EMUS

EMUS is Empire Music's own instrument line, designed in Vancouver, British Columbia, and built for classroom use.

The range is the widest we carry, covering Orff xylophones, metallophones and glockenspiels, bell sets and resonator bells, tambourines, hand drums, triangles, claves, rhythm sticks, wood and temple blocks, castanets, maracas, shakers, sleigh and wrist bells, guiros, ratchets, rainsticks, recorders in six colours, ukuleles, music stands, mallets and replacement parts.

What holds it together is a single design brief. Every instrument has to survive being handed out to thirty students and collected again each week, has to make a good sound in the hands of someone who has never held one, and has to be sized and weighted for the age it is meant for.

That brief shows up in details worth knowing about. Instruments come in colours, which is what lets a teacher assign one per student and get them all back. Bars lift off individually so a damaged one is replaced rather than the instrument retired. Replacement bars, bar nails, triangle strikers and holders, and sandpaper faces are stocked separately, because the part that breaks in a classroom is rarely the whole instrument.

The EMUS Rainbow series applies the same idea to note-reading, colour-coding the bars and bells to the Boomwhackers standard so students find notes by colour before they read them.