Making a Copper Pipe Xylophone

Series Summary

The xylophone is an expressive musical instrument that usually consists of wooden planks tuned to a musical scale arranged on some sort of support system. Marimbas, vibraphones, and Glockenspiels are similar to the xylophone with marimbas having resonator tubes and lower pitches, and glockenspiels the higher pitch registers. Michael Josef Gusikov popularized the xylophone in the early 1800's, with names like Felix Mendelssohn, Frederic Chopin, and Franz Liszt lauding his performances.

In this free video series, our expert Benjamin hehn will teach you how to make a copper pipe xylophone. He'll teach you about the necessary materials, picking the right metal, cutting the pipe, piking a key, tuning the pipes, drilling the holes, and attaching the pipes to the hanger. He'll also tell you all about both metal and wood mallets, showing you how to make one of each and talking about the benefits and disadvantages of each. He'll even give you a demonstration of the xylophone in action with a piano.

Video Transcript

"In part four of How to Make a Copper Pipe Xylophone, we're going to finish making our notes out of copper pipes and attaching them to the xylophone. After we do that, we're going to explore different hammer options that we can make out of parts that we've already previously used, so we don't have any excess things lying around or extra materials that we need to throw away. That way we can utilize everything that we've already boughten. Also, we're going to take a look at how to play the xylophone with another instrument, and how to store it, and how to put it on a stand. These are all things we're going to explore in Part four of How to Make a Copper Pipe Xylophone and we're going to finish off our chart so that we have a running record of what we did today, so we can recreate it. And, as you can see we have all the lengths that we've already cut marked down so we can replicate this experiment and this project at another point in time. So we're going to finish off our chart, finish off our cuts and assemble our xylophone to make it ready for play."