I was curious on who does it and what exactly you use? I've been interested in this for sometime and been meaning to ask around.

Excuse the ignorant old guy, but what are you even talking about? You mean frosting like frosted glass? Some kind of freaky finish or what?

Besides why do you want to use a synthetic instrument anyway...?

I'm in the dark here as well...
I seem to have heard of something like this...
What exactly do you mean by synthetic? Electric, or not wood based?

I was reading a discussion on marimba.org and there was a discussion titled, "Marimbas for a drum corp" where one person mentioning that during her corps experience she/they "icied" their keys (and assuming possibly resonators) for an half an hour before shows. I tried emailing her about what did she possibly use to "iced" them. ( I was thinking can air, but who knows) but no responce and was curious about anyone else's experience about such a procedure.

I mentioned synthetic because I'd never perform this on rosewood bars and think that she only performed this on synthetic keys and the resonators

Wacky. I wonder what they hoped to gain by this.

I haven't looked at Marimba.org in a while. Hope it's not ALL about how to ruin your instruments these days.

We did this at VK in 1994. Because of the intense humidity, our keys would would lose resonance and tone. As we would leave the housing site we would roll up the marimba bars and put them in an ice chest with bags of ice. The cold air dries out the keys and gives them back some resonance. This worked for about 2 hours after we took them out at the show site.

Gabe

Thanks, Gabe. Thanks the exact info. I'm looking for. I had no clue what she meant by "icing". I'm sure my defining it as "frosting" was very misleading, as well. I've been wanting to experiment with this since some of the boards at the schools I teach/taught. Thanks a million.

What I meant by "Synthetic" was marimba's with bars made of synthetic material for example: Ludwig-Musser's "kelon" bars, Yamaha's "Acoustalon" , ect.

Glad I could be of some help. In 1994, we had Yammies and one Big Bertha that was a Musser Kelon. The Yamahas reacted better to the rapid changes in temperature. We never iced the resonators.

Gabe

Did this mess with the pitch of the instruments? Cause when it drops below 60 or so here our keys go fantasticly out of tune. One day in rehearsal we trasposed everything by a half step and were closer to actual pitch. I would imagine 'frosting' the keys would do the same thing.

husker, You may be interested in reading this article by Leigh Howard Stevens Acoustics of Resonators in conjunction with this post from marimba.org Temperature effect on bar pitch

I know this was reasonably common among southwestern corps in the mid 90s... I saw more than one corps pull bars out of coolers at a show in 1995. I've also heard of it being done by just putting ice packs (the kind you use when you injure yourself, or for putting in a cooler when you don't actually want ice) on the keys under the covers. I'd personally be a little wary of that as condensation on the ice packs will leave water on the keys. I've never actually done this personally, but I do see how, in some circumstances, it would help get better tone and more characteristic sound from the keyboard.