Kalimba Ranch Beginners Lesson 1 Introduction and how to read Ktab
Lesson 1: How to read the Ktabs and Introduction to the Kalimba.
Musical spider quoted in Lucas l'Araignée
"My name is Lucas. I'm a spider. I want to sing you a wonderful song! And if you see me, please don't squash me, I want to be your friend all day! Hee: 3!
Take Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, for example
Kalimba introduction:
Also known as the thumb piano, Kalimba is said to have been invented twice in Africa. However, when it was first used, it largely depended on what was called Kalimba, since there are over a hundred of them. African slaves in Brazil were said to have Kalimbas in the late 18th century, but they eventually disappeared.
The Kalimba / mbira is an African musical instrument consisting of a wooden plank (often fitted with a resonator) with staggered metal teeth, played by holding the instrument in the hands and pulling the teeth with the thumbs.
Acoustics
The arrangement of the most mbira notes, with the notes of the ascending scale on the teeth from the center outwards, alternately right and left, means that chords are made by the adjacent teeth. When a tooth is plucked, the adjacent teeth also vibrate, and these secondary harmonizing vibrations perform a function similar to the harmonics of a stringed instrument: they increase the harmonic complexity of an individual note.
Kalimba has earned its name
Hugh Tracey, an English ethnomusicologist who settled in Africa in 1920, spent several years between the 1920s and 1950s traveling through rural Africa (as far as possible from Western musical influences such as radio, Eastern influence groups and Christian missionaries) where he recorded traditional music and documented the chords and note patterns of the various Kalimbas.
Tracey later founded African Musical Instruments and began building a mbira variant in Roodepoort, South Africa, which he called kalimba; he began exporting them around the world in 1954. The name Kalimba is a Bantu word meaning "little music" and is similar to the word Karimba, a type of mbira. The design and tuning of the notes were not traditional; instead, Kalimbas were tuned diatonically to the note of G, with adjacent notes on the scale located on either side of the Kalimba. These were the first mbira to be exported from Africa for commercial purposes.
