Building a Saron — A Gamelan Metallophone of Tuned Bronze Bars

The saron is a metallophone: a row of thick tuned bronze bars laid over a wooden trough and struck with a mallet. Its bright, ringing shimmer is the heart of Indonesian gamelan.

Cut five to seven bronze bars, each a little shorter than the last. A shorter, thicker, stiffer bar rings higher; a longer one rings lower.

Sprinkle sand on a bar and tap it. The sand gathers at two still points, about a fifth of the way in from each end. These NODES are where the bar barely moves.

Build a shallow, open-topped wooden box a little longer than your longest bar. This hollow trough is the resonator that makes the bars ring out loud.

Stretch two cords across the top of the box exactly where the bars' nodes will sit, so every bar rests only on its two still points and can ring freely.

Lay the bars across the cords, longest to shortest. They should ring cleanly when struck and never buzz against the wood.

Carve a mallet: a short stick with a rounded head. A harder head gives a brighter, pingier tone; a padded one is mellower.

Tap a bar over the box with the mallet. The bar rings, and the trough below swells the sound into a full, warm note.

To LOWER a bar's note, file metal from the MIDDLE of its underside. This makes the bar more flexible, so it bends more slowly and sounds deeper.

To RAISE a bar's note, file metal from the ENDS instead. This stiffens the vibrating span, so the bar bends faster and sounds higher.

Tune the bars to a five-note slendro scale (roughly even steps), not a Western scale. Gamelan has its own tunings, and each gamelan set is tuned uniquely to itself.

Strike a bar, then pinch it silent with your other hand as you hit the next. That crisp catch-and-damp is a signature of gamelan playing.

A gamelan metallophone is a set of tuned bars, each a struck idiophone that rings from its own metal. A free bar bends when struck, and it does so fastest — highest in pitch — when it is short, thick and stiff; longer or thinner bars bend more slowly and sound lower. Every bar has two 'nodes', still points about a fifth of the way in from each end where it hardly moves; resting the bar there (on cords or pegs) lets it ring on freely, while touching it anywhere else deadens it. You tune a bar by removing metal: file the MIDDLE thinner and the bar becomes floppier and drops in pitch; file the ENDS and the vibrating span stiffens and the pitch rises — the two moves every marimba, xylophone and glockenspiel maker uses. The wooden trough beneath is a resonator: a bare bar moves little air, but the box amplifies it, and on the finest gamelan and marimbas each bar even sits over its own tuned air chamber. Gamelan does not use the Western scale — it has two systems, five-note slendro and seven-note pelog, both with uneven steps — and famously each gamelan set is tuned as a single unit, slightly different from every other, so its instruments belong together and cannot simply be swapped between orchestras. The bronze bars are cousins of every tuned-bar instrument in the world — the xylophone, marimba, glockenspiel and vibraphone — and of every struck idiophone from bells to bone clappers.