For a while now I've been working on incorporating temple woodblocks into my drums and performance. It took a while to come up with a design for them that I could make reliably and that I liked the tone and volume. I finally got it figured out and here's what I came up with.
They're made out of red oak, which can be a passable tone wood in certain applications. They're nothing more complex than a box with a slit cut in one side. Originally I was only thinking of a rack mounted version, but in conversations with others in our group the advantages of a hand held version were brought to light, so I pursued that as well.
The rack version is made to mount to any one of multiple stands I have in my drum set.
These are chromatically tuned, half step between each block. With them in combination with the drum like this, especially if you have two stands right next to each other, you have access to a lot of tonal values.
The hand held versions look like this:
Hold the block in one hand, a bachi on the other. With the whole group playing you can construct melodies accross multiple players, which is an effect I'm very fond of.
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