A student who copied a Deagan marimba.

Marimba One was founded in 1986, forty years ago, by Ron Samuels in Arcata, a university town on California’s far north coast. The local North Coast Journal dated the business “Since 1986” in 2018, and a 2020 profile in US Manufacturing Report named Samuels as chief executive. The company’s own published story says he was a 25-year-old student at Humboldt State University who dropped out to take a woodworking job so that he could learn to build a marimba.

His first instrument, the company says, was “a copy of a Deagan marimba,” and two established figures in the trade, Del Roper and Lowell Montz, gave him “a one-hour tuning lesson.” By the 1990 Percussive Arts Society convention in Philadelphia, the company says, his marimbas had begun to win acceptance among professional players. Samuels is still described, on the company’s own pages, as its “owner and founder”; we found no record of a sale.

The company is still trading in 2026, forty years on: its website carried dated offers for this year’s PASIC convention in Indianapolis. Its mailing address is a post-office box in Arcata, and the North Coast Journal placed the workshop in the town’s Creamery District.

100% designed and built in the USA.

Marimba One states its origin repeatedly. Its banner reads “100% Designed and Built in the U.S.A.”; its homepage says “Designed and built in Arcata, California”; another page says “100% of the design, engineering, and manufacturing take place” in Arcata; and its story says it “continues to design and build all of its instruments and mallets” there. Samuels told US Manufacturing Report: “We don’t have them made overseas… we design and build them all here.”

Its range is broad for a single-site maker: the Wave, Motif, Izzy and 3100 marimbas, a Jewel marimba, a synthetic-bar Horizon, and a One Vibe vibraphone whose bars come in gold, silver, black, blue or red. It has made vibraphones since 2016, and the North Coast Journal reported in 2024 that they use a “silent magnetic drive system” rather than a motor to turn the fans. It also makes its own mallets, endorsed, the 2020 profile said, by players including Ivana Bilić, Jason Marsalis and Lynn Vartan.

Its instruments are expensive — a five-octave model cost $12,000 to $25,000 in 2018, the paper reported. In 2024 the North Coast Journal reported that a $1.2 million bequest to Fortuna High School’s music programme had been spent partly on Marimba One instruments — a school a short drive from the workshop, which shows how close to home some of its customers are.

Rosewood, by its own arrangement.

Marimba One talks about its wood in detail. Its rosewood page says its keyboards are Honduras rosewood, and that in 2008 Samuels set up a supply with “a Mayan community” and “provided a band-saw mill with over 100 blades.” It says “All of Marimba One’s rosewood is CITES-certified,” that one mill cuts on a “30-year-rotation cycle” and only trees of 12 inches or more across, and that another plants “14 young trees” for each one felled. The 2020 profile said the wood comes from Belize and Guatemala. These are the company’s statements.

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. Marimba One’s own page describes the 2017 genus listing but not the 2019 exemption, so we give the full sequence here.

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.”

A number and a word.

Marimba One’s name reads as a statement of rank — and its identity leans on place: Arcata, the Creamery District, the USA. Its colour options for the One Vibe show a willingness to treat a concert instrument as a design object.

For a design guide, Marimba One shows a small maker making origin and material its whole story: where it is built, by whom, and where the wood came from. Compare DeMorrow, another founder-led marimba workshop, in Arkansas; Musser, the Chicago name whose founder came from Deagan, the maker Samuels first copied; and Majestic, whose mallet instruments its owner says are made in China and developed in Taiwan.

Marimba One’s level of detail about its rosewood — the mill, the blades, the replanting — is itself branding: it answers a question a buyer might not think to ask, and attaches the company’s name to the answer.

For this guide we use a rosewood brown and a sand with a sans serif, an unofficial interpretation. No instrument, bar layout or logo is reproduced.

Keep Marimba One’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.