Lesson 2: The good music didn't start until the beginners arrived

The second kalimba klub taught me an important lesson.

My neighbor Geo came over, and at first it looked as if it was just going to be him and me. I guess this made Geo a bit nervous. Geo is a pretty good musician on guitar and bass and keyboards, and I've heard him play some very nice things on the kalimba too -- he was one of the first in Tucson to buy a kalimba from me, and he got one with a pickup on it (if you want one with a pickup, check out the Kalimba Shop ).

So, I don't know what was wrong with the energy that night, but Geo and I weren't connecting. After a few failed attempts at music, Geo picked up his kalimba to go, but at the door were Carolyn and Kim.

Carolyn and Kim were kalimba beginners. Kim didn't even own a kalimba, but Carolyn had brought her old kalimba (which we DID paint with blue fingernail polish and retuned to match her Hugh Tracey Alto). That kalimba seemd to have a song built into it already, we eventually we found something in D. As the kalimbas were tuned to the key of "G", you don't get the regular "do-re-mi" scale from playing it in "D" -- rather, you get a scale called the "mixolydian scale". It is funky, sort of like Jerry Garcia playing "Dark Star", "Fire on the Mountain", or "Roll Away the Dew". So, we played something like this:

.

This has a nice balance to it: the first pair of notes goes R then L (an octave), the next two notes are both R (going up a third), then the last two notes are both L (going down a third).

Listen to this music while you follow the tablature.

The good thing about a simple starting point is that you have plenty of room to grow, and that is exactly what we did. I think we played on that riff for about half an hour and had a lot of fun.

Listen to the same music drifting

After Carolyn and Kim left, Geo and I talked about what had happened. We agreed that it was an excellent thing that he had not left in failure. And we also saw that the difference between failure and success did not particularly relate to one's intrinsic abilities, but more to one's attitude.

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