February 28, 2007
How High Can You Tune a Kalimba?

Again this question is from Kevin Eaddy (for Kevin's earlier question, see Tuesday's tip this week). Kevin plays jazz on his kalimba, and he is interested in changing his instrument to better match the requirements of the music. If you push the tines in to make them shorter, they will play higher notes -- up to a point.

Eventually the tines will get to be too short and they will just go THUD instead of plingggggggggggg. Or, as you shorten the tine, it may slowly move towards that THUMB sound. Some people may not accept that note as musical while other players will be OK with that more-thud-like sound and figure out how to work with it.

Here is a place where I see variation in seemingly-identical Hugh Tracey kalimbas: some of them go THUD after raising the note by only a whole step; others can go up by more than a fifth (i.e., from G to D for the Alto). And on some kalimbas, I find that as I raise the pitch, I go through a dead-zone, but as I continue to raise the pitch, the tine comes back to life!

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