New Alternative Kalimba Tunings

Why Retune Your Kalimba?

There are so many new kalimba tunings in my life right now I hardly know where to start. First, the disadvantages of changing to a new tuning: usually the instructional materials won't work for your new tuning, so you are on your own (i.e., you have to create your own music and trust in yourself that you know what to do, which is not a bad thing, but should be understood nonetheless). Second, if you know some songs in a standard tuning, they won't work in the new tuning. The tuning turns the kalimba into a new instrument that you must learn anew.

Which is exactly why I retune my kalimbas. If you ever get stuck on your kalimba and feel that you know it too well, or you feel that you are stuck in a rut, try out a new tuning. It will breath new life into your kalimba and your playing. You no longer can predict exactly what something is going to sound like. You are not the master of the instrument, but you will find out what the kalimba wants to give to you. It can be refreshing to make your brain develop new pathways. And it can also be fun to just go along with the ride that tuning has to offer. And there are things that you just can't do unless the kalimba is tuned in that way - the blues notes for example cannot be found anywhere on the diatonic kalimba in standard tunings.

I hope these new tunings inspire you to new and great things. As you can see, the new tunings are often collaborative efforts. Who else but Kalimba Magic will work wth you to find the tuning that is just right for you, your music, and your kalimba?

Middle Eastern Tuning for Alto

Shortly after 9/11/2001 as the world turned its attention to the Middle East, I tuned my Alto kalimba to a Middle Eastern tuning. This was the first alternative tuning I made that really stuck with me. Believe it or not, while much of the US was fuming with frustration, pain, and hate for the people of the Middle East, this tuning put me in a place of beauty and compassion for the people in that part of the world that were about to experience the pain of US military force. For some reason, I had never posted this tuning for Alto on my website, so here is the Middle Eastern Tuning for Alto.

The song Morocco is in Middle Eastern tuning.

Alternative F Tuning for Alto

It is fairly easy to turn a standard Alto kalimba from G into F just by pulling all the tines out a whole step's worth. The advantage of doing it that way is it seems just like an Alto in G - i.e., your brain doesn't need to learn anything new, just like tuning every string on a guitar down by a whole step (the guitarist for Queen did this).

The F tuning I present here is a totally different beast. The F#'s are retuned to F naturals and the B's are taken down to Bb so all the notes are now in the key of F (the A, C, D, E and G are common to the keys of F and G, and those tines don't change at all). I also lower the low G to an F. The F is a bit below the resonant range of the Alto box, but I strengthen the low F by playing inside a gourd which is much larger than the F.

There are two oddities about this kalimba. First it is missing the 2nd in the lower octave (but you get an extra 2nd - the top G above the high F, which is handy in certain melodies). The second thing is that the notes, in terms of 1 or 5 or whatever, are on the opposite side from what I am used to. In other words, I have to totally rewire my brain and relearn this as a totally new instrument. Anything my left hemisphere used to do, my right hemisphere now has to learn, and vise versa. At first, it would take me about an hour of playing before I got into the groove and could actually make the instrument do what I wanted. Now it takes a few minutes of warmup. Even though it is hard, I feel that I am expanding my brain and expanding the things I can do - I am symmetrizing my hemispheres.

All systems GO!

Alternative A Blues Tuning for Alto

A few months back we put out some ideas for blues tunings on the Alto kalimba.

Apostolis requested an Alto in an A Blues scale, and this is the tuning we worked up. First, note that it doesn't have the A in the bass, but G. The A's all lie on the left side. As Apostolis is left handed, this seemed like a good choice. Also the A's are all on painted tines, and the C's are all on painted tines on the right. Why is this? Because the chosen scale is a 6-note scale: root, minor 3rd, 4th, flat 5th, 5th, and 7th, then repeat an octave higher. This is one note less than the 7-note diatonic scale, and one more than the 5-note pentatonic scale, so alternating notes in a left-right fashion puts the upper octave on the same side as the lower octave. A benefit: if you learn a riff in the lower octave, the upper octave version is exactly the same in terms of left and right. A drawback: a main method of the diatonic kalimba setup which allows you to play chords on one side down low and melody on the other side up high, no longer works.

Note that this 6-tone scale results in a higher top note (C), which is getting a bit thin-sounding.

Alternative Karimba A minor Tuning

I love playing in this tuning - good things are going to come from this one.

SaReGaMa Karimba Tunings

By the way, a great and innovatove karimba player known as SaReGaMa the Artist has a bunch of different karimba tunings, and he makes them available at his music blog

G Major Tuning for Sansula

My customers - well, actually I prefer to think of them as clients, because often we work very closely together - are the people who drive most of the new tunings. They think of something that I hadn't, and I say (just like Bob Dylan from Highway 61) "Yes, I think it can be very easily done," and then I go do it.

Kathryn Rambo decided that she wanted a Sansula that could play in G major along with the G pentatonic Hugh Tracey kalimbas, and this is what I came up with.

D minor Tuning for the Goshen Mate Kalimba

Raphael is an experienced kalimba tuner, but he thought he'd ask what I could do for him in terms of a D minor for the Goshen Mate kalimba. The 11-note side is a straight D minor (i.e.,the same notes as F major, or one flat, but with D in the bass note). However, on the 8-note side, I made that sort of like a pentatonic scale, skipping over many of the notes that are within a half step of stronger notes (i.e., removing the minor 6 and 2 because they are near the 5th and the minor 3rd). But inspired by Apostlis, I gave it a blues note also. You will often want to avoid playing the blues note, but in the right spot in the chord progression, adding the blues note is very effective.

My wife Deb is playing the 8-note side of the kalimba, and I am playing the 11-note side.

A Major Tuning for the Goshen Mate kalimba

When I first picked up the Mate Kalimba and tried playing it with other less experienced players, I thought I should give the less experienced player the 8-note side and I would take the 11-note. However, in the standard F tuning that 8-note scale started on A, making it an odd Middle Eastern mode with a flat 2nd. A very nice scale, but probably not the first thing you would start with.

So I retuned both parts of the kalimba to an A major scale. If you are on the 8-note side, you just have Do-Re-Mi-Fa-Sol-La-Ti-Do, a common and obvious scale. The 11-note side is tuned lower - it can't go all the way down to low A an octave lower, but it can go all the way down to C# - the major 3rd of A. So the 11-note is tuned in a way that is similar to the Treble, and we let the 8-note player start on the root and, therefore, have the simple scale.

My wife Deb is playing the 8-note side of the kalimba, and I am playing the 11-note side. (Sorry the view is lopsided!)