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The recent kalimba craze has been fueled by a huge influx of Chinese-made kalimbas over the last 4 years. These kalimbas have made so extreme a mark on the world that a great many people incorrectly believe the kalimba to be a Chinese instrument. Nope! The earliest kalimbas were made in Central Africa, around present-day Cameroon, about 3000 years ago. The first metal-tined instruments were made about 1300 years ago, in present-day Zimbabwe. And, since 1954, the Hugh Tracey kalimbas have been made in South Africa. Please, I invite you to meet the team of South African workers at African Musical Instruments (AMI) in Grahamstown, South Africa. Vuyolethu (Vuyo) Ntleki

The Olive-9 is a very interesting kalimba. It fits beautifully in your hands. The wood body has a resonant sound chamber routed into it, providing an expressive wah. The pentatonic tuning is very liberating – it plays in A minor, C major, and a neutral D (neither major nor minor – see the video tab to experience this one). This tuning is great for jamming! Perhaps the best part of the Olive-9 is its price tag. This one will take you to different places than your typical kalimba, and the journey is definitely worth your time and effort. The Olive-9, in the A minor pentatonic scale, is great for jamming.

    The PDF Version of the Best Ever Book on 8-Note Kalimba Music is now available. I wrote this book in 2006 when I was teaching 8-note kalimba to early elementary school children on Tuesdays, to inner city middle school kids on Wednesdays, and to high school aged youth in the downtown library on Thursdays. I had to create some very simple materials so the beginners could get it. And I found that they did get it. Even the 6 and 7-year-olds I worked with could readily follow the tablature up the page, even though it is not the direction the rest of the world reads musical notation. The

The whole concept of kalimba music, in my mind, is bouncing the right thumb energy off of the left thumb energy, and watching where they dance together. Or you can take it to the next level, and play with two thumbs and an index finger, with all three energies dancing in a triangle. But what if you don’t have the use of one or the other of your thumbs? I would think just playing with one thumb might be a bit dull. But you can get that same sort of kalimba experience by using two or three fingers from one of your hands. The the note layout of the Moon-10

At Kalimba Magic, we give you the tools to succeed on your kalimba journey. The kalimba has great depth and breadth, and you can gain a lot from the resources we have arrayed here for kalimba players at all levels. The “Learn to Play” section is a perfect place to help you start your journey. Our job is to help you to understand your kalimba, how it is set up, and how to keep it sounding sweet and in tune. We invented Kalimba Tablature in 2004 – of course we are the experts! Tablature is much easier to read than staff notation is – it is just a map of

Our new system works much better than our old system. In my mind, our instructional downloads are the best thing we have going at Kalimba Magic. I love creating the music, the lessons, and arrangements.  Creating these kalimba ebooks is my super power. Too bad it was so hard for so many of my customers to get those ebooks. I often had to send them download links “by hand” in emails. Kalimba Magic updated its web site to Word Press in December 2020. Before then, the Kalimba Magic instructional downloads often did not work right. While I still see some problems with customer’s downloads, this system is working much better

For use with the 11-Note Hugh Tracey Pentatonic Kalimba. Here is the intro to the book: The G Major Pentatonic Scale: The G Minor Pentatonic Scale: Why would you want a pentatonic kalimba? It is harmonically simple – a good choice for new kalimba players. It is easier to play than other kalimbas, due to the large tines and extra space between the tines. It has the same scale as the Native American Flute – meaning it can access that same ancient culture space through its music. In fact, primitive cultures all around the world use the pentatonic scale. In other words: take away a few notes from your regular

The 21-Note Kalimba can use all the 17-Note/C Books. Several Chinese companies have been making pretty good 17-note kalimbas lately. They are roughly copies of the Hugh Tracey Treble Kalimba, but are tuned to the key of C. I paint my 17-Note Kalimbas in C differently than suggested by the Chinese, so that the kalimba is consistent with my library of tablature. More recently, there have been some 21-Note Kalimbas made. This post shows you how at least some of these kalimbas are tuned, and how you might paint them so that you can use Kalimba Magic materials to learn to play.   How to Tune and Paint a 21-Note

As with most good things, this is a work in progress. Kalimba Magic is now a modern wordpress web site. As such it is (theoretically) much easier for me to maintain and (presumably) much easier for the user to navigate. That said, I know there are a great number of problems. There is still 5-year-old content that I need to update, and there are a lot of pages that have sloppy formatting. Perhaps the biggest loss is the 2005 – 2015 archival Kalimba Tips and Kalimba Newsletter Articles. That old content stuck around for the last five years, but now it is gone. If there is a particular post of