Collection: Rhythm/Percussion

Rhythm and percussion instruments for elementary classrooms, early years programs and group music of every kind. Tambourines, shakers, maracas, bells, triangles, claves, rhythm sticks, guiros, wood blocks, castanets, chimes and sound effects, from Groove Masters Percussion, EMUS, SUZUKI, REMO, NINO and MEINL.

What these instruments have in common is that none of them need to be learned first. A student picks one up and makes a good sound on the first try, which means a whole class can be playing together in the first minute of a lesson rather than the fourth week.

They divide roughly by how the sound is made, and that division is worth knowing when you are building a set. Shaken instruments give a sustained rattle that fills space. Struck instruments give a clean point in time and are what you want for keeping a pulse. Scraped instruments give a rasping sound with a shape to it, which is where rhythm patterns start to have character.

A working classroom set needs at least one of each, because a room where thirty students all have shakers has no pulse in it. A room with claves and wood blocks holding the beat, tambourines and shakers filling the texture and a triangle marking phrase ends sounds like an ensemble.

Class packs are stocked across most of these categories, in quantities from four up to eighty, alongside single instruments for building a set piece by piece.