Mark Holdaway

Dear Kalimba Magic: “Just wanted to reach out with a big ‘Thank You’, Mark, for making the kalimba accessible to me! “I originally purchased one of your kalimbas back in 2017 for my partner. She has a natural gift to pick up nearly any instrument and play it perfectly and she loved playing with the one I got her. I recently started poking around with that one and after purchasing a very cheap one on Amazon to make sure I wasn’t just momentarily infatuated, I purchased another one from you for myself along with the corresponding Middle Eastern Music e-book. I come from a very musically-gifted family but I’ve never

Here is a general history of how people notated kalimba music, roughly 1950 through 2004: @kalimbamagic##Kalimba ##kalimbatutorial ##kalimbatablature ##kalimbahistory♬ original sound – kalimbamagic Here is a quick guide to the kalimba tablature I invented in 2004: @kalimbamagicIntro to Kalimba Tablature. ##kalimba ##kalimbatutorial ##kalimbatabs ##kalimbamusic♬ original sound – kalimbamagic I have written like 60 instructional downloads and 30 hard copy books for various kalimbas, mostly based on my kalimba tablature. This little video gives a quick tour of some of the breadth and depth of the kalimba books I have created: @kalimbamagicI’ve written dozens of Kalimba Books for many types of Kalimba.##kalimbatutorial♬ original sound – kalimbamagic   How to Read and

And what about staff notation for a kalimba? Recently, Lilly wrote to Kalimba Magic: “I am experienced with reading standard staff musical notation, and I don’t really like the kalimba tablature, and I don’t understand why you use it. Can I just read staff notation with my kalimba? Please give me the main advantage to using tablature to notate kalimba music.” Yes, Lilly, I think there are some really big advantages to using kalimba tablature rather than staff notation. Consider kalimba tablature to be my chosen way of expressing my 33 years of kalimba-playing experience to you. It is a doorway to my kalimba-playing thought process.  First, it’s good to

Click, Save, Print, and Fill in Your Own Notes Kalimba Tablature is generalizable to any kalimba, and is powerful enough to cover almost any music   Playing kalimba is such a liberating activity! You seemingly have nothing but good choices in front of you. You can really cut loose and do whatever you want. Often, it works very well, because most kalimba tunings make success highly probable. And it’s really fun to just let things flow. You can also make great progress on the instrument by developing a new awareness – paying careful attention to something you love that you just came up with while playing, and then playing it again and

Using the universal language of tine painting, Your 15-Note Alto or 17-Note Kalimba in C can read 8-Note Tablature! Click to download the Greensleeves tablature in PDF Two years ago, I made a video demonstration of my kalimba tablature (which I originally created in 2004 to facilitate learning and sharing music on kalimba), playing Greensleeves on the 8-Note kalimba. The illustration at the top of this article is from that video. Three of the kalimba’s tines were painted red, and the three corresponding columns in the tablature were also colored red – the tablature is a replica of the kalimba, and each column represents a different tine. What if you

You can learn to play this song yourself with Free Tab for Alto and 17-Note Kalimbas The classic holiday song “Let it Snow” has a great trick that usually doesn’t work on the kalimba. Some songs, including this one, modulate to a different key temporarily. Usually, when you modulate to another key, you have “accidentals” – that is, notes that are not in the original key, or even on the kalimba! Well, “Let it Snow” can be played happily on your kalimba with a bit of musical sleight-of-hand. You can hear the modulation in “Let it Snow” – it happens in the bridge at 0:42 in the video. At that

Compare: 10-Note Heart, 17-Note Heart, Hugh Tracey Alto, and Hugh Tracey Treble Kalimbas Kalimba Magic has “Easy Christmas” ebooks for each of four of our best selling kalimbas. A big part of every ebook is the sound recordings for each song. This provides us with a great data set for comparing these four popular kalimbas, side by side.   Without any prejudice, I recorded the Christmas carols on each kalimba, trying my best to make each one sound as good as it could. The sound editing and processing is fairly minimal and very similar for all four kalimbas. You get to decide: which sounds better to your ears? Which is

Christmas Carols are so so beautiful on kalimba I had spent 10 years getting good at playing kalimba, comfortable with holding it in my hands… but I was still mostly about making music up on the spot and improvising. But in 2002, I decided to really learn a whole bunch of Christmas carols on the kalimba. Creating these arrangements and then committing them to memory was the single biggest step in my personal improvement as a kalimba player. But now that I have perfected so many of these Carols, I can pass these arrangements and this Kalimba Wisdom to you. Blessings!   Part One of my Classic Christmas Kalimba Medley

At last, the hard Copy Book is available! Get your Christmas Carol book today! Christmas carols on the kalimba can be so beautiful. They are my specialty – and now, they are my special gift that I share with the world. This collection of Christmas favorites has been arranged specifically for the 17-Note kalimba in C. This is the same content as the download of the same title, but it is a spiral-bound flat-laying hard copy book. This 60-page book has tablature and sound recordings for 32 different sacred and secular Christmas songs. Most are pretty easy, but there are also some more challenging carols to give you room to