Mark Holdaway

All your holiday favorites, arranged for the Hugh Tracey Treble in G Click to Purchase the Easy Christmas Treble PDF Download This collection of Christmas favorites has been arranged specifically for the Hugh Tracey Treble Kalimba in G. We started with a set of generic arrangements, but refined several of them so all the songs are comfortable and easy to play on the 17-Note Hugh Tracey Treble kalimba. I have been playing Christmas Carols on the kalimba for 20 years. Not only is it a fine way to learn your kalimba, working on songs you already know. It is also a fantastic way to cultivate feelings of joy and gratitude during the lead-up

All your holiday favorites, arranged for the 15-note Alto in G Click to Purchase the Easy Christmas PDF Download This collection of Christmas favorites has been arranged specifically for the Hugh Tracey Alto Kalimba in G. We started with a set of generic arrangements, but refined several of them so all the songs are comfortable and easy to play on the 15-Note Alto. I myself have been playing Christmas Carols on the kalimba for 20 years. Playing carols is a fine way to learn your kalimba, working on songs you already know. It is also a great way to learn about classical harmony. Playing carols is a fantastic way to cultivate feelings

This is the main technique I use to keep on the happy side of life The Christmas Medley you hear is available on the Kalimba Christmas CD While I have not been diagnosed with clinical depression, I am prone to struggle with depression.   Or rather, I would struggle with depression, except that I have a powerful tool at my disposal that proves effective against depression. Some days I wake up and tell myself I don’t need my early morning walk, and on those days, I tend to take a nosedive around 9 or 10 AM.  By then, I realize that this is my wake-up call.  If I don’t go out,

Are you looking for a different kind of kalimba experience? The Star-13 Kalimba is quite different from your standard 17-Note kalimba:   This kalimba has a crystal clear, beautiful ringing tone and long sustain. The special wah-wah effect, made by raising the kalimba up and down on a flat surface, gives you a great level of tonal expressiveness. The note layout, with 6 upper row notes and 7 lower row notes, provides interesting harmonic opportunities. It also inspires combining melody and self accompaniment. The range is soothing, going down to a G, lower than your typical kalimba in C. Even though the low note on the Star-13 Kalimba is G,

  This 40-page booklet uses colorful photos, graphical illustrations, tablature, and live sound links to convey how I play some of my favorite songs on the Magadi Star-13 kalimba. The Magadi Star-13 Kalimba is a super cool instrument. It is angelic in sound, with expressive mind-blowing special effects, and it is also really fun to play because of the unique note layout. Available Oct 11 2021: This hard copy booklet (small format, 6″ x 6″, so it fits the kalimba’s footprint) has 40 pages in four sections: Quick Start for people who already play kalimba (8 pages); Introduction for people new to the kalimba (10) pages); Easy Songs (8 pages);

Whenever I change the tuning on my kalimba in a small way, I have the sense that I am standing next to a great ocean of possibilities. I have experimented with hundreds of retunings. However, even a 13 tine kalimba will have billions of possible tunings. No matter how deep I go into alternative kalimba tunings, I will only scratch the surface of those possibilities. This blog post tries to do the math in a simple but persuasive way. By the way, those billions of tunings? Some will have redundant notes, meaning the same note twice, or more. But that is a thing in traditional African tunings. Another consideration: there

Customer Steve Says: “The other day a friend of mine asked why I had purchased so many kalimbas from Kalimba Magic. I bought several from other distributors and tried to find music to learn the kalimba. I made little progress until I found Kalimba Magic.   “I saw that Mark Holdaway had developed music training programs for many different types of kalimbas. The tablature-based music was easy to understand, downloadable as PDFs, and very inexpensive considering their great quality. The pricing of the instruments seemed reasonable so, I started to learn with a 15 key Alto Kalimba. It sounded good to me and felt very resonant in my hands. There

There has been so much rush in the direction of the 17-Note Kalimbas in recent years. There are a lot of other kalimba possibilities out there, each offering their own types of experiences. While any kalimba can be tuned to a pentatonic scale (see Maurice White’s “Evil Tuning”, which is a pentatonicaly tuned 17-Note Treble), you get something altogether different when you make a specially designed pentatonic kalimba. In this video, I feel wild and extremely powerful playing the minor pentatonic scale on this kalimba. What is the pentatonic scale?   An important thing to know: primitive cultures all around the world used the various pentatonic in their music and