What are Orff Instruments?

Orff instruments are a category of classroom musical instruments that include specially designed xylophones, metallophones, and glockenspiel. They were developed by Carl Orff and associates as part of the Orff instrumentarium.

Supporters of the channel get downloads (audio and notation) as well as videos not available for free.

WDC T-Shirts

Kalani is a Professional Percussionist, Orff-Schulwerk Certified Music Educator and Board-Certified Music Therapist (MT-BC). He presents classes and workshops all over the world for people of all ages.

Books by Kalani:

Videos by Kalani

[pedromeza]

Thank you for making learning music easy, I am a 64 year old kid, learning music to help as therapy for mild Traumatic Brain Injured. Learning music helps to establish new nuero pathways which I hope helps to rewire the demage parts of my brain.

[Haley-wnph]

The idea of removing notes is also a very common practice in improvisation in music therapy! It helps to address various goals such as decreasing anxiety, discovering outlets for creative expression, improving motor skills, and much, much more! Thank you so much for posting this, as a music therapy student it helps me to better explain these concepts to my friends!

[emeraldgrace]

Thank you for this! Young music teacher here 😊

[AlwaysLearningtoTeach]

As a new music teacher I really appreciate this explanation! I also love your ukulele DVD. Very helpful!

[killerkt]

This reminds me of music class in elementary school!! What a throwback thank you :)

[christophertsiliacos]

1:58 Glockenspiel: It comes from two German words: Glocken which is the plural for 'bells' and 'spielen' which is the infinitive: to play. Loosely translated, it means the ‘bells that play, ’ or ‘the playing bells.’ 😉 🎼 ♫

[alexander-maxwell]

THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU! I new these were for classrooms mostly. but what I never could understand is since 15 notes are TWO octaves diatonic. Orff instruments are typically 13 notes just two shy of the 15 needed for two octaves. I never understood why leave off those two notes to make 15. But when you put it into easy play pentatonic mode and it had two PENTATONIC octaves suddenly I got the genius of 13 notes. I figured the extra bars on the side were for other keys but your explanation confirmed it. I have seen some of these for $500 and thought the two missing notes was strange but now I get it.

[johnveca]

Very cool and informative. I am registered to take the Orff Level 1 course at Univ. of Nebraska this summer and I can't wait.

[ozapollo]

What about Gamelans? Are there any 'ethnic' instruments that you could consider as an 'Orff instrument'?

[InTheMusicBox]

Great video once again, love this channel.

I am not sure why the distinction between metallophones and glockenspiels is made a couple of times in the video, given that glockenspiels are part of the metalophone family? In any case all these instruments xylophones, metallophones, glockenspiels would be under the umbrella of idiophones (the body of the instrument itself resonates to produce sound) as opposed to membranophones (a membrane resonates to produce sound, as in drums).

I am a bit confused by this metallophone VS glockenspiel argument, so anyone that gets it please explain!

[RichardsKindermusikladen]

Hey, great video, but: Austria is Austria and Germany is Germany and Orff and Keetman were from Germany. Xylo is definately Greek.