August 21, 2010

Volume 5, Number 6

Kalimba Magic NEWS

• In This Issue
• Message from Mark: Tunings Are Palettes of Color
• What's the Buzz at Kalimba Magic?
• Interview with Steve Catania of Catania Kalimbas
• Kalimba of the Month: Catania Electric Pentatonic
• Also New from Catania: The 6-Note Pentatonic
• Nowhere Man: Tablature
• The Gods Must Be Crazy: Tablature
• Turn Your Alto into a Maurice White Pentatonic
• Tunings of the Sansula, Part 2: Morocco E
• 15 Original "2B" 9-Note Tunings Available
• Kalani Drum Circle = Community, Wellness & Joy
• Kalimba Community

Tunings of the Sansula
Part 2: Morocco E Tuning

The Hokema Sansula

This is the second in a series of music videos demonstrating the four book tunings of the Hokema Sansula. By "book tunings," I mean the four tunings that are covered in the Playing the Sansula book, including: the standard A minor, Beautiful E, Heavenly A and Morocco E. The objective of these videos is to help you to understand the wondrous potential in these tunings.

Last month we looked at the Heavenly A tuning. This month's video shows me playing a guitar-supported Sansula improvisation in the Morocco E tuning. I am playing the standard Hokema Sansula in this video (I would prefer the goat skin head on the Deluxe, but Kalimba Magic is a low budget operation, so my personal Sansulas are all standards).

One of the key features of the standard Am Sansula tuning is the E and the F tines adjacent to each other on the right side of the center tine. In the standard tuning, E is the 5th and F is the minor 6th, a half step up, and this results in some tension. I refer to these as "pivot notes" - you can play a bunch of other notes plus the E, then the same note pattern but play the F instead of the E, and the riff pivots.

The Morocco E tuning is built around the same E and F that are the pivot notes in the standard Am tuning, but as E is the root note, or 1, the F makes a minor 2nd, which sounds middle eastern. The low note is now a B, or the 5th of E, so the low B and D notes are a good bass lead in to he E note.

This tuning, along with a full chord dictionary for this and other tunings, is available in the book Playing the Sansula.

What is a chord dictionary? It spells out which tines and notes you can play together to achieve a particular chord. And why would you want to do that? A chord is an established musical entity - those notes in a chord will sound good together. Generally, you won't want to play every note on the Sansula all in the space of two seconds, but rather you want to just play a subset of the notes, and then shift to another subset. The chord dictionary gives you 23 different subsets of notes that make chords. You don't actually need to remember all 23. Indeed, you can make an effective song just by going back and forth between two or three chords. Don't worry about playing all the notes in a chord all at once (though I do that 0:35 - 0:40 in this video) - instead, just flit among the notes in the chord to form arpeggios.

The guitar that supports the Sansula improvisation plays several different chords, and when the guitar chords change, the Sansula responds by also changing the subset of notes that dominate - i.e., the Sansula's improvised melody is based on the chord changes defined by the guitar. This is a great example of the utility of understanding chords on the kalimba.

In the coming months, we'll post videos of more great new Sansula songs that use various tunings. In the meantime, you can listen to example recordings of the four different book tunings here, and you can listen to example recordings and descriptions of the four different Sansula models here.