As readers may have gathered, I’m quite an enthusiastic musician! One of the instruments I have always, always loved the sound of is the Kalimba. I’m familiar with the name from a lifetime of playing MIDI keyboards, so I was delighted to find out early last year that they are relatively inexpensive.
Kalimba score (also known as Kalimba tab) is really quite rare, so for me, so far, learning songs has been a process of pure muscle memory and trying to visualise things on the fly. As someone who has spent their life playing linear chromatic instruments, I find it quite hard to wrap my hear around the “mirrored” diatonic layout of the standard Kalimba keys.
I’d like to learn how to properly play on the standard layout before deviating from that and trying to conceive my own layouts.
I, like many others, learn much quicker if I have something to read from, so I am writing a Kalimba app which will take MIDI files as an input, and output Kalimba score to the screen. This app uses my own MIDI.js library This app also features playback driven by Mudcube’s MIDI.js library. I’d like to find more time for this, hopefully I’ll have something finished this year.
I may turn this into a casual commercial endeavour and build a Cordova app, I think this would also help the Kalimba community out a lot!