June 21, 2019

This eBook has Songs From the Soul of America… arranged for your kalimba Click to Purchase the Kalimba Americana Download for 17/C For all the good and bad things you can say about my country America right now, one thing that most people can agree on is that America is a great leader in musical innovation. This has been going on for centuries, and a lot of it has to do with the huge ethnic melting pot that the land of the free has always been. Know that this great country’s great music has always brought people together, across this land and across the world. I invite you to jump

Five + One Volumes of Mbira Dzavadzimu Music B. Michael Williams has loved playing – and teaching – mbira and karimba I have great news about B. Michael Williams, as well as some sad news. On the plus side, he is making a strong finish to his career as an academic, a percussionist, and a proponent of the mbira and karimba: he has just published his 5th and final volume of mbira songs in his easy-to-read mbira tablature, available from Bachovich Music Publications or Steve Weiss Music. On the sad side, Michael tells me that he has been diagnosed with both Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases. While he had the wherewithal to

What? Those squiggly lines are supposed to mean something? There are going to be some really great kalimba players in the next 2-10 years. A lot of kids are getting into the kalimba, and some of them will study, and go off and work on kalimba on their own, and invent their own style, and then reappear on the world stage as master kalimba players. Cool! Go for it! One budding young kalimba player has been avidly tearing up all of the instructional material we sell for the 17-Note kalimba in C… but when she didn’t understand what those squiggly lines meant, we heard from her about it. Those squiggles are called “rests.”

OK – at the same time, play one note with your left thumb, and one with your right – and I’ll show you how to make that sound great every time The kalimba is fundamentally a polyphonic instrument – meaning it plays multiple notes at the same time. It does have more limitations in its ability to play multiple notes than, say, piano or guitar. But those limitations on the kalimba also make it very easy to make some very pretty music  – for example, any two adjacent notes on one side will always harmonize. Three adjacent notes will always make some sort of triad, a sweet three-note chord. But what

And how to play melodies above them. This recipe works for any diatonic kalimba with alternating note layout In an article I wrote earlier this month, I said that every non-traditional kalimba in the world owes its existence to Hugh Tracey. (Of course, they also owe their existence to the hundreds and thousands of people in Africa who pioneered and played the karimba, mbira and related instruments over the last 1000 years.) But most non-traditional kalimbas are copies of the Hugh Tracey kalimba’s design and note arrangement. That note arrangement makes it particularly easy to create melodies high up on the instrument, and simultaneously to produce good chords low down