Vibraphone Vibraphone The vibraphone (also known as the vibraharp or simply the vibes) is a musical instrument in the struck idiophone subfamily of the percussion family. It consists of tuned metal bars, and is usually played by holding two or four soft mallets and striking the bars. A person who plays the vibraphone is called a "vibraphonist" or "vibraharpist". The vibraphone resembles the xylophone, marimba, and glockenspiel, one of the main differences between it and these instruments being that each bar is paired with a resonator tube that has a motor-driven butterfly valve at its upper end. The valves are mounted
Struck idiophone Struck idiophone Struck idiophones is one of the categories of idiophones (that is, any musical instrument that creates sound primarily by the instrument as a whole vibrating—without the use of strings or membranes) that are found in the Hornbostel-Sachs system of musical instrument classification. Struck idiophones are categorised as 11 in the Hornbostel-Sachs system. There are 2 main categories of struck idiophones, directly (111) and indirectly (112) struck. Directly stuck idiophones produce sound resulting from a direct action of the performer as opposed to the indirectly struck idiophones. The player strikes the instrument with a direct action, either by hand