Thomas Burritt has a wonderful web site that includes a weekly podcast called Percussion Axiom. Each week he discusses an aspect of the percussion happenings and many of them are focused on the marimba.

I first saw Tom at PASIC (Percussive Arts Society International Convention) in 2000 where he participated in the New Music Day for Marimba. A copy of that program is available as a PDF. Since this was my first PASIC I didn’t introduce myself to too many people as I was still in awe at the sheer talent and magnitude of the percussion event. I will post more about PASIC in a future entry.

One of the very cool things in a recent episode of Percussion Axiom TV, was Tom’s suggestion to learn a marimba piece together as an online community. When I heard about this I was thrilled and scared! I wasn’t a music major in college (most of my friend’s were) so I didn’t spent 6 hours in the practice room. However, I do own a 5-octave MarimbaOne and I am as highly motivated as someone can be about a percussion instrument!

There was an online vote as to which piece to play and we started 2 weeks ago. As I started working on the piece, I noticed that I had more to say than what could be said in a comment on Tom’s web site or via Twitter, so I decided it was time to make a marimba blog.

I bought www.jeffsass.com years ago because it was available so now is a great time to use it. So here we are! I am a marimbist with a blog and I am going to use it to better the percussion community and help foster a discussion about not only the piece we are learning together but any marimba topic in general.

Hi everyone – welcome to my marimba blog. The purpose of this blog is to talk about anything related to the marimba and the never ending pursuit of creating fantastic musical experiences on a non-standard instrument.

For my initial post instead of a long-winded introduction and background of who I am and why I am doing this I am instead going to jump right in to the matter at hand. So join the conversation and head over to my second post.