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Two Great Kalimbas that go Great Together! Click to visit the Alto / Pentatonic Package product page One of my favorite things to do is to play kalimba duets with a close friend. The Hugh Tracey Alto kalimba is one of the most popular and most capable of all kalimbas.  In many ways, it is the gold standard by which all other kalimbas are measured.  I have written more books and music for the Alto Kalimba than for any other, and very often it is still one of my Altos (I have them in G, C, and F now) that I grab when I walk out the door. The Hugh Tracey

Please study this application of mindfulness to the process of learning to play specific music on kalimba Photo by Glen Davis. Kalimba by Andrew Masters Have you ever struggled to learn a piece of music on the kalimba, really studied in detail the exact notes you need to play?  It seems that the kalimba is a simple instrument – there are only a few tines for your left thumb and a few tines for the right thumb.  Surely this is simple.  You should be able to master this instrument after a week of playing it, right? But as soon as you approach a challenging song on the kalimba (and “challenging”

The tremendous assistance that kalimba tablature can provide in arranging and learning songs…plus a free CD or 25% coupon! Click to download the Greensleeves tablature in PDF I have a symbiotic relationship with kalimba tablature:  I work really hard to notate really wonderful music in tablature.  Through working on this tablature, I come to be able to play music that is more difficult and more polished than I would otherwise be able to perform. I make kalimba tablature better, and kalimba tablature makes me better.  To get your free Greensleeves tablature PDF, which will work for 8-Note, Alto, or Bb Treble kalimbas, click the image above. What is the best

These two similar parts, one delayed by an eighth note, lean against each other and create something fundamentally new Mbira music is designed to be played on two dueling mbiras The kalimba, as most of us know it, is a new adaptation of the family of African lamellophones that includes the mbira and the karimba.  As such, the kalimba doesn’t really have a tradition in Africa.  This is the very reason I am attracted to the instrument. Without a specific African tradition, we are free to create our own new and evolving kalimba styles. On the extreme opposite end of the “tradition” spectrum from the modern kalimba is the mbira

What’s a young professional musician to do when her body fails her? Klara is learning mbira and karimba, to play especially when her body doesn’t want to play violin. An introduction from Mark: High level musicians dedicate their body, their time, their soul, and years to their art. They are driven by the dreams of the greatness they have touched in their musical experiences, and they invest their very lives to this god of music. But what happens when their body fails them? When pain and debility make their work and ambitions look like one of God’s great jokes? Many musical instruments are quite physically demanding: guitar, upright bass, piano,

Conscious attention can bring many benefits to you and your music Photo by Glen Davis. Kalimba by Andrew Masters What is mindfulness?  For me, mindfulness is being as present as I can be to the moment that is unfolding.   Consider music as a sort of plow that is able to cut a furrow through the present moment.  Good music invites the listener to become entrained in that furrow as the musical plowshare cuts through the unfolding succession of present moments .  Good music, happy, sad, or otherwise, can be a great comfort as it can largely take us from whatever pathway we were wandering down, and instead directs our

Surging in popularity now, kalimbas arrived long ago and then all but vanished French painter Jean-Baptiste Debret depicted many scenes of Africans in Brazil, including these images with Kalimba! (From Decio Gioieli’s CD) Kalimbas had been common in many, widespread places, having come along with Africans when they were torn from their native lands by slavers. How and why kalimbas disappeared is a sad and complicated tale. Today, the kalimba is more popular than ever. People all over the world are creating original, unique kalimba designs. People everywhere are doing exactly what the people of Africa always did with the kalimba over the last millennium: adapting it to play their own musics. The

You can learn to create your own variations! Some of the variations I created to accompany Wa Kalulu I have written before about how much fun it is to find variations that work with traditional African kalimba music. This article elaborates on this subject, and how I went about creating my own variations, first by improvisation, and then later in composition inspired by those earlier improvisations. Even in the case of songs such as “Wa Kalulu” for which only a standard part notation exists, we can create essentially infinite variations to go along with this music. All it takes is two karimba players, one with a good grasp of the

Playing without looking helps you improve in so many ways Archival Practice Tips Part of what is so great about playing the kalimba is that it is all right there in front of your eyes.   You can see the entire instrument, all its notes, all that it can do, in one glance.  You might not understand it yet, but you can easily see that it is understandable.  Map the shorter kalimba tines to higher notes and the lower tines to lower notes.  Simple, right? But an even more important tip I can give you is to NOT look at the kalimba as you play. In this tip we are going