La Marimba de Arco

La Marimba de Arco

The “Marimaba de Arco” (Bow Marimba) is a musical instrument that looks like a Xylophone. Made by different sizes of wood that stands attached with wool wire over a wood frame that pended from a bended branch called “Arco”.

The keyboard looks like xylophone but has not two keyboards one over the other like a piano because the bow marimba is not chromatically tuned (like not black keys of a piano) just C, D, E, F. not sharps or flats. The resonators are attached to the frame under each piece of wood of the keyboard and have different size according to the size of each key. The resonators are made using different techniques. Many years ago they used different pieces of “Tecomates” or “Guajes” that are like big empty hard pumpkins with an small hole in witch they shape an eye of wax covered by intestine’s pig skin, that creates an special resonance/vibration characteristic of the African musical instruments.

The bow Marimba belongs to the Central American culture but is really possible it came from Africa instead some archeologists found a pre-columbian vessel with a marimba painted on its surface.

The bow Marimba is still performed in some communities of Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico, but the Mexican Marimba from Chiapas after 1940 stopped using the bow and adopted the chromatic scale as the xylophone.



The marimba’s performer seats him/herself on the bow to hold the marimba on his/her knees and another performer enjoys sitting next to him/her in an extra chair to play the bass notes. A guitar player, bass guitar player, and a drum player, usually enjoy the marimba performers. That music is rhythmically very rich because with the absent of a chromatic scale, it makes them play or just one melodic mode or mainly mayor key.



The tuning of this instrument can change with the whether, when the humidity is high the wood expands and can make the instrument flatten or sharpen when the whether is too dry. The marimba performers can flat a little bit the sound adding a small piece of wax under each piece of the keyboard.

Check the following links to get more about this beautiful instrument.





This is Spanish only… sorry. Click here  This is about a festival of marimbas in USA Click here

A YouTube video  Click Here