News and Announcements

At Kalimba Magic, we give you the tools to succeed on your kalimba journey. The kalimba has great depth and breadth, and you can gain a lot from the resources we have arrayed here for kalimba players at all levels. The “Learn to Play” section is a perfect place to help you start your journey. Our job is to help you to understand your kalimba, how it is set up, and how to keep it sounding sweet and in tune. We invented Kalimba Tablature in 2004 – of course we are the experts! Tablature is much easier to read than staff notation is – it is just a map of

Our new system works much better than our old system. In my mind, our instructional downloads are the best thing we have going at Kalimba Magic. I love creating the music, the lessons, and arrangements.  Creating these kalimba ebooks is my super power. Too bad it was so hard for so many of my customers to get those ebooks. I often had to send them download links “by hand” in emails. Kalimba Magic updated its web site to Word Press in December 2020. Before then, the Kalimba Magic instructional downloads often did not work right. While I still see some problems with customer’s downloads, this system is working much better

For use with the 11-Note Hugh Tracey Pentatonic Kalimba. Here is the intro to the book: The G Major Pentatonic Scale: The G Minor Pentatonic Scale: Why would you want a pentatonic kalimba? It is harmonically simple – a good choice for new kalimba players. It is easier to play than other kalimbas, due to the large tines and extra space between the tines. It has the same scale as the Native American Flute – meaning it can access that same ancient culture space through its music. In fact, primitive cultures all around the world use the pentatonic scale. In other words: take away a few notes from your regular

The 21-Note Kalimba can use all the 17-Note/C Books. Several Chinese companies have been making pretty good 17-note kalimbas lately. They are roughly copies of the Hugh Tracey Treble Kalimba, but are tuned to the key of C. I paint my 17-Note Kalimbas in C differently than suggested by the Chinese, so that the kalimba is consistent with my library of tablature. More recently, there have been some 21-Note Kalimbas made. This post shows you how at least some of these kalimbas are tuned, and how you might paint them so that you can use Kalimba Magic materials to learn to play.   How to Tune and Paint a 21-Note

Everything we have that will work for your 17-Note Kalimba in C Get a 17-Note Heart Kalimba   I have recently written some great eBooks for this kalimba. These books use kalimba tablature, which is easy to read and very expressive. In addition to tablature and recordings for each song, these eBooks offer insights into how to read the tablature, how to tune, the kalimba’s history, how to accomplish the various moves you need to make on your kalimba, and more. Everything you need to have a wonderful kalimba ride! Says one recent customer, after she purchased our instructional downloads: “Mark, I am already practicing the songs and love it.

I have begun the process of breaking up part of my kalimba collection. For the first 15 years of my kalimba career, I owned only three kalimbas. They were all Hugh Tracey kalimbas, and I loved them. I changed the tuning when I needed a change of scenery. But being one of the kings of kalimba, over the last 16 years, I have collected a whole bunch of kalimbas. Some were at one point to be my personal instruments. Some were experiments. Some were just used for a recording project. Some were leftover when we stopped carrying that model. And some had defects. Over the next few years, I will

As with most good things, this is a work in progress. Kalimba Magic is now a modern wordpress web site. As such it is (theoretically) much easier for me to maintain and (presumably) much easier for the user to navigate. That said, I know there are a great number of problems. There is still 5-year-old content that I need to update, and there are a lot of pages that have sloppy formatting. Perhaps the biggest loss is the 2005 – 2015 archival Kalimba Tips and Kalimba Newsletter Articles. That old content stuck around for the last five years, but now it is gone. If there is a particular post of

The “Golden Moon” Moon-10 Tuning – gives you a lot of music on a very simple instrument. You can purchase the Moon-10 Kalimba in this “Golden Moon” tuning, or you can retune your Moon-10 yourself! The Golden Moon tuning is significant in that the low note is not the root note or key note. The root note is F, and the lowest note is C. This makes a great many songs possible. Demonstration of what makes the Golden Moon Tuning so capable. The Golden Moon ebook is a 106 page PDF, covering the standard introduction to the Moon-10, special playing techniques and strategies, plus a section with 26 general songs,

If you want to perform some carols on kalimba this Christmas, start here! Over the years, I have created a lot of books, instructional materials, videos, and articles about playing Christmas music on your kalimba. For your Christmas consideration, I have collected it all in one place for you. If you want to spend money, we have plenty of books, ebooks, and CDs for you to take advantage of. If you don’t want to spend money, we have created a lot of free resources, and they are all listed here. You might ask why I have so many resources for playing Christmas music on the kalimba. It is because I