Marimba Takeover: All Your Favorite Bands

I have a soft spot a mile wide for a good anthem. So when our local radio station first played this gem of a song by Dawes (do watch it -- there is someone playing air guitar on a chicken) that culminated with the chorus wishing for us all that our favorite bands would stay together, I was hooked.

Being a musician means that when  you hear a really great tune it is absolutely NOT enough to just listen to it over and over, it means you have to find a way to participate in that tune, thank you very much. So I started trying to figure out the chords and melody, wondering if I could be a piano, guitar, and voice all at once.

​It was tricky. Piano chords sound good when you just play them and let them ring. But when I plunked those same chords on the marimba, it sounded a little empty. I would need to waggle my hands a bit to fill things out. But waggling wasn't enough -- the melody is actually pretty fantastically intricate, and holding four mallets meant the "voice mallet" (the one closest to the camera) was getting thrown off by the others wiggling about hilter-kilter. So I had to inform the other mallets they'd need to actually move in time, with the melody fitting in like a little puzzle. And finally, I had to get them to move in time in a way that wasn't too chunka-chunka-thud-thud -- I wanted them to feel like a nice stream of sound with the melody gliding over the top. I used three rounder, softer yarn mallets on the bottom and a cord mallet on top to try to create that sound. 
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​Below, I'm including my chicken-scratch music, which doesn't have the voicings or accompaniment rhythms but gives both you and my brain a general idea of how it all comes together:

And below is the my full version of "All Your Favorite Bands," including a little opener and bridge not notated, which for now I'm keeping simple and hymn-style, though I have suspicions it might evolve to rock a bit more ...