Jan. 17, 2011 Vol. 6, Num. 1

Kalimba Magic NEWS In This Issue From Mark: This Did Not Have to Happen What's the Buzz at Kalimba Magic Tour the Kalimba Magic Web Site Interview: Aaron Chavez Danny Boy: Free Tablature The KTabS Notebook: Tablature for Danny Boy Student Karimba: Book Reviews, New 9-Note Kalimba Music Therapy for Seniors New Thomas Bothe 2B/9B Kalimba w/Buzzers Kalimba Workshop at Hot Springs Jan. 28-30 How to Get a Kalimba Gig: 11 Musicians Share Upcoming Contest Deadlines Pushed Back

Quick Tour of the Kalimba Magic Site

If you are a new kalimba player, welcome to Kalimba Magic! Our website could very well be the most important resource available to you as you begin your kalimba journey. This newsletter article will introduce you to some of the most useful aspects of the our website.

Back in 2006, I asked a neighbor of mine, Susan Taunton, to do some work for me and design a web site that could organize all of the kalimba materials I had at hand, and could grow to accommodate all the kalimba materials I had in mind. Through our collaboration, we produced a web site that is friendly, functional, and beautiful. The coolest thing about it is that almost five years later, the web site has the same basic structure, and while we are always adding to the site, we don't have any plans to change that basic structure. In other words, if you invest an hour to learn your way around the web site, that investment will pay off for you next week, next month, next year, and probably beyond.

There are a lot of new kalimba players out there - several hundred people got kalimbas as holiday presents, or gifted kalimbas to themselves. This has swelled the numbers of people on the Kalimba Magic mailing list, and with so many new folks in the kalimba community, it seemed like a good idea to give a proper introduction to the Kalimba Magic web site in this issue of the newsletter.

Kalimba Magic Search Tool

One of the most useful aspects of the Kalimba Magic website is the search tool. In the upper left corner of the Kalimba Magic home page (and on many other pages too) you will find a search window. Enter a word or a phrase into this window and click on "Search," and you will get links to the pages on the Kalimba Magic site which contain the words in the search phrase. I use this many times each day.

"How to Play Kalimba" Pages

I think the most important information on the Kalimba Magic web site is in the How To Play Kalimba pages. These pages act as an index to the Kalimba Magic site, linking to Tips and newsletter articles that will help you play a number of different types of kalimbas. Perhaps the most important page in the How To Play Kalimba section is the Kalimba Fundamentals page. This page covers basic nomenclature of the kalimba and its parts, but also shows you how to fix most common problems you might have with your kalimba, including fixing the buzzes that can crop up. There are also links to tips that show you how to set up your kalimba to optimize its performance. After that, the pages on Kalimba Tuning and Thumb Nail Care are also very useful.

Several of the How to Play Kalimba pages are devoted to our most popular kalimbas - the Hugh Tracey Alto, the Hugh Tracey Treble, the African-Tuned Karimba, the Pentatonic Kalimba, the 8-Note Kalimba, and the Sansula. These pages serve as an index for instructional resources, books, downloads, free tips, and articles that are specific to each type of kalimba. If you own one of these kalimbas, this would be an excellent first stop on your kalimba journey.

Tip of the Day

One of the broadest and deepest parts of the Kalimba Magic website is the Tips of the Day. There is usually a new tip each Monday through Friday, though on occasion we do skip a day or two here and there. The tips have been coming out for four and a half years, so there is a lot of material there.

The tip for each day of the week has a unique objective:

• Monday Tips: Spirit/Mind/Body
• Tuesday Tips: Elementary kalimba instruction
• Wednesday Tips: Advanced kalimba instruction
• Thursday Tips: Features a particular kalimba
• Friday Tips: Ian's Corner
  For a couple of years, the Friday tips was home of the Physics of the Kalimba series, but since September of 2010, Ian Clothier has been authoring the Friday tips. Ian is brimming with ingenious ideas to help you get the most out of your kalimba and has just completed a very instructive series on how to build a kalimba from scraps around your workshop.

Each day's tips tend to follow each other in an unfolding story, consisting of 3 or 4 or 10 or 20 tips that fit together to convey something big that is worth understanding and worth thinking about and exploring. You can get the unfolding story if you check the tips each day, or you can get it all at once for old tip series by going into the tips archives, which are kept separately for each day of the week.

The depth of the tips is apparent when one views the vast tip archives. At the top right of each of the current tips is a link to the archives for that day of the week. If you click on the archives link, you can see all the tips in each of the series going back to June 2006. The tip archives are a great place to browse for items of interest.

For example, looking at the Thursday (featured kalimba) archives, you can find series and lists of individual tip titles on the karimba, the pentatonic kalimba, the sansula and treblito, the 8-note kalimba, the sansula, the sansula in beautiful E tuning, modal scales on the diatonic kalimba, modes and intervals, the chromatic kalimba, the G minor karimba, the hotshot-11 (diatonic 11-note), the 11-note Goshen, the G chromatic kalimba, the G amadinda, the sansula (again, again), the box pentatonic kalimba, and the primal karimba.

So, no matter what you are looking for, browsing through the titles in the tip archives is sure to turn up something of interest to you. By the way, the search tool searches the entire web site, including the tips.

Newsletters and the Newsletter Archives

The Kalimba Magic newsletter is the main way we keep in contact with the world of kalimba players. If you are reading these words, you are probably already a subscriber to the newsletter. If not, you can scroll to the bottom of this page and sign up for it right now.

About once a month, we prepare a new Kalimba Magic newsletter. It is a permanent newsletter that stays archived on the Kalimba Magic web site, so the articles you read today will be there for you a month, a year, or five years from now. But to alert the subscribers to each new newsletter, we send out a lightweight email that describes the contents of each newsletter article, teases you with a nice graphic for each article, and then links you to the actual newsletter articles. A little under half the subscribers open the email, and just under half the people who open the email click through to read one or more newsletter articles.

The newsletter is an evolving thing, and it is one of the main ways I express the things I discover about the kalimba. In the Message From Mark, I put out a thoughtful piece of writing that is on my mind and/or close to my heart. I advertise new books and new kalimbas in the newsletter. I share new ways of understanding kalimba music. I give away free tablature for popular songs. In the Kalimba Community article in each newsletter, I tout the achievements of other kalimba players. In the interviews, I shine a bright light on some of the world's greatest kalimba players, kalimba builders, and kalimba scholars. But this isn't People magazine, these pillars of the kalimba community are being asked insightful questions and, hopefully, you will find the answers illuminating.

You don't need to keep the newsletter email in your inbox - it is just letting you know that the new newsletter has arrived. If you go to the Kalimba Magic website, you will see all the articles listed with blue titles on a white background in the far right column. Click on any of those titles, and you will be taken to that article.

If you would like to make a bookmark in your web browser, the page www.kalimbamagic.com/newsletter will always link you to the current newsletter.

If you would like to browse through the article titles from past newsletters, you can go to the Kalimba Magic newsletter archives.

The best way to find things in the newsletters is probably the search engine available from many of the top level pages - if you search on "pentatonic kalimba book" for example, you get 116 hits - and many of those hits are for newsletter articles (you can tell from the URL, which will have the word "newsletters" in it).

Looking for inspiration and beauty

In the section of the site called Waking Dream, you can learn about the shape of my kalimba journey and a a vision that I had a few months before Kalimba Magic was born - a vision of a world with a million kalimba players making beautiful kalimba music for their partners and families, neighbors and coworkers, and bringing peace and beauty to the world through their joyful vibrations.

Another place to look for uplifting messages is in the Monday Tips archives, which is dedicated to Mind/Body/Spirit ideas.

But the place where I give it all I've got is the Message from Mark, a relatively new feature of the Kalimba Magic newsletter. I aim to touch your heart with these messages, and more than one has had me in tears myself before I was done writing.

I invite you to read past Messages from Mark:

• On Racism and the African American Spirituals Book
• On Resilience - Coming Back from a Fire
• On Loving a Kalimba
• A Powerful New Film on Race
• Tuning Old Kalimbas at the UNICEF Store
• The Joy That Turns the Musician's World
• My Kalimba Fixing Mission
• Playing Kalimba in Hospice
• Kalimba Tunings: Like Palettes of Color
• 1,000,000 YouTube Views!
• Words I Live By
• This Did Not Have to Happen

While the technical aspects of Kalimba Magic are really my forte, I also fuel the vision, and it is this spiritual side of Kalimba Magic that keeps my heart singing. I hope your heart is singing too!

At Kalimba Magic, we do much more than sell you a kalimba. We help you decide which kalimba is right for you. We show you how to keep your kalimba in top working order, and we teach you how you can make amazing music with this instrument. The magic begins when you fall in love with your first kalimba and make it your own, but the magic deepens as your relationship develops over time. Explore our web site and join us on this rich journey into the heart of the kalimba.