It is not essential to have long nails on your thumbs to play the thumb piano, but it can help at the stage when you first start learnign and are picking up the basic technique If your Kalimba doesn’t sound as good as it should, you may begin to think you are not able to play so well and lose motivation to learn further, and this would be a wasted opportunity as I am sure you can become a great Kalimba player in a very short time. Dead tines or buzzing will affect the overall sound performance of your instrument. If you are not aware you could have poor sounding tines, or worse still, buzzing tines, or dead tines and not even be aware.Įach and every tine on your kalimba should be able to be heard clearly and resonate. It is important to understand what your Kalimba should sound like when you recieve, it, take it from the box and play if for the first time. Know What a good Kalimba Should Sound Like

In this case, one might expect that you would progress your learning at a much faster pace and be able to hear and value the difference in quality of sound, resonance, and tone of the instrument. The exception here is if you are buying your first Kalimba but have extensive musical experience with other instruments. The value you ill get from paying those extra $100 on a Kalimba will only come when your technique and ear for the music is such that you can appreciate ad value the nuances of better quality materials and higher price tags. However, if you are considering your fist kalimba then I would suggest that you would not get full value from one of these.Ī mid-range Price Kalimba is going to suit you perfectly, especially if you have little to no previous musical instrument experience. It is possible to spend a great deal of money on buying a Kalimba and there is certainly a place for them in the market. This could lead to you questioning your ability to play Kalimba well and give up, hen in fact a better-priced Kalimba would have sounded much better, and you would have been encouraged to continue learning and improving your technique and playing skills. (Beginners tend to play a lot!)īut moreover, the kalimba is not going to sound the best it could even if you are playing the instrument absolutely perfectly. This will have an effect on the resonance of the tines, how long the tines will last after being played a lot. When you buy cheap kalimbas, and I am talking about instruments in the less than $25 range, you are in almost all cases, going to receive a Kalimba made with poor quality materials. Probably one of the most important tips in this guide, is to choose a mid-range priced instrument. You are almost certainly reading these Kalimba buying tips because you are researching and embarking on buying a Kalimba for the first time. If you are prone to dropping things or are buying a kalimba for a child, then a solid base Kalimba is probably your best bet. There is obvioulsy no sound modulation with board mounted Kalimbas, but they are a great deal more sturdy then box types thanks to the more solid construction. The sound is naturally amplified in the chamber created by the box design, and with practice and once skilled you can create vibratos with rapid to and fro movement of your fingers near the rear sound holes Solid base Kalimba

This also gives you the ability to affect note by note the sound you kalimba makes and is a great additional for e personally. With additional holes on the rear of the kalimba that can be accessed with your ring or little fingers, you can increase and decrease the volume coming out of the hole on the front. The benefit of Kalimba with a sound hole is that the space is used for modulating the sound. You can buy great kalimbas with or without sound-holes, so this choice is going to come down to personal preference and look. Plastic or Acrylic Kalimbas can be very good, but there is little that matches the resonance and general ‘feel’ of a wooden instrument.

The advice here is to stick with wood for your first Kalimba. The instrument with the patented, free-floating suspension of the sound block is a complete in-house development.It is possible to buy Kalimbas on Wood or Acrylic bases. The sansula belongs to the kalimbas family and is just as easy to play as a normal kalimba.

Renaissance kalimba music