Kalimba

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The kalimba is an instrument in the percussion family. It is a modernized version of the African mbira. It is a sound box with metal keys attached to the top to give the different notes. It is also known as the African thumb piano.

A Hugh Tracey treble kalimba.

The kalimba is a musical instrument from Africa. Several reeds or tines are plucked with the thumb or fingers, and the reed vibrations are amplified by a hollow box resonator or a sounding board. The kalimba is a member of the Lamellophone family of musical instruments.

The first kalimba to be exported commercially out of Africa was the Hugh Tracey Kalimba. After years of studying African music and dozens of prototype instruments, Hugh Tracey's company African Musical Instruments began manufacturing kalimbas, a western version of the mbira, in the late 1950s. The name kalimba is a Bantu word which means "little music", and is similar to the word karimba, a type of mbira.

While kalimba initially meant the Hugh Tracey kalimba, the name kalimba is now a generic name and can describe any non-traditional thumb piano, or can even be used generically for the traditional lamellophones of Africa (ie, the mbira, karimba, sansa, etc).

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[edit] The African roots of the kalimba

Unlike string instruments or flutes, which were widespread around the world, the kalimba family of instruments is uniquely African. The kalimba appears to have been invented in Africa twice: a wood or bamboo-tined instrument appeared on the west coast of Africa perhaps 3000 years ago, and metal-tined lamellophones appeared in the Zambezi River valley around 1000 years ago. These metal-tined instruments traveled all across Africa and differentiated in their physical form and social uses as they spread. Kalimba-like instruments came to exist from the northern reaches of South Africa to the southern extent of the Saharan desert, and from east coast to west coast. There were hundreds of different tunings, different note layouts, and different instrument designs.

Dr. Hugh Tracey, an Englishman who moved to Africa, spent many years from the 1920's through the 1950's traveling about in rural Africa (ie, as far away as he could get from western musical influences such as radio, western-influenced bands, and Christian missionaries) where he recorded traditional music and documented the tunings and note layouts of the different kalimbas. However, when Hugh Tracey founded the company African Musical Instruments and started building kalimbas in Rudespoort, South Africa, and exporting them around the world in the late 1950's and early 1960's, the note layout and tuning were not traditional. Rather, the kalimbas were tuned diatonically in the key of G, with adjacent notes on the scale sitting on opposite sides of the kalimba.

[edit] Kalimba tunings

[edit] The treble kalimba

Tuning chart for the 17-note treble kalimba.

Most western instruments have a simple linear visual mapping from the instrument to the pitch which is played: on a piano, the further left you go, the lower you go, and higher notes are to the right. String instruments have a similar mapping: the further up the neck you go, the higher the pitch, but this progression is realized independently on each string. Most western string instruments have a similar progression from one string to the next (ie, each violin string is a 5th higher than theù+ èò+è lùàòlàòlàòlàòlàòlàòlàòlàòlàòlàòlàòlàòlàòlàòlàòlàòl previous one). Such consistent visual mappings from the instrument to the pitches the instrument plays promotes the development of intuition and aids in the learning of the instrument and even the ability to improvise or play by ear.

It is common on African mbira and other lamellophones to have the lowest notes in the center with higher notes to the far left and the far right - this is an ergonomic nicety, in that the thumb can pivot such that all the tines are easy to reach. However, traditional African tunings use notes that do not lie on the grid of the western tempered scale, and traditional kalimba note layouts are often idiosyncratic, sometimes with adjacent tines making part of a scale, but then an odd note thrown in that defies the pattern.

The Hugh Tracey kalimbas are tuned diatonically in the key of G. The arrangement of the notes on the Hugh Tracey kalimba borrows from the typical scheme with the lowest notes in the center and the upper notes on the left and the right, but a regular note layout is used, with the notes in the ascending scale alternating strictly right-left and going outwards towards the two sides. With this bidirectional note layout, it seems that all intuition from linearly mapped instruments goes out the window. This arrangement requires that the kalimba player develop a new intuition, but that new intuition is not as hard to come by as the more idiosyncratic note layouts of the traditional African lamellophones.

The diatonic western kalimba tuning Hugh Tracey used was practical for a world-wide instrument - with hundreds of African kalimba tunings, the chosen western standard would maximize the number of people who would immediately connect with the kalimba. The beauty of this note arrangement, with notes going up the scale in a right-left-right-left progression, is that modal 1-3-5 or 1-3-5-7 chords are made by playing adjacent tines and are trivial to learn and play. If chords are played in the lower octave, the same notes will appear on the opposite side of the kalimba in the upper octave, which makes it very easy to simultaneously play a melody in the upper octave and an accompanying harmony in the lower octave. So, the arrangement of notes on the Hugh Tracey kalimba (and on virtually any kalimba you find, as this note layout scheme has been adopted by virtually everyone who copies the Hugh Tracey kalimba) makes some complex musical operations very simple and easy.

Alternative tunings are possible, as the tines of most kalimbas are easily pushed in and out to sharpen or flatten their pitch. Some alternative tunings simply change the key of the kalimba, without changing the note layout scheme. Other alternative tunings move the kalimba to non-modal scales (such as Middle-Eastern scales). Each note of the kalimba can be tuned independently (unlike a guitar), so any scale, western or non-western, is possible, and traditional African scales are still accessible to this modern African instrument.

[edit] The kalimba explosion

In the early 1960's, Hugh Tracey secured an initial order of 10,000 kalimbas with Creative Playthings of Princeton NJ, a company which designed and distributed truly innovative toys and furniture, mostly made from natural materials. And so, many people bought their first kalimba from a toy store. People quickly realized that the kalimba was not a toy, but a real instrument capable of real music.

Soon, African Musical Instruments began making other styles of kalimba with similar, but different note layouts. The original kalimba was named the Treble, and a larger, lower pitched 15-note model called the Alto was introduced. See the ALTO tuning chart below:

Tuning chart for the 15-note alto kalimba.

Similarly, different kalimba models with the same note layout were also introduced over time. Most traditional African kalimbas had the tines mounted on a flat board, rather than on a box, though some traditional kalimbas were mounted on a piece of wood which was hollowed out to provide a resonant box. The flat board kalimbas could be placed inside or on top of a hollow gourd, which was used as a resonator to amplify and alter the quality of the sound the kalimba produced. The new board-mounted Hugh Tracey kalimbas were a nod to the traditional African kalimba designs. The smaller board-mounted Hugh Tracey kalimbas were given the name "celleste" (as in "celleste treble").

Shortly after the Hugh Tracey kalimba started being sold around the world, artisans and craftspeople started copying the design, or adapting the design. Several high quality kalimba makers exist around the world today: Lucinda Ellison, Andrew Masters, David Bellinger, Steve Catania, Luc DeCock, R. P. Collier, and Greg Trimble. On the other hand, most kalimbas sold today are inexpensive copies make in third world countries such as Pakistan or Indonesia.

African Musical Instruments continues to produce high quality kalimbas from their shop in South Africa. They have expanded their offerings to over a dozen different kalimba models, ranging from an 8-note student model to a modern version of a traditionally tuned Shona karimba. AMI also makes high quality marimbas and drums.

[edit] Kalimba acoustics

Lamellophones are instruments which have little tines or lamella which are played by plucking. Unlike string instruments or air column instruments like flutes, the overtones of a plucked lamella are an-harmonic (ie, the overtones and the fundamental vibration don't harmonize), giving the kalimba a rather odd sound. However, the an-harmonic overtones are strongest in the attack and die out rather quickly, leaving an almost pure tone which is quite beautiful.

The tuning of most kalimbas, with the notes in the scale ascending on the tines from the center outward in an alternating right-left fashion, results in chords being made by adjacent tines. When any tine is plucked, the adjacent tines also vibrate, and these harmonizing secondary vibrations serve a similar role to the harmonic overtones of a string instrument - they increase the harmonic complexity of an individual note, though in a strange yet pleasing way.

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