Beetle Percussion Marimba/Xylophone Mallet Practice Pad by Matthew Coley

Professional marimba performer and Beetle Artist Matthew Coley wanted to be able to silently and accurately warm up back stage as he waited to perform. Since the mallet pads conception, its potential and demand has grown exponentially. We have since developed it with as many options as possible to provide a practice implement that can assist mallet players on all levels for hundreds of uses. At its core, it is a practice pad for mallet players like a snare pad is for snare drummers. It is also a larger modular system that can be combined into a full sized marimba, making a normally extremely limited and expensive instrument more available to many. We make a long base that can accommodate all five pads on an x-stand as well. We also provide three playing surface options. Soft foam that is nearly silent for practicing or pre-warmup, recycled car tire rubber for a harder bouncier, audible surface usable with any stick or mallet - it has more tactile response than the foam rubber, and beetle killed Ash bars that replicate the realistic feel of hardwood bars at a louder volume.

"It is of course very important that you play on a keyboard percussion instrument as much as possible for tone development, pitch understanding, and musicality. However, our approach with the pads is to give players more accessibility to tackling technical, kinetic, and memorization skills and issues. These components of playing can and sometimes should be practiced away from the instrument." - Matthew Coley

With each item purchased, one tree seedling will be planted in the beetle affected forests of Colorado to assist with restoration. We have teamed up with our partners at the Colorado State Forestry Service at CSU, and are excited to not only be able to remove harmful materials from the environment, but now also replace them with new life. In the aftermath of destructive wildfires, reforesting burned land helps protect water supplies, restores wildlife habitat and reduces flooding and erosion.

By now many have seen or heard about the devastation beetles have caused North American pine forests in the western half of the continent. An extended drought in the late 1990s and early 2000s is considered the spark that set off the explosive assault.
Beyond that initial drought, three other factors have facilitated the epidemic: warmer winters, old forests, and continued dry conditions.

With global temperatures on the rise, beetle eggs and larvae have a better chance of surviving the winter; it is only with a continued deep freeze of five days or more that the beetle population can be controlled. In the Colorado Rocky Mountains alone, there are over 3.3 million acres of woodland that has been killed by a beetle infestation.

The beetles burrow into the bark of the trees laying their eggs, and in the process a fungus carried by the beetles infect the trees. The fungus ultimately kills the tree and turns it's grain into a blue-grey color. Beetle Percussion produces hand made ecologically helpful percussion products from North American beetle-killed trees.

We source the majority of our lumber from Colorado, but also other beetle affected states like 200 year old pines from Montana and ash trees from Kansas City. Our goal is to use as many recycled and reclaimed materials as possible to hand craft unique, high quality percussion products.
Imagine how many car tires we could keep out of landfills and oceans if every drummer used pads made from recycled car tires. Beetle uses recycled car tire rubber on many of our products such as surfaces for pads and hinges for slap sticks. Our 13.5” marching pad uses 1/5th of a car tire! We are proud to have kept over 300 tires thus far from land fills or ocean bottoms.


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