I recently acquired a large number of xylophones and glockenspiels from an elementary school music teacher who was going to throw them out. All the keys are mixed up in a huge bag and I frankly have no idea where to start in trying to reconstruct them. The glockenspiels all have places for 13 notes and some of the xylophones have places for 13 notes and some have 11. Does anyone happen to know if what the standard beginning note on such instruments is? This would greatly help in my quest to put them back together.

can i have one?

i think they tend to start at C?

I was gonna guess C. I'm a bit confused though because there are no sharps or flats in my bag of notes except for a few Bb and a few F#.

i guess the Bb ones are for like, an F major xylophone? do they have key-specific ones? F# is for G Major i think

There are lots of missing keys to these instruments. So far I have only put together the glockenspiels and the stuff I had only made two full ones. One is in the major scale (they all seem to have a middle B key which is noted as special by a little line underneath the letter B) and I had to kind of improvise with the other. I ran out of D keys so I wound up using Bb and F# instead. So now the instrument is tuned:

C E F F# G A Bb B C E F F# G

I have no idea what scale this is, if it is one at all, but it sounds pretty cool. Kind of jazzy.

^^ your xylophone should have all 12 notes, 13 being to repeat the root. No idea about the 11-note models.

also xylophones are usually like 5-6 octaves and made of wood? you might have something else like a bellkit

^^ your xylophone should have all 12 notes, 13 being to repeat the root. No idea about the 11-note models.

also xylophones are usually like 5-6 octaves and made of wood? you might have something else like a bellkit

No, the glockenspiels are metal but I have ten huge wooden xylophones too. I have not looked at the xylophone keys yet but I don't think there are sharps are flats in there, and like I said, with the exception of a few odd Bb and F# there were no sharps or flats in the bag of glockenspiel keys either. This may just that the person I got them from lost a shitload of them. I dunno.

Edit: From what I can find online, it seems that xylophones can be tuned pretty much any old way depending on where they are from and such. Chromatic, diatonic, pentatonic, and other scales are all very common. So I'm pretty much fucked trying to put the keys back on the correct way. My best bet would be to start with one diatonic and then try putting others together in other scales I think.