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This book shows you how to make great music in the Afroharp tuning Buy the book “Playing the Afroharp” The Afroharp is a legendary 13-note, two-level kalimba created and manufactured for only a short period in late 1960s Chicago. This instrument plays sweet, hauntingly beautiful, harmonic music, and the Afroharp’s particular tuning is at the heart of the music it makes. The Afroharp is gone, with only a few floating around in the world. But Kalimba Magic has started building instruments in the Afroharp tuning, made from Hugh Tracey Alto kalimbas with electronic pickup – just as the original Afroharp had a connection for a “high impedance dynamic microphone”, as

Listen to MP3s for Alto, Treble, Sansula, Karimba, and Lotus These are the three models of Lotus Karimba that we make at Kalimba Magic   I’ve seen it happen dozens of times – maybe hundreds.  Someone gets a kalimba with the best of intentions, they sort of connect with it, but they are afraid to really take ownership of the instrument – they doubt their own ability to tune the instrument.  And so over time, their kalimba drops out of tune, playing becomes unpleasant, and the kalimba goes into the closet. But I have also seen the opposite.  I have seen people who doubted their own musical ability and doubted

I’ve been jamming out on kalimba… playing along with Top 40 Radio! Click to download Tablature for the mbira song Chaminuka I was very disappointed on election night a couple weeks ago, as I am sure many of you were as well. Leading up to the election, I had taken to listening to more and more news and analysis, mostly on NPR and Democracy Now, and when I saw the writing on the wall, I decided I needed to take a huge break from the news. So now, when I drive somewhere, or when my clock radio wakes me up, I listen to a local Top 40 / variety radio

Learning this song on Alto Kalimba has put me into “Beginner’s Mind” Click to download tablature for “Taireva” played on Alto Kalimba Have you ever read the book, “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind”?  The basic idea is that we can make great progress on our journey by approaching everything with an open, beginner’s mind, for it is in this state that we are ready to be taught, we are ready to see, and we are ready to understand.  The expert who already knows everything might not ever see the truth. While I like to think of myself as a kalimba expert, I do get knocked on my (musical) butt quite often. 

The chords and phrase structure behind most mbira music Click to download Tablature for the mbira song Chaminuka Most “primitive” music is so-called “two-phrase” music – basically a call phrase and a response phrase, or a question and an answer.  This simple musical form exists across cultures, in nursery rhymes, and in basic karimba music. Sometime between 600 and 1000 years ago in the Zambezi Valley of southeastern Africa – let’s suppose during the peak of the “Great Zimbabwe” civilization – an incredible innovation occurred: that primal two-phrase tune pattern evolved into a “four-phrase” pattern.  This innovation was momentous. Doubling the length of the original two-phrase cycle had the effect

A close look at the inner workings of the mbira song “Taireva” reveals remarkable and quirky details Mbira music is elusive. You think you understand it, you reach to grasp it, but then it slips through your fingers. There are in truth many ways to understand mbira music – and you learn to strive to come to the place where you touch all of those understandings without holding any. In another blog post, I give away the tablature for the song “Taireva,” for both mbira and C Alto kalimba.   In this post I detail some of the more subtle aspects of traditional mbira music, using “Taireva” to help in the

New tablature for mbira dzavadzimu, plus tabs for Hugh Tracey Alto and B flat Treble Kalimbas Click to download tablature for the mbira song “Chaminuka” Chaminuka was a real person, a renowned Zimbabwean prophet who foretold the coming of white European colonialists.  After his death, he became a popular ancestral spirit to channel.  Mbira dzavadzimu were and still are used in these ceremonies. While researching Chaminuka for the Chiwoniso article, I learned that there are at least two totally different songs by this name: “Chaminuka” for the karimba by Chiwoniso, and an unrelated song for the mbira dzavadzimu.  The mbira “Chaminuka” is the classic pattern described by Andrew Tracey in

Free tablature for “Chaminuka,” for A-17 or F-15 instruments Click to download Tablature for the song Chuaminuka on F-15 Note Karimba We have featured the music of the late Chiwoniso before at Kalimba Magic.  Chiwoniso was a talented and charismatic singer and karimba player (which she simply called an mbira). She was also the daughter of Dumisani Maraire (Dumi), who is credited with bringing both the marimba band movement and the karimba to America, starting around 1968.  Dumi was educated about music at the Kwanangoma School of African Music in Bulawayo, Rhodesia (now called Zimbabwe). Chiwoniso grew up traveling with her father and learning African music, between Zimbabwe and Washington

Yohei Kisanuki plays some of the best Chromatic Kalimba in the world! When Kalimba Magic gets an order for an instrument and we ship it out, we have no idea if this kalimba will sit in its box unused for years, or if it will become the recipient’s new best friend, accompanying him or her on daily journeys and sharing beautiful music for years.  I hope the latter, of course.  It is always nice to see when someone does really well with their kalimbas. I recently learned of the great kalimba artist Yohei Kisanuki through YouTube.  I was particularly impressed by his ease in playing the Treble Chromatic kalimba, and thought