October 19, 2006
Lesson 38 from the New Pentatonic Book

More about the pentatonic kalimba/pentatonic scale.

Last week, we did some simple two note chords with the pentatonic kalimba. Every pair of adjacent notes sounds fine - of course, you can also play two non-adjacent notes and that will usually sound pretty good too!

Here is Lesson 38 from Playing the Pentatonic Kalimba, towards the end of Part I which deals with the major-tuned pentatonic kalimba:

Last week's pentatonic tip is one of the starting points, showing you just how easy it is to play something. This week's pentatonic tip shows you just how fast and zippy you can learn to play on the pentatonic. My friend Bev picked up the pentatonic kalimba one day a year ago, and her thumbs engaged, and she was OFF to the races! It was as if she could just do amazingly fast and wonderful things without even thinking. Of course, that is the beauty of the pentatonic scale, because you CAN do fast and amazing things without thinking. But if you are able to think (and this lesson does require some thought to untangle it), you can do even more amazing things.

The brand new book, Playing the Pentatonic Kalimba, which includes a CD and KTabS reader files for all exercises, is now available at The Kalimba Shop. As the book is divided into Part I for major-tuned and Part II for minor-tuned, next we'll explore an easy and a hard lesson from Part II.