Mark Holdaway

While the scale isn’t the easiest thing to play on kalimba, you should have it at your fingertips A Box Lotus and a Regular Lotus Karimba The notes your kalimba plays are probably just like the white notes on the piano. However, the way you play them ends up being totally different from a piano… because the notes are organized differently than on a piano. Playing a scale on a piano, especially just on the white notes, is quite easy. Playing a scale on the kalimba is a bit harder, but the scale is one of the most useful bits of music you can learn – so please do learn

Only at Kalimba Magic This kalimba grew out of a beloved customer’s imagination and my interpretive kalimba skills This kalimba started life as a standard Hugh Tracey Alto kalimba with pickup, in standard G tuning. What is it now, and how did it get there? Let’s start with “How did this kalimba get to be this way?” This kalimba setup and tuning are the result of a series of requests from one of my repeat kalimba customers, Dajari Makena. He and I have collaborated developing great tunings. He wanted half the tines bent upward. He wanted a unique D minor tuning. He wanted something that reflected Africa. He wanted treble tines on

Play favorite folk and popular music on your Alto kalimba! Click to Purchase the Kalimba Americana Download This is the music I grew up with – the American song book! These are some of the songs that bind us together as citizens of the great American experiment. To many of us, this is some of the sweetest music in the world! This 54-page PDF download with clickable links to MP3 files has tablature for 29 different versions of 25 different songs. This book has enough easy songs to have a beginner playing right away, and it has enough complex songs to keep you working for months or longer!   This book’s

Learn more about Kalimba Tablature

Maurice White (of Earth, Wind & Fire fame) started playing the Hugh Tracey Kalimba in his signature tuning 50 years ago In ancient Africa there were dozens or even hundreds of great kalimba innovators, all lost to the dust of time. These ancestors we must honor, explicitly or implicitly, every time we pick up a kalimba. Two people of the modern era who have done the most to move the kalimba forward are Hugh Tracey and Maurice White. Hugh Tracey studied traditional African instruments extensively, and he also made the first commercial kalimbas to be marketed globally, starting in the 1950s. On this website, his name is well known. Maurice

The kalimba’s unique note layout really affects the music it makes Learn more about Kalimba Tablature A customer recently asked: “I am having a lot of trouble playing my kalimba. I took piano lessons as a child for three years and I think this is the trouble. Is there a tip to help me make sense of reading the kalimba music as opposed to reading piano music?” The kalimba and the piano are very different instruments! Two big differences between them are that the kalimba only has a small subset of the notes the piano has, and the notes on the kalimba are arranged in a way that is fundamentally different from

The “44 Beginner Songs” Book is a Printed, Paper Version of the Popular 44-Songs Download Click to Purchase the new “44 Beginner Songs” Book People have been asking me for a hard copy book for the newly popular 17-Note Kalimba in C – the new kalimbas that have been made in China over the last 18 months. These are sold under a variety of names, including Donner, Walter, Gecko, and Heart-17, but all of these are essentially the same instrument, with the same number of tines and the same note layout.  In other words, all of these kalimbas can use the same book. That book is “44 Beginner Songs for