MIMF

So, I have a student-grade glockenspiel and the keyboard from an old reed organ and naturally, I want to find a way to force them into some kind of unholy relationship. My first thought was to make a keyboard glockenspiel, using solenoids to strike the tonebars, triggered by contact switches attached to the keys (that's still Plan B). But now I'm wondering about some way to produce notes with a softer attack -- to "excite" the tonebars, rather than strike them.

I've seen guys playing vibraphone tonebars with bass viol bows, so I'm thinking that maybe some kind of motor-driven rotating soft disks (felt?) that would contact the tonebars might be interesting. But I also have an E-Bow that I play around with, which makes me think that there might be some way to excite the tonebars using a constantly fluctuating electromagnetic field to cause each bar to vibrate.

Any thoughts?

You had me at the first sentence! This sounds like a fun project. I'm thinking solenoid approach + magnetic pickups on bars = frankenstein Rhodes, but I like the fuzzy disc idea, too. Felt seems like it'd be too soft to me, and it'd be hard to generate enough sound. I think I'd try some of that rope that they make catch-scratch-posts out of, rubbed with a bit of rosin. 'Course that might sound like Hell's bells in a very real sense. The only thing I worry about with the magnetic-field idea is that those bars are pretty heavy, right? It seems like it would take a lot more to move a bar than a string. Sure, you could probably make it work, but I wonder if it would cause nearby metal objects to act strangely. And so on...

If the bars are magnetic then a electro-magnet under each bar could be "hit " with a magnetic pulse. Think big magnetic pickup used in reverse.