This Adams 4.1/3 octave Concert marimba with dark Honduras Rosewood note bars is available for sale.  The instrument has been fully serviced and repaired where needed and the notes have been tuned (A=440 Hertz).  It comes with a full cover.  Condition, on the whole is very good.  There are a few battle scars and some compression marks on the notes, but on the whole it is a very clean instrument.

With the exception of tuning jobs, it was a refreshing change for me to work on a keyboard percussion instrument which wasn’t a vibraphone; everything seems to go much more smoothly.  My standard operating procedure when repairing instruments, unless they are complete basket cases, obviously starts with assembly and inspection.  Then when I disassemble the instrument, everything is thoroughly cleaned which, in most cases, should be a job in itself.  I mention this, because the vinyl wraps that manufacturers put on the instruments tend to suck in filth making them feel nasty which was the case with this instrument.  Thankfully, the wrap is also very resilient, so I could give this instrument a good scrubbing and lose that feeling of being contaminated.  It is during the cleaning process that I pick up on all of the minor little repairs, check screw tensions, etc.  I start with the frame so that I can put the cleaned elements straight back onto the instrument.

My feelings towards these Adams frames are getting more positive as time goes on.  After all they are now tried and tested.  There are some things that I don’t like and some elements that could be much better, but these things come at a cost that evidently musicians are unwilling to pay for.  This instrument must be at least ten years old, and all I had to do to the trolley was lubricate the height adjustment gear.

The main problem with these bigger instruments, is note rail sag as the inside ends of the rails compress at the hinge, but this can be pretty much corrected.  I say pretty much because I don’t know how good the rails were to begin with, all I see is that they never go perfectly flat.  Thankfully on marimbas they don’t need to be absolutely perfect, as close as you can is good enough.  This is more to do with the acoustic balance across the range of the instrument by keeping the note bars at the correct height for the resonators.  Murphy’s law being that the area most affected by note rail sag is the area most played.

Most of the repair work was on the resonators.  These also fold.  This time however it was the clasp that failed, the resonators fell out and the longest tube was badly dented and the rail bent.  The difficulty with repairing these particular sort of resonator is the downside of the tubes being permanently fixed in place, meaning that I have to manipulate the whole bank of tubes instead of simply extracting the individual damaged tubes.  The secondary difficulty with these tubes was the powder coating which is chipping off instead of wearing through, but all things considered, the repair was remarkable successful, although you can still see the crease in the bottom of the low B flat tube in the photo below.

The note bars just needed tuning.  This is another area where someone like me can make a big difference when compared to the manufacturers.  The bars can be treated as belonging to a single instrument and tuned sympathetically to each other.  This is what I mean by balancing an instrument.  There are limits as to what is possible when retuning note bars, a lot of it depends on how the bars were initially tuned and how well the the note blank was seasoned, but again, the market demands affordable instruments and these are the details that are compromised.  Mostly it is the upper partials which go flat that cause the problems and this instrument did suffer a bit from this, but fortunately I could pull them back up to pitch, and if not to where I would ideally want them at least in the right ball park.  After tuning the bars are sealed and in this case new cord was fitted.

There have been a lot of developments in marimbas over the years and the bigger instruments certainly sound great, but if you are looking for a decent marimba that is easy to shift or a practice instrument that will fit in your house, this is a good buy.