July 6, 2007
Understanding the Kalimba's Buzz: Part 1

In Africa, everyone has something on their kalimba to intentionally produce a buzz! It's part of the culture and part of the sound.

But most people who play the Hugh Tracey Kalimba treasure its pure and beautiful tone - or at least most of the time. One of the drawbacks to the Hugh Tracey is that every now and then, out of the blue, one of the tines will start producing a horrible buzzing sound. Fortunately, it is trivial to fix that buzz - you need to slip a narrow strip of paper between the offending tine and the metal bridge rod. You lift the tine off of the bridge rod to permit the paper to slip in between, as illustrated below:

When you let the tine down, clamping down on the paper, rip off the excess. My old Alto, shown above in the photograph, has more tines with paper beneath than tines without. This method for fixing buzzes was written up in Andrew Tracey's kalimba instructional booklet in 1966. So, we've long known how to fix the buzz. But the question today is: what makes the buzz?

Before we jump to the answer, go back and think about what is going on with the vibrating kalimba tine - at least for the Hugh Tracey. Other kalimbas with different tine attachment mechanisms could have different tine vibrational dynamics. The space between the bridge and the "z-bracket" is key to the vibration. So, review these two Tips from April:

• How do the kalimba tines vibrate?
• Why does the kalimba tine have an overtone at one octave above the fundamental?

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