November 27, 2008
Kalimba Magic NEWS
The Hang Drum and the Kalimba
The Hang Drum was invented in Switzerland around 2000.
I have to admit that if there is an instrument cooler than the kalimba, it would be the Hang Drum. It is sort of like a steel pan drum that you hit with your hands, and if you have never heard one, I invite you to go and see/hear what they are all about.
Manu Delago is using two different hang drums, each with different tunings,
to access more notes than any one hang drum has, permitting
chromatic
notes and more musical complexity.
Part of the genius of the Hang Drum is that it is a melodo-harmonic percussion instrument—you beat and bang on it, and out come beautiful tones. You set up a physical pattern, and out comes a melody. You hit multiple notes at the same time, and you get harmony. You don't need to understand what you are doing, but if you do understand, you are that much farther ahead. In this way, it is very much like the kalimba.
The hang drum comes custom-tuned for the purchaser in one of about 50 different ethnic scales from around the world. The typical Hang Drum note layout is similar to the kalimba's, in that the notes alternate from side to side:
The Hang Drum has a note layout which alternates from left to right.
I've played the hang drum, and they are beautiful, intuitive, and fun. They are wonderful instruments for improvising and just letting loose, and they work really well—even if you have no idea what you are doing. The only drawback is that they are very difficult to get. In a story on NPR's "All Things Considered", people who want a new Hang Drum travel to Switzerland and are screened to determine if they are a good person to own a Hang Drum, and used Hang Drums can go for well over $5000. At the moment of writing, there are no Hang Drums for sale on eBay.
The Hang Drum is tuned to the scale of the future owner's choosing as it is made. Different scales will have different feelings and emotional overtones. The scale determines what sort of music you will be able to make. Unlike a piano, which has every (Western) note and can play any scale and any sort of music, instruments like the Hang Drum restrict themselves to a small subset of those notes, so it is as if they have their own songs built into them. This is at once restricting (you will not be able to play very many songs you hear on the radio) and also liberating (the subset of notes which your Hang Drum offers represents its own little universe, and you can just jump in and swim in the logic of these notes without wondering if a note will be right or not). Once the Hang Drum has been tuned to a certain scale, it is not really possible for the owner to retune to a different scale.
Lately, several people who own and play Hang Drums have been purchasing kalimbas from me, specially tuned to their Hang Drum scale. If you own a Hang Drum, you have invested thousands of dollars in this special instrument. You can invest about $100 now to get a kalimba specially tuned to your drum. In other words, for only a few percent of the cost of your hang drum, you can double the number of people who are making melodic/harmonic music in your hang drum groove. Sounds like a great investment to me!
One of my clients, Spyros, says:
I have received my Kalimba. Everything looks and sounds as it should be. The instrument feels very sound in my two hands. I will be travelling extensively during October and unfortunately my Hang is out of the item list I will be having with me. No-matter how sad this is, the good thing is that the Kalimba with its amazing size will fit into my backpack!!!!
You can watch Spyros playing Hang Drum.
One advantage the kalimba has over the Hang Drum is that you can retune it to virtually any scale you can imagine. You yourself can retune your kalimba in a matter of minutes. The Hang Drum comes in these scales. To date, I have tuned kalimbas to 10 of those scales: Aeolian, Dorian, Ake Bono, Hitzazkiar, Ionian, Lydian, Minor Pentatonic, Major Pentatonic, Mixolydian, and Phrygian. Even if you don't own a Hang Drum, the list of Hang Drum scales is a great resource for kalimba players looking to play in a different feel. And, unlike the Hang Drum, your kalimba has access to all of these scales with just a few moments of retuning.
On the other hand, you probably don't want to retune during a performance, though it is possible to do, especially if someone else is the front man or front woman, and they can talk to the audience for a moment while you retune. At a recent hour long performance, I played six different kalimbas, each tuned to a different key and a different scale, each evoking different sounds and emotions.
If you have a Hang Drum and would like a kalimba tuned to go with your Hang, or if you would like to explore the world of scales, I am in a good position to figure out different possibilities open to you. So, I invite you to contact me to talk about the best tuning for your kalimba.
If you really want a Hang Drum, but you have no hope of purchasing one for thousands of dollars, you can always get a kalimba! But there are now inexpensive alternatives to the Hang Drum—though they feel and play very different than the Hang Drum. One of them is the HAPI Drum. Allegedly, HAPI stands for "hand-activated percussion instrument." But I think that HAPI stands for HANG in the same way that the computer in the movie "2001: A Space Odessy" was named HAL (each letter is a neighbor of the letters in IBM).
The HAPI Drum is an inexpensive alternative to the Hang Drum.
Discover the world of kalimbas at http://www.kalimbamagic.com
Shop for kalimbas and accessories at the Kalimba Magic Shop