Mark Holdaway

What is a tuning? Why do you retune? How do you retune? Click to visit the first sansula tip The sansula is a great instrument for so many reasons: its lush tone, beautiful craftsmanship, the smooth metal tine tips, the amazing wah-like effects it produces totally acoustically, its simple 9-note layout with staggered tines, and its intuitive tuning that literally transforms nearly-random thumb twiddling into actual music. However, the same tuning that is geared toward instant success turns out to be very limiting. I realized this early on, but I so loved the tone and feel of the sansula; I wanted to do more with it. So I started to

The C Major Sansula Tuning has always been beautiful – and now it is accessible! Get the C Major Sansula Instructional Download Kalimba Magic sansulas are normally sold in the A Minor tuning, which produces music of an enchanting, mystical and melancholy nature. I created the C Major sansula tuning in 2011 in response to a customer’s request for a sansula in C.  I love this tuning; it is simply happy and positive, potentially majestic and even euphoric. I am often struck by how easy it is for the C Major sansula to produce music of great simplicity and beauty. If something gorgeous happens in the midst of my time spent with

Doug is a studio percussionist in NYC, and the kalimba is in his bag Click to visit Doug Fitch’s website Hi! I’m Doug Fitch, and I have been playing kalimba for about five years. I work as a studio musician in New York City. I’m a percussionist, and one of the special things I bring to the table is the kalimba, and specifically I like Hugh Tracey kalimbas the best.  I’ve found there is just nothing else like them out there. I own several, and have given them as gifts to friends and family. I’ll be sharing here some of what I’ve learned about playing, recording, and amplifying the kalimba.

How to understand a new tuning, and how to make sense of the tuning charts Click to visit the first pentatonic kalimba tip The pentatonic scales have a great power, related to the fact that playing them does not require as much thought as other scales demand. They have fewer notes, and they are simpler instruments, both physically (with more space between adjacent tines) and intellectually. However, there are some important basic things that you should know about pentatonic scales, and these little bits of wisdom are applicable to almost any scale at all. In other words, learn the lessons these simple scales have to teach, and you can take those

MT Lee Anna Rasar Specializes in the 6-Note Pentatonic One of the best kalimbas to use in music therapy is also our least expensive kalimba – the 6-Note Catania Pentatonic kalimba. While there are a lot of spirituals and children’s songs that can be played on the 6-Note Pentatonic, probably its best uses are improvisational in nature. You just pick it up, twiddle your thumbs, and music comes out! Lee Anna Rasar is a professor in the Music Therapy department at University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire. She has used the 6-Note pentatonic kalimba and other kalimbas extensively in music therapy. The following is from a letter that Lee Anna wrote to

A Guide to Changing from G Major Tuning to Other Exotic Tunings Why would anyone retune their kalimba? Well, I hope you DO tune up your kalimba every few weeks or so, at least to maintain its correct original tuning. However, once you learn the skills required to brush up the kalimba’s tuning, you also possess the skills required to explore alternative tunings – you just need to push or pull the tines a bit farther than the very delicate moves required to fine-tune the kalimba. But again, why would someone retune their kalimba to a different tuning? Because different musics are available to different tunings, and because different tunings help

Great music for G minor and Ake Bono tuned 11-Note Pentatonic Kalimbas Click to download Tablature PDF for the Ake Bono piece It turns out there are dozens of possible ways to arrange the notes into a pentatonic scale. A pentatonic scale is any scale that has five unique notes per octave, a simplification over the standard seven note major scale.  The pentatonic scales tend to sound raw, earthy, primitive. About 40% of the kalimbas Hugh Tracey encountered in his travels around Africa had various sorts of pentatonic scales, and Maurice White of the band Earth, Wind and Fire put his kalimba into a pentatonic scale to make it resonate more

Francis Bebey used this tuning in his song “Breaths” – what a great tuning! Click to go to Video of This Kalimba Someone called a few months back. His wife had recently died, and he was working on healing from that great loss. He had played mbira dzavadzimu in the past – and since the mbira is all about helping us to connect with the ancestral spirits, I figured he wanted some help with that. But instead of being drawn to mbira music, this man was drawn to the song “Breaths”, written by Francis Bebey, with lyrics focusing on how our ancestors live on in the physical world around us.