Tips

Many kalimbas – such as the Alto, the Treble, and the Pentatonic 11-Note kalimbas – have a range of two or more octaves.  In my mind, this is where the playing really gets to be interesting.  This tip relates the lower octave scale to the upper octave scale on the Alto kalimba. The Alto kalimba tablature here starts at the bottom and works up.  The first measure shows the upper octave of the G major scale, while the second measure shows the lower octave of the G major scale.  The two scales have the exact same note names: G A B C D E F# G (you can tell by

Do any of your tines make a sound that annoys you? Learn to fix that! To keep your kalimba sounding good, learning to tune is the most important thing. After that comes learning to fix the odd buzzy tine so that each note on the instrument can ring true. This tip points out the resources for removing the buzz and returning your kalimba to sounding clear. When I  listen to other people’s kalimba recordings, I am often annoyed by nasty buzzing sounds.  I think “If only they knew how easy it is to fix those buzzes!” Before I record a kalimba, I touch up on the tuning and make sure

You can learn an instrument with modest daily work – but do pick it up every day The kalimba is one of those amazing instruments that magically sounds good even if you don’t know what you are doing, often right out of the box.  However, if you practice, you can become really good at playing.  I have compiled some thoughts on my experience of practicing on the kalimba with the idea of helping you with your kalimba journey. If you are going to “get good” on the kalimba, you should try to play it a bit every day. Do it for 15 minutes a day. Once in a while, you will probably

Everything you need to keep your kalimba in tune Many people purchase kalimbas without realizing that they need to keep the kalimbas in tune.   Most kalimbas that are played daily will slowly go out of tune over a month or two, and then you need to touch up on the tuning. This article hooks you up with all the resources you need to learn how to keep your kalimba in tune – just the way I do! Many people purchase kalimbas without realizing that they need to keep the kalimbas in tune. Most kalimbas that are played daily will slowly go out of tune over a month or two, and

Each kalimba we sell has its own How-to-Play page. What can you expect from these pages? Inside the “How-to-Play” category, there are 20 sub-categories.  Several of these are general subjects that are applicable to all kalimbas, such as “Fundamentals of the Kalimba”, “Thumbnail Care”, and “Tuning”.   We also have 13 categories dedicated to information about different kalimbas.  This tip tells you what information you will find on these pages. We have a great series of resource pages for many kalimbas, including the Alto, Treble, Chromatic, 6-Note, 8-Note, 12-Note, Sansulas, Pentatonics, African-tuned Karimba, Student Karimba, SaReGaMa-tuned Karimbas, and more, and you can see all of these in the How to Play pages. While the structure of each instrument’s

KTabS is a powerful Windows program that takes a lot of the guesswork out of writing tablature Writing down music for kalimba can be tricky, and for a newbie to music, overwhelming.  A fabulous alternative to writing out a song by hand on blank tablature involves simply clicking the notes into a tablature template, using Windows software program KTabS (Kalimba Tablature Software). One key advantage of KTabS is that when you click on a tine to add a note, you will immediately hear the note that tine is tuned to, so you know immediately if it is the right note or the wrong note. Similarly, once you have clicked five

Kalimba Tablature is a powerful way to save your kalimba ideas Tablature is an alternative to staff notation. Kalimba tablature is intuitive and easy to read.  We provide blank tablature PDFs for 8-Note, 11-Note Pentatonic, 15-Note Alto, 17-Note Treble, and 17-Note Karimba.  You can download them for free, print them out, and write notes on them detailing the kalimba riffs you make up.  And if you don’t understand the rules for tablature, we can help with that too! Before we get into the blank tablature, you might want to brush up on the rules of tablature. The tablature is a map of the kalimba’s tines, stretched out from the bottom

A kalimba’s “tuning” is the set of notes the tines are tuned to In order to keep your kalimba tuned correctly, you need to know what its notes are supposed to sound like.  An experienced player will know the sound of each note on their kalimba by heart, and will either know which note each tine should be tuned to, or will be able to figure this out quickly.  What if you are not an experienced player? This tip connects you with dozens of possible tunings for a dozen different kalimbas. Your tuning is probably here. The rest – becoming an expert – is up to you!  To maintain the tuning

You can syncopate by leaving out notes The easiest thing to do when you play kalimba is to set up a regular rhythmic pattern, alternating right-left-right-left (or the opposite), but this will not result in syncopation.  Here is a quick changeup you can make to this regular pattern to create some great syncopation. This tablature shows a sample pattern on the Hugh Tracey Alto Kalimba, but you can do this sort of pattern on any kalimba at all. Feel free to change the exact notes. In Measures 1-3, we establish the alternating right-left pattern, and Measure 4 changes the pattern to make a “bookend”, indicating both that the pattern is over, and that the whole