What's the Buzz at Kalimba Magic

Our Gift to Mom this Mother's Day: Treble Kalimba Special

For the entire month of May we are honoring Mother's Day with a Treble Kalimba special deal. The package includes the Hugh Tracey Treble Kalimba with electric pickup, the Treble Fundamentals Book, and Mark Holdaway's CD Two Thumbs Up—a $147 value for only $125. And if you would like us to include a special note for mom, just provide that note in the Special Instructions field when you order from The Kalimba Magic Shop.

Why this kalimba for moms? Women tend to have slightly smaller hands than men, and many women find that the Treble feels better in their hands than the larger Alto kalimba. Meanwhile, this smaller instrument represents no compromise in musical capacity: the Treble has 17 tines, two more than the Alto. And, on the high end, the Treble's range extends up to the D, a 5th higher than the Alto's top note of G, i.e., the Treble kalimba can soar above the Alto!

Of course, you don't have to be a mom or even a woman to take advantage of this special May deal! You could purchase this instrument for yourself, no matter who you are. Indeed, the Treble is one of my favorite kalimbas!

Learn more about the Treble Mothers' Day Special.

KTabS Reader Now a Free Download

Randy and Sharon Eaton, proprietors of KTabS software, have begun offering the KTabS Reader for FREE as a download from the KTabS website.

KTabS, the Kalimba Tablature Software, which enables you to write and read kalimba tablature on your Windows computer, is a great resource for learning the kalimba. The KTabS Reader lets you view and play all KTabS files. The full KTabS program permits editing files, including adding repeats, changing the tempo, adding notes, removing notes, cut-and-paste to change arrangement, or creating your own tablature of your own music. The full KTabS is still available for $30, but the free KTabS Reader will let you view and play loads of music that is available on the Kalimba Magic and KTabS websites.

KTabS can run on the Mac using something called Darwine. My son, Tim, got it to work, but when I bug him about writing up instructions for getting KTabS to run on the Mac, he tells me, "It's sort of complicated—the typical user won't be able to do this, as they need to be comfortable with using the command line." Still, I keep hoping for a writeup of this solution. If anyone else has a Mac and is up to the challenge, I'd love to hear from you.

If you'd like to learn more about how to use KTabS, I invite you to read my monthly article, The KTabS Notebook.

New Additions to the Alto Kalimba Learn How Pages

Last year, Kalimba Magic took a giant step towards indexing the massive amount of instructional material available on the Kalimba Magic website. Out of this effort emerged a vastly improved and expanded Learn How to Play the Kalimba section. The pages in this section link to dozens of educational resources for many of the different kalimbas promoted and sold at Kalimba Magic. But many new resources have become available since last summer, so in the last couple of weeks we have begun the process of updating the Learn How section. We have just updated the Learn How to Play the Alto Kalimba page with several new downloads, tips and articles.

You might also be interested in the new easy-to-remember shortcut urls for each of the Learn How pages. These are the shortcut urls:

• http://kalimbamagic.com/treble
• http://kalimbamagic.com/pentatonic
• http://kalimbamagic.com/karimba
• http://kalimbamagic.com/8note
• http://kalimbamagic.com/sansula
• http://kalimbamagic.com/chromatic

Books, CDs, and Kalimbas to 51 Countries

Kalimba Magic is located in Tucson, AZ. But people from across the US and beyond—from Canada, Japan, Finland, Mexico and more—have dropped in to meet us and to seek the exact right kalimba for themselves out of our physical inventory. But we also ship around the world, using Priority Mail International. Just last week, we added our 50th and 51st countries to the list of places to which we've shipped instructional materials or kalimbas. These include:

• The Americas: Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Guadelupe, Jamaica, Mexico, Peru, St Pierre & Miquelon, USA
• Africa: Egypt, Reunion, South Africa
• Asia: China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Macau, Philipines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan
• Australia: Australia, New Zealand
• Europe: Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, England, Finland, Germany, Greece, France, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Norway, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Romania, Scotland, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine

If you live outside the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, you might be able to find a Hugh Tracey Distributor near you. Many of these folks sell the Kalimba Magic books, some carry the complete line of Hugh Tracey kalimbas, and most could make a special order for Hugh Tracey kalimbas they do not carry. However, if you can't find what you are looking for, please contact us and we'll get you the kalimba you want!

New Tuning for the Pentatonic Kalimba

If you have a pentatonic kalimba, you know the glory of wailing on it in any old way and making great-sounding music. However, a major drawback to the pentatonic kalimba is that it has no 4th! The notes (in G major) are: G, A, B, D, E, G (and so on), which are the 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 1 of the scale. The most common harmonic progression in western music is the I-IV-V - requiring G, C, and D, but the D is missing from the standard pentatonic scale!

So, we've come up with a simple modification of the standard tuning - move the low A (the 2nd) up to a B (the major 3rd), and move the low B (3rd) up to C (the 4th). The upper eight out of 11 notes are still exactly as they used to be, but having the 4th in there permits you to play I-IV-V progressions.

Here is an example of what you can do with this tuning. It is great for ragtime and other American-type musics. I guess it isn't a pentatonic scale anymore, but this greatly extends the breadth of music possible with this kalimba.

Next month, we'll look at a new alternative tuning for the Karimba!