Ashkatan Marimba Mallets has unveiled a new, limited-edition medium hard mallet for a special occasion - the popular Kipchak series is celebrating its fifth birthday this year. During this time, the series has evolved a lot, but throughout it has retained the principles it laid out at the beginning: standard sound, unique feeling, durability and last but not least, excellent value for money.

We tested a number of new developments on these limited mallets:

- The surface treatment is done with a new material that has never been tried on marimba mallets, which forms an acrylic coating on the handle of the mallets in such a way that it completely protects the wood from aging. This technology is not new to us, as we use a similar surface treatment on our Student series. However, the new material has a very important plus property: it does not slip. Satin's tactile surface resists palm sweating on stage or even during practice and frees you from many uncomfortable minutes.

-We used another technique that was never used before to connect the heads of the mallets: we introduced two yarns with different material compositions into the winding machine and waited curiously for the result - which I think was great. The promising advantage of the new method is that we can make nuanced changes in the yarn composition of the mallets and even average them. For example, if one of the two yarns we use contains 40% cashmere and the other only 20% cashmere, and we would be perfectly satisfied with 30% cashmere in terms of mallet sound or other properties, we can easily bridge the problem by blending the yarns.

- The third and perhaps most important innovation is the design itself. But how can this be the most important? One of our immediate plans is to make a mallet that can be said to be almost futuristic, which would be made up of entirely new materials and components and would take the requirements for marimba mallets to a whole new level. However, these materials have certain limited properties, such as color, density, and elasticity. The new mallets will therefore have certain immutable design elements, which we need to "prepare" percussionists for in time, and of course it doesn't hurt to get some feedback.

Update december 2020:

You loved the design of the limited edition R89 mallets, so we'll have similar mallets soon. Now, however, we would like to introduce you to another "experimental" direction: our first RATTAN-handled marimba mallets! More info coming soon!