April 9, 2016

Great music for G minor and Ake Bono tuned 11-Note Pentatonic Kalimbas Click to download Tablature PDF for the Ake Bono piece It turns out there are dozens of possible ways to arrange the notes into a pentatonic scale. A pentatonic scale is any scale that has five unique notes per octave, a simplification over the standard seven note major scale.  The pentatonic scales tend to sound raw, earthy, primitive. About 40% of the kalimbas Hugh Tracey encountered in his travels around Africa had various sorts of pentatonic scales, and Maurice White of the band Earth, Wind and Fire put his kalimba into a pentatonic scale to make it resonate more

A Guide to Changing from G Major Tuning to Other Exotic Tunings Why would anyone retune their kalimba? Well, I hope you DO tune up your kalimba every few weeks or so, at least to maintain its correct original tuning. However, once you learn the skills required to brush up the kalimba’s tuning, you also possess the skills required to explore alternative tunings – you just need to push or pull the tines a bit farther than the very delicate moves required to fine-tune the kalimba. But again, why would someone retune their kalimba to a different tuning? Because different musics are available to different tunings, and because different tunings help

Francis Bebey used this tuning in his song “Breaths” – what a great tuning! Click to go to Video of This Kalimba Someone called a few months back. His wife had recently died, and he was working on healing from that great loss. He had played mbira dzavadzimu in the past – and since the mbira is all about helping us to connect with the ancestral spirits, I figured he wanted some help with that. But instead of being drawn to mbira music, this man was drawn to the song “Breaths”, written by Francis Bebey, with lyrics focusing on how our ancestors live on in the physical world around us.