Well, actually the photo should have been with the instrument itself and not with the drumsticks (or mallets), but the angle of the photo was not good, so, as we say in Venezuela: ¡esto es lo que hay! (that's what we have!)

So here I am attending the invitation of @mipiano, who believes that I can play all musical instruments, but the truth is that this is very, very far from reality. In reality, there are very few that I am able to play with a certain quality and many that I like, but I can't get the right sound out of them.

Among the many instruments that I like and do not play, there are the so-called Mallets, a term that actually refers to the sticks that I am showing in the picture. But these are tuned percussion instruments, that is, they can play melodies by notes. Among these, the most popular are the xylophone, the campanelli or Glockenspiel, the marimba, and the vibraphone. The first two of them are very common in classical music, the third in the traditional popular music of several countries, and the last one was born in the world of jazz. However, all of them have been used today in all musical forms.

In the first video that I attach appears, in a 1940 film, Reg Kehoe and his Marimba Queens, where they play three of these instruments, only the campanelli was missing.

I have been so passionate about these instruments that, despite not being part of the traditional Venezuelan instrumentation, I included a marimba in an arrangement made for Los Cañoneros, for the song Sultana del Ávila, which we recorded in 2015.

But my favorite is the vibraphone, an instrument that was born around 1927 and which should have had the name Vibraharp, but due to different confusions ended up with the name it has today.

It was an instrument that was born by and for jazz and its greatest promoters and exponents were Lionel Hampton and Gary Burton.

There are two techniques to play it, the two mallets and the four mallets, which are taken in the way I hold them in the picture and depending on the technique varies the function of the instrument. Well, when working with only two of them, its function is melodic and it usually substitutes the wind instruments. There are arrangers who work it as if they were writing for trumpet. On the other hand, the four mallets technique brings it closer to the piano and there it fulfills harmonic and rhythmic functions.

In fact, the distribution of the aluminum plates (which is why they are also called laminophones), is like that of the piano, so it is easy to understand for pianists. But what changes radically is the execution with the mallets, which require the technique of the percussionists. I was also able to verify another interesting detail, which I will explain below.

There is a saying that is used all over Venezuela that goes: "What you did with your hands, you disrupt them with your feet". This is to indicate that a good deed you did is harmed by another bad deed. What almost nobody knows is that this is an expression that comes from the field of music and is attributed to Maestro Vicente Emilio Sojo and he used it to refer to a student of him who played very well, but handled very badly the use of the pedals of the piano, which ended up affecting the sound of his interpretation.

On the vibraphone this is much more serious, because the "muted" sound of the instrument (which is when the pedal is not pressed), is so muffled that it does not sound good. The function of this position is to mute the sound which is like a bell and it is necessary to trim it. Unlike the piano, where if you play without pressing the sustain pedal it just sounds short, here it sounds so muffled that it only serves as an occasional effect, the real beauty of the instrument is with the sustain. This makes the level of demand on the pedal much higher.

This instrument is part, nowadays, of the salsa world as well and as part of my salsa project in which I am working, I have a small group format in which I decided to include it and soon you will be able to listen to the first song I am recording.

One of the first musicians to include the vibraphone in Latin jazz was the Swedish musician Carl Tjader, in the United States, and from there other great jazzmen of those times, such as Tito Puente, began to include it.

However, the inclusion of this instrument in Latin music, or should we call it Salsa, was with Joe Cuba's sextet, starting in 1956.

Although there were many of Joe Cuba's hits, one of the most memorable for lovers of the genre is the song Mujer Divina.

In Venezuela there have always been many important vibraphonists linked to Latin music, but of the first groups that had great success, the group Mango stands out, where Freddy Roldán initially played. In the video I share here, Filemón Monterola, who is another of the greats, appears playing.

Germán Domador is the musician who is playing with me and I took advantage of the recording we had in recent days to make this video, where I show that I definitely do not know how to play the instrument, but at least I can show how it works and as an additional gift I leave you a nice performance by Germán and a few bars of the recording of the song we are recording "Pa' los bailadores".

A small additional gift for lovers of classical music. A sample that shows us other possibilities that this beautiful instrument has.