Tips

A download and some free tablature Click to download the full PDF tablature for “Ends on Blue” I admit it – I got carried away with my tip on the traditional mbira song “Kuzanga” arranged for the Alto kalimba.  That is a challenging piece, but I know at least one person who will rise to that challenge – hopefully many more. Now, let’s do something that might be of interest to just about everyone – easy music for the alto kalimba. The first place to start if you are playing the alto kalimba is the Alto Primer.  This book takes a very simple African riff and shows you about a

The glissando permits you to play a chord of three or four notes Shop for Kalimbas, enjoy 13% off with coupon code CAT13 Not all kalimbas are laid out in the same way, but a lot of kalimba makers follow the lead of Hugh Tracey in laying out the notes to require an alternating left-right pattern to go up or down the scale.  If you have an alternating note layout, two or three adjacent notes on one side of the kalimba will sound great together. This is a chord – at least three adjacent notes.  Easy! But how should one play three or more notes simultaneously on a kalimba?  

Here is tablature for “Kuzanga” on Bb Treble Kalimba Click to download the full PDF tablature for Kuzanga on Bb Treble Kalimba “Kuzanga” is a song for the mbira dzavadzimu, which is the instrument that accompanied the original, traditional African song.  I’ve been working on “Kuzanga” now for about six weeks on my mbira, and even though I have a long way to go, I can still feel myself getting better each day – it’s a wonderful feeling. While it is possible to play most of the “Kuzanga” variations on the Alto kalimba and the African karimba, the Bb Treble is much better for this song – the two extra

Here is the mbira song “Kuzanga,” translated onto the karimba – get the tablature for free! Click to download the full PDF tablature for Kuzanga on Karimba I have been learning to play “Kuzanga” on the mbira, a 24-note traditional African lamellaphone that in my mind represents one of the pinnacles of ancient African ingenuity and art.  I realized earlier today: it should be possible to play “Kuzanga” on the African karimba – and it is!  Included here, for your benefit, is tablature of “Kuzanga” for the karimba, for free!  Enjoy. When we transfer “Kuzanga” to the African karimba, with 17 notes (it actually has only 13 unique notes, as

The kalimba journey can reflect your inner spiritual journey Get the Best Ever 8-Note Book   Kalimba music tends, like the concept of Karma, to be cyclic. With Karma, what goes around, comes around, basically. Our job is to improve on what we put into the world, and what we get back will similarly improve. We can study and practice this our whole lives, and hopefully get better and better in all ways. When we are learning to play some new musical piece, our playing is plagued with stumbles and errors. And since kalimba music is generally cyclic, we will have repeating opportunities to improve on what we are studying.

Free tablature for the mbira song “Kuzanga,” translated to Alto kalimba! Click to download the full PDF tablature for “Kuzanga” on Alto Kalimba “Kuzanga” is a song for the mbira dzavadzimu, or mbira.  I’ve been working on this song for about an hour a day on the mbira now for about six weeks, and even though I have a long way to go, I can still feel myself getting better each day – what a wonderful feeling. I have not yet started to learn this song on the Alto kalimba, but I realized that several of the variations could be played on the Alto. So, I translated the song to Alto

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