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

The Gods Must Be Crazy
A Bit of Karimba Music, a Bit of Tablature

I saw The Gods Must Be Crazy back in the 1980s at the Somerville Theatre in Massachussetts, about when I started playing kalimba, but didn't remember the kalimba scene until my son lent me his copy of the movie and said, "It's the scene where the bushman picks up the rifle thinking it's a funny stick." Well, so there IS a kalimba in that movie.

Actually, it is not a kalimba, but a karimba or mbira. I can tell from the music, not the video. Actually, the music and singing does not match the video, so watching won't help you learn this piece at all.

However, I've tabbed it out for the karimba - both a basic part and a variation, which slips an upper tiered fingered note in the gaps left by the long notes in the basic version. Click here to download the KTabS file.

Notice how the tab of the basic part (i.e., the lower down part in the tablature at right) requires an odd cadence of the thumbs: "R - L - R - R - L - L - R - L". To invent your own variations, try to find other notes that sound good while sticking with that R/L thumb pattern. It will take you a bit of time to learn that thumb pattern, so when you learn it, you want to milk it for all it is worth! Find variations that are just a little bit off from the main part, and you will find them very easy to learn to play.

On the other hand, if you were to try to do something that is the mirror image of this, like "L - R - L - L - R - R - L - R", you will find that it is almost impossible to do - at first. In other words, you would think something like a mirror image of a pattern would be simple for your brain to do once it has learned the original - but that is not true at all! Your left hemisphere neads to learn how to play what the right hemisphere knows, and vise versa, so it is really starting over from scratch.

The advanced variation is actually rather tricky. All the notes labelled "finger" have been stuck in, and 3/4 of the time the right finger follows the right thumb, but once the right finger follows the left thumb. Good luck!

I love simple little patterns like these. They really make you start at the beginning, no matter how long you've been playing. Sit with them for minutes or hours, roll them over in your mind like a Zen koan. Don't just learn something like this, let it become one with you.