I am interested in making and learning to play marimbas, so I recently bought Jon Madin's book "Make your own marimbas".

I have no illusions that what I make is going to be professional quality, all I'd like to do is to make it sound OK (and if that works, move on from there).

I've read as much as I could find on tuning, and think I understand the principle, it's the actual making / tuning of bars that I'm having difficulty with.

Here's the specifics:

I 'm making the 2 octave bass marimba from the book using Padouk wood. Lower keys are 100m wide by 20 mm thick by various lengths.

I've encountered 2 problems - 1)fundamental tuning for higher bars and 2) overtone tuning for all bars.

With the upper half of the bars, I'm shaving very little to no wood, and the bars are already flat! In fact, the highest bars are flat by more than a note, with no wood removed.

Also, I can't seem t get the overtones even close - probably becaus I can't remove a wide enough arch without making the fundamental flat.

My thought was to shorten the total length or thickness of the upper bars - would this help?

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks