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the sticks i used (or planned to use) for each excerpt in my 2011 MET orchestra percussion audition
if youre thinking about taking the upcoming MET percussion audition, youre going to have to choose
sticks! i recommend that you use a method that i call the A/B method to choose them for each excerpt.
heres what that is:
for each excerpt,
1. line up all the sticks that you could possibly use for that excerpt.
2. find a stage and ask a friend to listen to you.
3. play the excerpt twice. once with pair A (the first pair in the line), and once with pair B (the second). make
sure the friend is far enough away that theyre using their ears and not their eyes.
4. ask the listener to choose a winner. put the loser pair away and move to the next pair of 2 mallets.
5. continue like its a march madness bracket until theres only one pair left - thats your winner!
its going to leave you with a great mallet choice. its even better if you can have a friend play with your
mallets and you can choose. feel free to do this multiple times with different people, like i did.
in the end, youre going to come up with a list of mallets that work for each excerpt. chances are that you
play differently than i do, and your personality is different, so your ideal sticks for each excerpt will be
different than what i chose. you should use my list as a reference and for ideas. good luck!
NOTE: youre gonna have to find this 2011 MET list for yourself to see the exact excerpts im talking about! a
bunch of the excerpts arent in the public domain so i cant reproduce them. :-)
1. xylophone
im realizing as i write this that im not sure all these mallets still exist! for instance - i have two pairs of
malletech OR39Rs. one of them i got when i was in high school, and its kinda red. the other one is brown.
strauss: salome - dance of the seven veils, rehearsal d malletech reds (see above)
gershwin: porgy and bess, act ii, sc. 1 freer K6 (the pro-mark era, i believe)
2. bells
delibes: lakme, bell song freer KBFM (an older version of these)
4. marimba
bach: e major partita, gavotte en rondeau (tape only) vic firth robert van sice sticks (a selection)
5. snare drum
bellini: norma, act ii stage music pearl philharmonic 14x4 aluminum & innovative CL-1L
britten: peter grimes, act ii, sc. 1 pearl philharmonic 13x4 maple & innovative CL-3L
britten: peter grimes, act iii, sc. 1 pearl philharmonic 13x4 maple & innovative CL-3L
berg: wozzeck, act i stage music pearl philharmonic 13x4 maple & innovative CL-3L
berg: wozzeck, act ii reh. 643 pearl philharmonic 14x4 aluminum & innovative CL-1L
prokofiev: lt. kije, mvt. i opening pearl philharmonic 13x4 maple & innovative CL-3L
prokofiev: symphony no. 5, scherzo pearl philharmonic 13x4 maple & innovative CL-3L
prokofiev: symphony no. 5, finale pearl philharmonic 14x4 aluminum & innovative CL-1L
rimsky-korsakov: scheherazade, mvt. iii pearl philharmonic 13x4 maple & innovative CL-3L
rimsky-korsakov: scheherazade, mvt. iv, reh. n pearl philharmonic 14x4 aluminum & innovative CL-1L
rimsky-korsakov: scheherazade, mvt. iv, reh. p-u pearl philharmonic 14x4 aluminum & innovative CL-1L
zuber: roll exercise pearl philharmonic 14x4 aluminum & innovative CL-1L
delcluse: douze tudes, tude no. 9 pearl philharmonic 14x4 aluminum & innovative CL-1L
6. tambourine
7. triangle
(there was not, ahem, good enough record-keeping to include the bass drum mallets, sorry!)
thanks for reading! if youd like to share this with someone, they can visit
robknopper.com/stickbag.