Leigh Howard Stevens left Vic Firth in 1982.

Malletech’s tagline is about its founder: “The only keyboard percussion manufacturer owned & operated by a concertizing marimbist.” That marimbist is Leigh Howard Stevens, born in Orange, New Jersey, in 1953 and inducted into the Percussive Arts Society Hall of Fame in 2006, according to Wikipedia. The four-mallet technique he developed from the older Musser grip is widely called the Musser-Stevens grip.

The company grew out of mallets. Malletech says that in 1976 Vic Firth asked Stevens to produce Firth’s first “Signature” line, Stevens’s solo marimba mallets, after hearing him play at the first PAS international convention. In 1982 Stevens took the mallet-making over himself, with Bob Becker, David Friedman and Dave Samuels. Malletech’s own page gives three dates for the start — “conceived in New York City in 1982,” “Since 1983,” and a fortieth anniversary celebrated in 2024 — so we say it dates its founding to 1983, with the mallet line begun in 1982.

It began inside a publisher. Stevens had set up Marimba Productions Inc. three years earlier, the company says, “because Leigh couldn’t find a publisher for his book, Method of Movement for Marimba,” which Wikipedia dates to 1979. The two businesses still share a building.

Zildjian, a buy-back, and Eastman.

Malletech has changed hands more than once, and its about page sets out the sequence. In 1997 Stevens sold the instrument and mallet business to the Avedis Zildjian Company, the cymbal maker. At the end of 2000 he bought back the instrument business, and in June 2005 the mallet business and the Malletech trademark. Then, in 2024, “Malletech was acquired by the Eastman Music Company,” a deal reported that August by the trade magazines Music Inc. and MMR and by the Percussive Arts Society. Stevens remains president and chief executive.

So the tagline needs reading with care. Malletech is still operated by a concertising marimbist, but since 2024 it has been owned by Eastman, a larger instrument group. We report the tagline as Malletech’s own words.

Its factory has moved once. It began in Asbury Park, New Jersey, where the company remembers “a series of leaky factory roofs,” and moved to “neighboring Neptune New Jersey,” to “an 18,500 square foot building, which it shares with Marimba Productions,” “one hour from New York City.” Its instruments are “shipped from our factory.” Its budget MTech line is “tuned 48 hours before leaving the Malletech facility,” but the company does not say where those instruments are built, so we do not.

Patents, prototypes and the vibraphone.

Malletech presents itself as an engineering firm. It says it holds “eleven U.S. Patents for keyboard percussion design,” that it showed its first professional instruments at the 1992 PAS convention, a LoveVibe prototype in 2008 and an OmegaVibe in 2014, and that Stevens designed the Musser M450 “Plus One” marimba — “the first commercially available marimba made with a furniture-grade all-wooden frame (rock maple),” in its words. It also owns the Albright mallet line, acquired from the family of Fred Albright.

The vibraphone has a precise history. According to a 2021 article in the Percussive Arts Society’s journal Percussive Notes, Herman Winterhoff of the Leedy company fitted rotating fans to a metal-barred instrument in 1921, Leedy’s sales manager George Way “first coined the name ‘vibraphone,’” and Deagan’s design was “released in 1927 as the first ‘Vibraharp,’ Deagan model no. 145,” with aluminium bars and a damper pedal. Leedy, the article says, “did not feel it necessary to apply for a patent.” The same article says Winterhoff had begun experimenting in 1916, and that the first recording, in 1924, billed the instrument as the “Leedy Vibratone-Bells.”

The classic marimba bar is cut from Honduras rosewood, Dalbergia stevensonii, and that wood has been a treaty matter for years. Guatemala listed it in CITES Appendix III in 2008; in 2013 the convention moved it to Appendix II on a proposal from Belize, whose filing called it “the preferred species for the manufacture of bars for marimbas and xylophones,” noting “a high level of wastage, up to 80% … as only logs of the straightest grain are used to make marimba bars.” In 2017 the whole rosewood genus went into Appendix II, and only from 26 November 2019 did the listing exempt “finished musical instruments, finished musical instrument parts and finished musical instrument accessories.” Appendix II regulates trade through permits; it is not a ban. Belize’s filing added that the species is “superior to Brazilian Rosewood for this purpose due to greater density, toughness and resonance qualities,” that it is “restricted in distribution to broadleaf evergreen swamp forests of southern Belize and nearby regions of Guatemala and Mexico,” and that Belize had imposed a moratorium on cutting and export in March 2012.

A performer’s claim as a tagline.

Malletech’s brand is Stevens, from top to bottom: the tagline, the grip named partly after him, the method book and the instruments he designs. Its name is a plain compound — mallet plus technology — that says what it makes and how it thinks.

For a design guide, Malletech shows how a founder-led brand handles a sale: the founder stays in charge, the tagline stays the same, and the owner changes behind it. Compare Musser, for which Stevens designed the M450 marimba and whose own founder left decades ago, and Innovative Percussion, still led by its founder in Nashville.

The marimba also has a place on UNESCO’s list of intangible heritage — though not the concert-hall kind. In 2015 UNESCO inscribed “Marimba music, traditional chants and dances from the Colombian South Pacific region and Esmeraldas Province of Ecuador,” replacing a 2010 Colombian listing, and describes an instrument “played on a palm wood xylophone with bamboo tube resonators, accompanied by drums and maracas.” The tradition is palm wood and bamboo; the orchestral marimba is rosewood and metal tubes. UNESCO’s 2010 decision described it as heritage of Afro-Colombian communities in the departments of Valle del Cauca, Cauca and Nariño, bound up with four rituals: Arrullo, Currulao, Chigualo and Alabao.

For this guide we use a teal and a mist with a sans serif, an unofficial interpretation. No instrument, mallet or logo is reproduced.

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