BETHEL — When the Mahoosuc Community Band performs its annual spring concert on Monday, May 9, percussionist Scott Hynek, who has played both the marimba and concert bells in the band, will introduce the audience to his newest instrument: a vibraphone.

A lifelong engineer and hands-on designer, builder and inventor, Hynek often puts his engineering skills to work around his East Bethel homestead, where he has taken up a second career as a farmer since retiring to Maine 15 years ago.

When he decided he wanted to own a vibraphone, he didn’t simply go out and buy one — he built one from scratch.

“I could have bought an older used one, in need of restoration work, for around $1,500,” Hynek said.

A new one would have set him back between $3,000 and $6,000.

Instead, he has invested about $1,000 in materials “and a whole lot of time” in the instrument he will play in Monday’s concert at 7 p.m. at the West Parish Congregational Church.

The vibraphone is one of several mallet percussion instruments of varying degrees of complexity, Hynek said.

The most basic is the xylophone. The concert version of the xylophone has wooden bars and can play notes in several octaves, he said.

The more complex concert bells, also called the glockenspiel, have metal bars. Hynek’s set of concert bells has a range of two octaves.

He also owns a marimba, which is like the vibraphone, but has a resonator tube attached to each of its bars to amplify the sound.

Manufactured in 1943 — “the same vintage as me,” Hynek said — his marimba has bars made of rosewood and can play notes in two and a half octaves.

He became interested in the vibraphone because of the standard marimba’s limited range. 

“A lot of the music I want to play requires three octaves,” he said.

After buying a set of plans online from “some guy in Australia” and assembling the materials, Hynek spent countless hours, spanning more than a year, crafting the vibraphone in his workshop.

He cut the 37 half-inch-thick aluminum bars to length, then, using a table saw, roughed out the arch shape that must be cut into the underside of each bar to lower the pitch and give the instrument a mellow sound.

He finished the arches with a belt sander and “a lot of hand sanding,” continually checking the tone of each as he worked.

A length of parachute cord runs through holes drilled through the width of each end of the bars and attaches to a spring, holding them suspended above the frame and allowing them to vibrate when struck.

The resonators, made of graduated lengths of PVC pipe, are mounted vertically beneath the bars. A damper mechanism is operated by a foot pedal and lets Hynek stop, or dampen, the notes, or allow them to ring freely.

Hynek said many of the materials in the instrument were purchased locally.

Some of the PVC pipe that he used to make the resonators came from Brooks Bros. in Bethel and some from L.M. Longley and Son Hardware in Norway, before it closed its doors late last year.

Mahoosuc Community Band member Paul Beaton of Woodstock provided rough cherry boards, which Hynek planed and sanded to build the instrument’s frame.

The butterfly valves, or fans, at the top of each resonator are made from lightweight aluminum circles he cut from beer cans, crimped, and shaped to fit over the shaft.

The vibraphone, which weighs about 80 pounds, comes apart to travel, and can fit into the back of Hynek’s Subaru for transport to rehearsals and concerts.

The first vibraphones were developed and manufactured in the 1920s. The instrument consists of a double row of aluminum bars of varying lengths that are struck with a mallet to produce notes. The standard modern instrument has 37 bars and a range of three octaves.

Each bar is paired with a tubal resonator that amplifies its sound. Across the top of each bank of resonators is a shaft of discs, called fans. When rotated by a small electric motor, the fans open and close over the openings of the resonators, producing a tremolo effect.