Spinning fans inside its tubes give the vibraphone that shimmering wobble
Under each metal bar of a vibraphone hangs a tube with a small disc at its top, and all the discs turn together on one motor-driven axle. As they spin they open and close the tubes, and the ringing note pulses. That trick, first built in 1921, gave jazz one of its coolest sounds.
Herman Winterhoff at the Leedy company began experimenting around 1916, trying to coax a vox humana effect from a three-octave steel marimba. Raising and lowering the resonators worked, but in 1921 he found a better answer: a motor turning discs beneath the bars. A sales manager, George H. Way, named it the vibraphone, and Leedy began selling it in 1924, helped by novelty records that year from the vaudeville player Louis Frank Chiha.
The modern instrument owes more to a rival. In 1927 J. C. Deagan, which had invented the steel marimba in the first place, asked its chief tuner Henry Schluter for a competing design. He switched from steel to aluminum for a mellower tone, retuned the bars to remove clashing overtones and added a foot-operated damper, much like a piano's sustain pedal. His version became the template. Because Leedy had trademarked vibraphone and Deagan vibraharp, other makers had to settle for vibes or invent names such as vibraceleste.
Vaudeville novelty soon gave way to jazz. At a 1930 session with Louis Armstrong, the drummer Lionel Hampton was asked to play a vibraphone left behind in the studio, and the resulting Memories of You is often cited as the first improvised solo on the instrument. Composers such as Alban Berg in his opera Lulu picked it up too, and it later coloured mid-century tiki exotica popularised by Arthur Lyman.
Its warm voice comes partly from carving. Makers grind a deep arch into the underside of each bar, which lowers the pitch while keeping bars a manageable length and lines up the vibrations into consonant intervals; the brighter xylophone has a shallower arch and the glockenspiel none. The standard range spans three octaves, from the F below middle C.
Source: Vibraphone
