a story about mallets

This is a story Saori told me recently. One of Saori's friends from Japan went to visit her in Stuttgart. Saori's friend plays a musical instrument like a marimba or a zylophone or a glockenspiel but not any one of those. Neither one of us could remember what it was called.

Anyway, this friend said to Saori, hey I play professionally, and I want to get some great mallets. There is a very old German man who makes the best mallets in the world, let's go see him. So they take a train a bus out to his house which is also his workshop and salesroom, a reasonable distance from Stuttgart.

The old man invites them in and then proceeds to measure Saori's friend for mallets. The process sounds a lot like picking a wand on Diagon Alley. He had her play for him with a basic mallet so he could get a feel for what she needed, and then they went through what sounded like an hour of testing and balancing. The wood handle material, the size of the thing at the end, the material, the finishes. Each of the mallets are hand made by this one guy, and run at least a hundred dollars each. But Saori's friend swears they are worth every penny. She took home two pairs, each left and right slightly different to account for the difference in the hand usage.