Mark Holdaway

I love the enchanting feeling of this Middle eastern Kalimba tuning! As you can see, this tuning pretty much plays itself! (I haven’t written any books for this Desert Moon Tuning… but you don’t really need a book for it.) If you order a Moon-10 Kalimba, make sure to select “Desert Moon Tuning”. The Moon-10 Kalimba is usually tuned to a C pentatonic scale… but there are many other tunings you can put this really cool kalimba into. I absolutely love the Desert Moon Tuning… one of the exotic tunings I created for the Moon-10 kalimba a few years ago. Forget about learning to play this song or that song

Hokema has long made top notch kalimbas. They became really famous when they made their Sansulas with two rows of narrow, very smooth tines. The two rows really improved the playability of the instrument, but with only 9 notes? The music it produced was beautiful, easy to create, but rather limited in scope. However: this here B15 kalimba? I haven’t been this excited to play a new kalimba in a long time! I am overjoyed. Now Hokema has released the B15, a 15-Note instrument covering exactly two octaves of the key of G major. This is the same tuning as the Hugh Tracey Alto Kalimba. But as the notes lead

I’m sorry to say that the promised Volume II of “365 Days to Kalimba Mastery” is not finished. That is, if you are one of the 100+ people who pre-ordered it at half price… you will have to wait another few weeks.  You can still pre-order it now for  half price at $6.  I’ll come through… hopefully by December 1 2022. I do have a good track record – I was able to put out Volume I on time… and I have written over 100 kalimba books and kalimba downloads over the last 17 years. Creating these books and helping people learn to play so many different kalimbas has been

This “mixolydian pentatonic” scale, derived from Francis Bebey’s 1970s tuning, makes cool groovy music!  For decades, I knew about the major pentatonic scale and the minor pentatonic scale. They were actually the same scale, just starting at different points in the scale. Kalimba has taught me that there are actually a whole bunch of pentatonic scales. A “pentataonic scale” is any scale that has five different notes per octave. The first pentatonic scales we learn about are the black notes on a piano. They come in groups of 2 (between C, D, and E) and then in groups of 3 (between F, G, A and B). Then you repeat

For each of 10 popular kalimba setups, this book includes: pages of blank chord charts, pages of blank tablature, and several useful alternative tunings. A great notebook to capture and save your kalimba compositions. Get the Blank Tablature eBook Get the Blank Tablature Book If you get the eBook, you can print out as many pages of each as you want. If you get the blank tabs hardcopy book… we will send you both the hardcopy book and the ebook so you will never run out! Here is the back cover of the Kalimba Magic Bank Tablature book – showing you which kalimbas we cover in the book.   The

Different Kalimba Tunings Inspire Different Musics How many great tunings are available to your 17-Note Kalimba? Realistically, I would say there are thousands of excellent tunings, but most of them haven’t been discovered yet. But here are four of the tunings that people ask for the most, in a 60-second video that lets you compare and contrast the tunings… by going backward and forward. Left to right: (red) Standard C Major Tuning. (purple) C Minor Tuning. (yellow) Middle Eastern Tuning. (blue) EW&F “Evil” Tuning. You can get any of these tunings on any of the 17-Note Kalimbas in C. I’ve written tons of stuff for the 17-Note Standard C Tuning:

I have always had a lot to say about the kalimba – about its history, about how to play it, how to keep it in tune, how to tune it. I also have a lot to say about how the kalimba makes me feel, and kalimba music does for me. I invite you to tune into a new series of introspective kalimba videos I’ve been making, where I combine my kalimba playing with part of the story I am trying to tell. This gives you two channels of information, and I feel that the music and the words help each other tell thee story together. Here are three:   As

If you want to perform some carols on kalimba this Christmas, start here! Over the years, I have created a lot of books, instructional materials, videos, and articles about playing Christmas music on your kalimba. For your Christmas consideration, I have collected it all in one place for you. If you want to spend money, we have plenty of books, ebooks, and CDs for you to take advantage of. If you don’t want to spend money, we have created a lot of free resources, and they are all listed here. You might ask why I have so many resources for playing Christmas music on the kalimba. It is because I

We have just a few Heart-17 Kalimbas left. They haven’t been for sale for several months, and we found four more. These few may be the last ones we will be selling, so if you want one, now is your chance.   Resources For the 17-Note Kalimba in C Learning to Play 17-Note Kalimba in C African Karimba Songs on the 17-Note Kalimba in C