In summary, there is an amazing diversity of music you can play on the simple 8-Note kalimba in F tuning.Have you recently purchased your first kalimba, and are looking for easy songs you can show off to family or friends? Or maybe you’re just looking for beginner-friendly songs to build your skill?Īlthough kalimba is still a relatively niche instrument, there is a large amount of music already written for it, and that includes classic songs that most people already know.
#KALIMBA MUSIC FOR BEGINNERS DOWNLOAD#
Also included in the download are: “Amazing Grace,” spirituals such as “Go Tell it on the Mountain” and “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” several traditional African karimba songs such as “Chemtengure,” a few classical tunes including “Finlandia,” Christmas carols such as “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” and Americana such as “This Land is Your Land” and “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain When She Comes.” We have a download with 32 songs that can be played on the 8-Note kalimba in F tuning, and “Away in a Manger” is representative of them. Follow the tuning link at the bottom of the article for more information on kalimba tuning.) A first-time kalimba tuner might take three or four minutes getting the note right. (An experienced kalimba tuner can accomplish this retuning in a matter of seconds. But if you don’t retune, that one note will be sticking out and sounding a little funny… and eventually you will probably want to tune it down so it sounds right. Strictly speaking, no, you don’t need to. You might be wondering if you really need to tune the B down to a Bb to play the music here. By pulling the B out a few millimeters to make Bb, you change the key to F, which totally changes the layout of the kalimba, as indicated by the numbers. That will make the first two notes of “Amazing Grace,” and you can feel the strength of that motion. And the low C, or 5, pushes us toward the F, or 1. The root note of this song – that is, the note the melody most commonly ends on – is F instead of C. What has changed is how we think about the notes. On the 8-Note in F, almost all the notes are the same as when it was in C – the low note (the longest tine) is still C, the high note (the shortest tine) is still C. And there are a lot of songs just like “Away in a Manger” that fit on the 8-Note kalimba only when you have the 5th in the bass, as in this F tuning. So doing this simple retuning of one tine gives the low C, which is the fifth of F (the new key), the proud designation of the “5th in the bass.” While “Joy to the World” requires the kalimba to be tuned from 1 in the bottom to 8 at the top, “Away in a Manger” requires the tines to run from 5 in the bottom to 5 in the top – that is, a tuning just like our F tuning.
Sing the note names and numbers with the same tune as “Do Re Mi Fa So”: F G A Bb C = 1 2 3 4 5, therefore C is the 5th of F, and on this kalimba, C is the longest tine and the lowest note, otherwise known as the bass note. Right about now you may be thinking “Whoa! What does that mean, put the 5th in the bass?” In this F tuning, the low note is C, and C is the 5th of F. This gives the instrument an entirely different note layout, which means you can play so many more songs that are not possible in the standard tuning. And it is so worth doing, because retuning in this way puts the 5th in the bass. It is the perfect entrance to the world of retuning. It requires only that the B tine be pulled slightly down to B flat. Retuning your 8-Note kalimba from from the key of C to the key of F is the simplest retuning you could do. By tuning the 7th note, B, down to B flat – the kalimba is thrown into the key of F with a fundamentally different note layout, and a whole world of different songs can be played on the instrument in this tuning. While it might seem that a kalimba with only eight notes would not be very capable, it turns out that there is quite a bit of music available to the 8-Note kalimba.Īlmost every 8-Note kalimba is tuned to the C major scale, playing from low to high: “Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti Do.” In addition to being useful for many songs in C, you can attain a “new and different instrument” by simply retuning a single note down by a half step. You may be wondering what could you do with only eight notes. Kalimbas generally have more tines than an 8-note does.
Click to download 8-Note tablature for “Away in a Manger”
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