Mark Holdaway

The 8-Note is a great place to start your kalimba journey Get the Best Ever 8-Note Book When Hugh Tracey recorded and studied every kalimba he could find in southern Africa, he discovered roughly 40% of the kalimbas had the pentatonic scale (5 notes per octave), 40% were hexatonic (6 note), and 20% were like our modern scales, heptatonic (7 note).  The 8-note kalimba, in its standard tuning, actually has only 7 unique notes per octave, and the top note is the same as the bottom note, but is an octave higher. Can you say “Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti Do”?  It turns out that there is a

This is the instrument Andrew Tracey calls “The Original Mbira” Get the Student Karimba Book If you are a beginning kalimba player who wants to play western music, the 8-Note kalimba is a great place to start. But if you want to play African music, I would recommend you get the Student karimba. The Student karimba is an 8-note or 9-note instrument that attempts to reconstruct what Andrew Tracey believes was a common instrument over 1000 years ago.  He argues that this instrument gave rise to several other well known traditional instruments, such as the mbira dzavadzimu and the karimba.  As such, there are lots of traditional African songs you

Half the 2B/14 kalimbas we shipped last month were in E1 Tuning – Now there is music for the E1 Tuning Download the 5-page, 60 measure instructional tab in PDF Thomas Bothe is famous for his delightful kalimbas as well as for his unique, individual kalimba tunings.  However, there was one day last month when I was fulfilling orders, and I tuned three 2B/14 kalimbas to the E1 tuning – which is perhaps the classic 2B tuning that most represents Thomas Bothe’s soul.  Simple, delicate, easy, and beautiful. Two of the three customers requested the E1 tuning after they had learned about it from the various 2B tunings I have

This electronic recording breaks the song into small pieces and starts slow Learn More About 4-phrase Mbira Music One of the best ways to learn to play is by playing with someone else. If you don’t actually have someone else to who knows the song to play along with, another way is to play along with a recording of the song you are trying to learn. Here we present something new in terms of Kalimba Magic instructional materials – the mbira song “Kuzanga” played progressively – meaning at first very slowly and speeding up gradually to help in learning to play. Also, the song is broken up into sections, which

I mark key root notes with different colors – and this works on other instruments too! Archival Practice Tips The mbira dzavadzimu is one of the pinnacles of the traditional African lamellaphones (thumb pianos), and its music is rich and sweet.  I consider the mbira and its music to be the highest intellectual wonder of ancient Africa.  And we can learn to play this venerable music today in our modern world. I have a confession to make: while I easily picked up the kalimba and taught myself to play, I have had a very difficult time with the mbira.  I bought my first mbira more than 15 years ago, and

20 Minutes a Day – You can make this a spiritual practice Archival Practice Tips You can spend 20 minutes a day doing any one particular activity, and you will get better at it.  If you did yoga for 20 minutes a day, your strength, flexibility, and balance would improve.  If you ran for 20 minutes a day, your cardiovascular function and physical stamina would improve.  If you meditated for 20 minutes a day, your level of insight and your outlook would probably improve. What if you played kalimba for 20 minutes a day, every day? I myself sometimes have difficulty finding the time to play kalimba every day, but