A mark tree (also known as a nail tree, chime tree, or set of bar chimes) is a

percussion instrument A percussion instrument is a musical instrument that is sounded by being struck or scraped by a beater including attached or enclosed beaters or rattles struck, scraped or rubbed by hand or struck against another similar instrument. Exc ...

used primarily for musical colour. It consists of many small chimes—typically cylinders of solid aluminium or hollow brass tubing 3/8" in diameter—of varying lengths, hung from a bar. They are played by sweeping a finger or stick through the length of the hanging chimes. They are mounted in pitch order to produce rising or falling

glissando In music, a glissando (; plural: ''glissandi'', abbreviated ''gliss.'') is a glide from one pitch to another (). It is an Italianized musical term derived from the French ''glisser'', "to glide". In some contexts, it is distinguished from the ...

s. Unlike tubular bells, another form of chime, the chimes on a mark tree do not produce definite pitches, as they produce

inharmonic In music, inharmonicity is the degree to which the frequencies of overtones (also known as partials or partial tones) depart from whole multiples of the fundamental frequency ( harmonic series). Acoustically, a note perceived to have a singl ...

(rather than

harmonic A harmonic is a wave with a frequency that is a positive integer multiple of the ''fundamental frequency'', the frequency of the original periodic signal, such as a sinusoidal wave. The original signal is also called the ''1st harmonic'', t ...

) spectra. The mark tree is named after its inventor, studio percussionist Mark Stevens, who devised it in 1967. When he could not come up with a name, percussionist

Emil Richards Emil Richards (born Emilio Joseph Radocchia; September 2, 1932 – December 13, 2019) was an American vibraphonist and percussionist. Biography Musician Richards began playing the xylophone aged six. In High School, he performed with the Hartf ...

dubbed the instrument the "mark tree". The mark tree should not be confused with two similar instruments: * Wind chimes are mounted in a circle with a hanging striker strung in the center; they may be solid or hollow and made of many types of material, whereas the mark tree is mounted in a linear fashion and normally has solid metal bars. * The

bell tree A bell tree, also known as tree bellsBeck, John. ''Encyclopedia of Percussion.'' Taylor and Francis, 1995. or Chinese bell tree (often confused with the mark tree), is a percussion instrument, consisting of vertically nested inverted metal bow ...

is a set of graduated cup-shaped

bell A bell is a directly struck idiophone percussion instrument. Most bells have the shape of a hollow cup that when struck vibrates in a single strong strike tone, with its sides forming an efficient resonator. The strike may be made by an inte ...

s mounted vertically along a center post.

References

* {{Authority control Musical instruments played with drum sticks Percussion idiophones 20th-century percussion instruments Unpitched percussion instruments Drum kit components

See also

References