he started: to get the perfect sound that is dark, warm and resonant as you play up and down the keyboard.

In the era when most manufactures of musical instruments have gone off shore, Marimba One has recently expanded into manufacturing vibraphones at their California factory.

You will be able to hear it in 9 concerts during IKMMA (International Marimba Festival) starting on June 3, 2017 in Arcata.