Chords for How To Play Kalimba - Tuning, Technique and Practice Scales

_ _ Hello everyone, my name's Cameron, otherwise known as KalimbaCam, and this is the beginning
of my series on how to play the kalimba.
With the purchase of your kalimba, you will often receive a kalimba cleaner, which can
be used to wipe down the kalimba of fingerprints, a kalimba tuner, which I will explain later,
and kalimba thumb picks, which I will also explain later.
For this tutorial, I will be using a 17 key mahogany wood kalimba from Muspore.
Note that the type of wood used for your kalimba barely affects the performance in terms of sound quality.
So to start, some basic technique.
You can use the skin of your thumbs to play the notes on the kalimba, if you don't have
any fingernails or you prefer the feeling.
I would suggest to use the kalimba thumb picks if you are to use the skin of your thumbs
to play the kalimba while practicing, as it stops your thumb from getting injured like
mine did when I first started playing the kalimba.
Thumb picks aren't great for if you want to record or perform, but they're fine for when you're training.
The method I would suggest for playing the kalimba is if you have fingernails, to use them.
So just pick at the keys using your fingernails as such.
_ _ [D] _ _
_ _ [C] _ _ _ _ _
Now we are going to explain how to tune your kalimba.
So you can download any regular tuning app on your phone, you can see mine is already
responding to my voice.
You can download any universal tuning app, it should work fine.
Okay, so play all the notes on your kalimba as such, and make sure that the tuner app
says that it is tuned correctly.
On purchase, your kalimba should be correctly tuned.
So [C] C, _ [G] that's fine.
D, _ _ _ _ [B] _ _
_ _ [F] _ _ _ [C] _ _ _
[A] _ _ _ _ _ _ [C] _ _
so those are all fine.
[N] D, okay there's an issue with D, you can see when I play D, you can see that when I play
D, the bar at the bottom _ _ _ hooks too much to the right.
So this is how you can fix it.
So because the app told us that D was hooking too far to the right, this means that D is
too high pitched.
And we need to lower the pitch using the kalimba tuner.
Hit on top of the key to lower the pitch, and hit below the key to higher the pitch as [C] such.
_ [G] _ _
_ _ _ _ _ Okay, let's see.
_ _ Yep, that's fine.
When all the notes on your kalimba are tuned correctly, [N] you can begin practicing.
A good way to begin practicing is to play the scale that corresponds to your kalimba's tuning.
For example, this kalimba is tuned in C major, so I'm going to practice playing the C major scale.
[D] _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ [A] _ _ _ _ _ [C] _ _
_ [D] Okay, once you've become more confident with doing that, you can try speeding it up a bit. _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
So that wraps it up for this episode.
This has been part one on how to play the kalimba.
We covered the basic tools that come with the kalimba, how to use them, technique on the kalimba.
We also learned how to tune the kalimba.
So if this video was helpful for you, please like the video, [Ab] subscribe to the channel,
stay tuned for the next video, share this video with others who would find this video
useful, and [D] we'll see you in the next episode.
Thanks for watching. _ _ _ _ _ _
_ [Em] _ _ _ _ [C] _ _ _
_ [F] _ _ _ _ _ [Cm] _ _