Welcome to the Percussion Play Blog
We hope you'll be a regular visitor as we share stories about the instruments we make and the people who play them.
This is where we share our passion for music in the great outdoors! We'll share with you details of exciting new outdoor music projects and designs from around the globe. We'll share with you information about the instruments we sell and a little about the inspiration behind them
Most importantly, this blog is about what we love to do the most - help you create new and exciting ways to bring music to the great outdoors.
Thank you for reading, visiting, commenting and contributing - we’re excited to have you here!
Welcome to the New Percussion Play Website
If you’ve visited our site before, you may notice that a few things have changed. Rather charming new design and layout? Correct! Slightly different navigation? Correct! Different colour scheme? Correct! The same fantastic outdoor musical instruments for everyone, everywhere? Correct!
We’d like to introduce our newly redesigned website to you. Fundamentally we’re still the same Percussion Play with the same great products but all slightly more shiny and hopefully a bit clearer. We set out to refresh our appearance, hoping to bring you a website that you can easily navigate and regularly visit.
If you’ve not visited our site before, then hello! We welcome new visitors with open arms. Please do have a look around and if you like what you see you can also follow us on our various social media channels: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Google+. Please do follow, subscribe, like, encircle us and say hello.
Our Blog (where you are now) is obviously another way to connect...
Music & Movement: World Nursery Rhyme Week
This week has been World Nursery Rhyme Week (10-14th November). A week-long celebration promoting the importance of nursery rhymes to the under 5’s.
Songs and rhymes for young children have been passed down for generations. They are fun, children love them, and they provide a warm, nurturing experience between parent and child. What we may not be aware of as we recite simple nursery rhymes or sing songs with children is they’re not just for fun, they have enormous educational value.
Short and sweet, they help children to learn language formation. They contribute to a child's spatial development when used with music and movement. Nursery rhymes also contain moral lessons to teach and are great for introducing counting and animal sounds.
When children hear nursery rhymes, they hear the sounds vowels and consonants make. They learn how to put these sounds together to make words. They also practice pitch, volume, and voice inflection, as well as the rhythm of language. Children...
Fun Halloween Activity for the Outdoor Music Classroom
Here is a fun Halloween music activity that you can do with your class using your outdoor musical instruments that will teach rhythm while scaring the pants off them! Sounds thrilling? Take a look!
It is a familiar game, similar to ‘What’s The Time Mr Wolf’, but with musical instruments, uses listening skills and has a Halloween twist!
Their task — or the "trick" — is to match the rhythm with the character shown on the cards.
A little preparation is required. Before playing the game you need to print the rhythm cards from the Halloween rhythm sheet below. Mount the sheet on card and cut it into five, for the different characters.
Spend a little time teaching, demonstrating and practicing each character’s rhythm, so that the children can begin to recognise which character is which.
How to Play: Place the cards into a bag or hat and place it near the outdoor musical instruments. One child is chosen to be the ‘witch’ and sits a little way from the musical instruments. The...
Inspired by Tradition – Harmony Outdoor Xylophone
Along with rice, another crop harvested in Vietnam is bamboo. Bamboo has long been used as an assembly material in Asia because of its versatility and it has numerous uses. After it is split, bamboo can be used for fences, baskets, and mats. The stems can make simple furniture, hunting implements, traps and musical instruments.
Two of the most popular traditional folk instruments in Vietnam are made from bamboo—the bamboo flute and the bamboo ‘hanging’ xylophone. The flute is found in most regions, while the xylophone hails from the mountainous region and is called a T’Rung. The T’Rung is an idiophone, percussive instrument made from lengths of bamboo in differing sizes. Traditionally, the T’rung would be suspended at the top from a tree and bound to the players belly at the bottom. It would be played with two double sticks which perfectly cover the range of one octave. After playing it would be rolled up and carried away on the players back.
The design of Percussion Play’s...
Making Music: A Peek Inside Percussion Play Workshop
Take a peek inside our workshop, meet the team and see our experts in action.
Designing outdoor musical instruments takes planning, knowledge and imagination, but what's even more impressive is the actual making - maybe a much more industrial yet craftsman-like process than you'd imagine. All Percussion Play instruments are designed and produced by dedicated and highly skilled craftsmen in the beautiful county of Hampshire right here in the heart of the United Kingdom. Delivering musical instruments to the world which are fun and exciting but sound amazing too. Because like you, we love music.
We are focused team and thrive on encouraging individuals to flourish in their music making. It all starts with having a go, and to have a go we need access to good musical instruments in our communities. We’ve designed a whole host of exciting user-friendly instruments that kids and adults can use to explore the joy of composing and music making in our open spaces; playgrounds, forests and...
Using Outdoor Musical Instruments On World Book Day
In the UK and Ireland today is World Book Day!
World Book Day is a celebration of children’s books and reading and marked in over 100 countries around the globe – although in other countries World Book Day takes place at a different time of year (usually in April).
This is the 20th year there’s been a World Book Day, and on 2nd March 2017 children of all ages will come together to appreciate reading. Hundreds of schools and bookshops all over the UK and Ireland will be taking part. Books are such a fun springboard in to all sorts of activities, crafts, play and of course…..music! And now spring is just around the corner (oh please let it be so!), it’s the perfect time to step outside and put your outdoor musical instruments to excellent use.
We all know that birds are great singers but what kind of sound would a Gruffalo make? Or the Very Hungry Caterpillar munching his way from being tiny to growing big and fat. Or the BFG, stomping across the countryside? An outdoor...