How to Tune the Kalimba?
- The most important thing you can do to sound good is to keep your kalimba in tune. To tune a kalimba is to actually adjust tines so they have the exact sound they are supposed to, according to which note a tine is designated to play.
- Hammer with Online App or a tuner:
- You can use a real tuner or download an App. (Android system app: gStrings, Apple system app: Instuner. )
- Tune with a hammer: Making tines longer (from the point where they are held down on the bridge) will lower their pitch, and making them shorter will make their pitch higher.
3. Also, after you tune up, make sure that the tines are more or less equally spaced. There is a mysterious phenomenon that sometimes happens – periodically, you will find that when you shift the tines to the left or right to get them equally spaced, you will “excite a buzz” in one of them. If this happens, shift the tine to an orientation where it does not buzz. Now you have to shift the neighboring tines (2-3 on each side) around to re- establish approximately equal spacing – and hopefully, that process doesn’t excite one of those other tines to buzz too.