In order to play a triad, play any three adjacent notes on the same side of the kalimba. While this sounds like an advanced technique, if you just focus on the basic thumb motions and ignore which notes you are playing, it is actually very straightforward.Ī triad is a certain type of chord that is common in music, typically made of the 1, 3, and 5 of a certain scale. This lesson will leverage that basic information to help you play chords and melodies together on kalimba. This is related to what I call “Mark’s Rule of Thumb” – if you play two notes that are straight across from each other, they will sound bad… but if you play one note lower and the other note higher, they will sound pleasing. The true beauty of Hugh Tracey’s kalimba design is that when a melody note is played high up with one thumb, then usually the chord that works with that melody note will be low down on the other side. At least for tines with identical thickness and steel properties, longer tines make lower notes and shorter tines make higher notes. Would you like to learn more?įirst, where are the high notes, and where are the low notes? If you are familiar with the kalimba, you know intuitively – the low notes are in the middle, and the high notes are on both the far left and the far right. That note arrangement makes it particularly easy to create melodies high up on the instrument, and simultaneously to produce good chords low down on the instrument that perfectly accompany that high melody.
(Of course, they also owe their existence to the hundreds and thousands of people in Africa who pioneered and played the karimba, mbira and related instruments over the last 1000 years.) But most non-traditional kalimbas are copies of the Hugh Tracey kalimba’s design and note arrangement.
In an article I wrote earlier this month, I said that every non-traditional kalimba in the world owes its existence to Hugh Tracey.