As you may know, Nils Westdal and I make up the production team, Keston and Westdal. We have a variety of production techniques, but no matter how we are working, we end up with dozens of ideas that don’t get fully developed.
Every so often we review these ideas and consider revisiting pieces that are interesting, but most of the time they collect virtual dust on backup drives. Here’s an example of one of the ideas that have been sitting in limbo; in this case, since October 6, 2005.
I took the liberty of minimally arranging the parts and mixing the instruments, but I have added no processing. The entire mix is in mono with no panning or EQ. The bass guitar is running through an outboard phaser, so I soloed it for the outro so you can hear how that sounds.
Unfinished Idea X.5
Today I was digging through my recording archives and came across a nice example of me running my Rhodes through a wah wah pedal with a little overdrive on it. So not being one to leave well enough alone, I sequenced the recording into a short phrase at 90 bpm. 
So, what do I do with all these samples of different mallets on piano strings, and other areas of the instrument? How about putting them all into a drum machine? Better yet, a virtual drum machine, like 
Here’s another example of using a mallet to get sounds out of my piano. In this case, instead of striking the main part of the string, I let the mallet bounce on the small piece of string after the bridge. This part of the piano is traditionally not used to create sound and the pitches are quite high and not tuned, similar to the area between the tuning pegs and the nut of a guitar. 
This dissonant phrase of piano was created by using a metal mallet to gently taps the stings on the piano in the upper register. I’ve been experimenting with getting some unique sounds out of my piano by not using the keyboard.