Hing hon franken-glock problems :-(

[Dj Task Manager]

Ive been building a hing hon into a glockenspeil so when you strike the bars with the beaters it plays the corresponding note on the keyboard, so you get sonorous glock-sound with simulanious squarewave grunt.  Sexy. This is SEEMINGLY easily done as all the keys go to ground so the ends of the beaters just need grounding contacts to trigger*.  Or so I thought...

It turns out though that you have to have the beater in contact with the bar for a fractionally longer period of time than an ordinary bar strike to get it to trigger with any regularity.  This is no good as then that dampens the bar and stops it from ringing.  I was thinking this is possibly failing because the keyboard is probably scanning all the notes in turn to see if one is being triggered and if it doesnt happen that that corresponds with when the beater strike is it doesnt register.  
Correct?

A sort of fix i thought of was to make keys to press that strike the underside of the bars (like some childrens toy glock things you may have seen) then have the contacts on the keys, special gloves to connect finger presses to ground might be needed but from playing around with the circuit just touching key contacts with skin seems to trigger them so silly gloves might not be necessary.

Any thoughts on another fix or should I chuck it in the bin?


Cheers  Mike

photos : http://mpanimation.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/sad-hing-hon-franken-glock.html



* (also the beaters have little mics on the ends to pic up the sound of the glock bars which work rather well and are good for tremalo and feedback fun!)