Yea totally, I’ll try to keep it condensed but it was a whole process haha. So we knew early in the season that everyone was gonna switch from the hardest mallets to the softest mallets in the middle of the phrase(also a whole different spiel which went through many phases), but we couldn’t find any mallet that got the sound Ian wanted for the soft section for me and the glock player. What we end up doing was tape a couple layers of moleskin on half the mallet with the idea being that me and the glock player would switch sides in the middle of the chunk(I think the glock player still did this by the end of the season). What ended up happening with my switch was that the staff didn’t want me dropping out of 2 beats to do the switch like everyone else bc I was the source of time going into all their flips, so they had me just learn the two beats, but kept me on the moleskin side because we still needed that sound for the end of the chunk. Hopefully this all kinda makes sense, the big thing with the moleskin was that if I kept my velocity how I normally played on xylo, the xylo would still get a pretty articulate sound, but if I fluffed out the velocity a *tiny* bit on the low end stuff, we were able to remove articulation in the middle of the phrase in a way you could only really do by switching mallets on xylo. I could go more in detail if you’re curious, just hit me up, but this is like a solid cliff notes version haha.
@@dantehernandez5818 ah makes sense. thank you so much. love seeing new creative techniques to the instrument. it’s like a double sided mallet. very cool.
Nice cam, thanks for uploading it! I noticed you play on the edges a lot for faster runs, is that common for Pulse throughout? I also noticed that your target zone seems to be about an inch in from the edge, is that a definition just for xylophone or for all players? I've always been taught/taught to play on true edge (except vibraphones).
So in general the other mallets try to play mostly centers. I used to do be pretty die hard ab hitting centers as much as possible, but the xylo player before me was like the polar opposite, so ended up kinda trying to meet in the middle and just went for edges when it felt like it would increase the consistency and quality of my playing. With xylo in general, if you’re velocity is consistent, the sound quality from the edges will be mostly consistent with if u went for centers, but there’s obviously differences from player to player or even the different xylophones different companies make. True edges definitely sound better for certain models, but I’ve just personally noticed hitting a little above the edge sounded better in my experience.(still a human being who doesn’t hit perfect zones tho haha, so some of them could definitely be a little closer to true edge)
