The layout is the whole instrument
Pick up a kalimba for the first time and the note order looks broken. The lowest note is not on the left, it is in the middle — on the longest tine, the one that sticks up furthest — and from there the scale climbs outward in both directions at once. Second note to the left, third to the right, fourth to the left, and so on, alternating all the way to the edges. The two highest notes on the instrument end up at the far left and far right.
On a 17-key in C, that means the tines you can see, read left to right, are D6 B5 G5 E5 C5 A4 F4 D4 — then C4 in the centre — then E4 G4 B4 D5 F5 A5 C6 E6. Nothing about that is arbitrary. Both thumbs rest in the middle, where the low notes live, and a scale is played by alternating them outward. A stepwise melody becomes a comfortable left-right-left-right rocking motion rather than a reach across the instrument, and that is the entire reason the layout exists.
- C4centre
- D41st left
- E41st right
- F42nd left
- G42nd right
- A43rd left
- B43rd right
- C54th left
- D54th right
- E55th left
- F55th right
- G56th left
- A56th right
- B57th left
- C67th right
- D68th left
- E68th right
Tap a tine to hear it. The list underneath is the same seventeen notes in pitch order — the order they climb, rather than the order they sit in.
Reading kalimba tabs
Kalimba music is almost never written on a stave. It is written in numbers, and the system is small enough to learn in about a minute — which is a large part of why the instrument has the reputation it has for being easy to start.
Each number is a degree of the scale, not a tine position: 1 is the tonic (the middle C on a C-tuned kalimba), 2 the D above it, up to 7. Octaves are marked with dots — a dot above the number takes it up an octave, two dots up two octaves, and a dot below takes it down one. So the numbers you see stamped on the tines above are the same numbers you will see in any tab you find, and the four bass tines of a 21-key show up as 4, 5, 6 and 7 with a dot underneath.
Because the numbers are scale degrees rather than positions, a tab written for one kalimba works on a kalimba in another key without a single change. Transpose the instrument above into G major and every song in the library still plays — the numbers mean the same thing, they just come out at a different pitch. In the editor, an apostrophe stands in for the dot above (1') and a comma for the dot below (1,), because those you can actually type.
Every song in the library is also printed in full on the kalimba songs and tabs page — numbers with their dots, the letter under each, sorted by which size of kalimba can play it — for when you want the tab on paper beside a real instrument rather than on the screen.
Sizes, and what each one can actually play
| Size | Range | What it changes |
|---|---|---|
| 7-note | C4 – B4 | One octave, and not even a full one — no upper C to land on. Fine for a first instrument, restrictive within a week. |
| 8-key | C4 – C5 | The 7-note with the octave closed. That eighth tine is worth more than it sounds — a great many melodies end on it. |
| 10-key | C4 – E5 | Two notes past the octave, five per thumb. The traditional mbira-ish size, and the point at which simple folk tunes fit without rearranging. |
| 17-key | C4 – E6 | The standard, and what almost every tab online assumes. Two full octaves and a third. If you are buying one, buy this. |
| 21-key | F3 – E6 | A 17-key with F3, G3, A3 and B3 added underneath. Bass notes to accompany yourself with — and every other tine shifted one place outward. |
Switching size above rebuilds the instrument and re-filters the song list, so a song disappears when the kalimba you have selected genuinely cannot reach its notes rather than being quietly played wrong. If a tab needs a note the current size does not have, the page says which note and why.
Playing it
Tap or click a tine to strike it. Drag across the tines and each one sounds as you cross it — that sweep is the signature kalimba gesture and it is worth trying before anything else. On a touchscreen you can use more than one finger at a time, so chords work the way they do on the real instrument.
On a computer, the letters printed near the base of each tine are the keys that play them. They run left to right across the board, which means a scale zig-zags across your keyboard exactly the way it zig-zags across the instrument. That is deliberate: a mapping that sorted the notes into a tidy ascending row would be easier to type and would teach you an instrument that does not exist.
Autoplay, and practice mode
Pick a song and Play it performs it on the tines, lighting each one as it sounds, so you can watch a melody before you attempt it. Timing comes off the audio clock rather than a timer, so the lit tine and the note you hear are the same event even on a slow phone.
Practice is the more useful of the two. It waits: one tine glows, nothing happens until you play it, and only then does it move on. There is no clock and no score, so a passage you cannot yet find simply stays on screen until you find it — which is the way this instrument is actually learned.
Everything in the library is public domain: traditional melodies and classical pieces free for anyone to publish — and all of it is written out as easy kalimba tabs you can print. For anything else, the editor takes a tab in the notation above, plays it, and turns it into a link. The notes travel inside the link itself and are never uploaded here, so what you write stays yours.
The instrument this one came from
The modern kalimba is a twentieth-century instrument, and it is a simplification of a much older family. The mbira dzavadzimu of Zimbabwe is the one worth hearing: 22 hand-forged keys across three manuals rather than one rank of seventeen, bottle caps nailed to the soundboard so that every note buzzes, and — the part that surprises most kalimba players — no standard pitch whatsoever. Its tunings are named sets of intervals rather than pitches, so an mbira is tuned to itself and to whoever it is playing with, never to A440.
That page has all three manuals with the B/L/R key numbering mbira scores use, the four traditional tunings, the machachara buzz as a switch, and a reference-pitch control that slides the whole instrument. Everything you have learned about tines here transfers to it — the physics of a key is the same object — and almost nothing about the layout does.
When the real one is out of tune
A kalimba drifts. The tines are steel held by friction against a bridge, and they move — with temperature, with a knock, and with being played. If yours has started sounding sour, the kalimba tuner listens through your microphone and tells you which tine has moved and by how many cents, with the full tine map for every size from a 7-note to a 21-key in the zig-zag order the tines physically sit in. Tuning is done by tapping a tine along its bridge with a small hammer — shorter to go sharp, longer to go flat — and the tine always moves further than you expect.
Questions
Why are the notes not in order from left to right?
Because that is how a kalimba is built. The longest tine — the lowest note — sits in the middle, and each next note up the scale goes to the opposite side, one place further out. So the pitch climbs outward in both directions at once and the two highest notes are at the far left and far right edges. It looks strange written down and makes complete sense with the instrument in your hands: both thumbs sit in the middle where the low notes are, and they reach outward together. A simulator that lays the notes out left to right like a piano is not showing you a kalimba.
What do the dots above and below the numbers mean?
They are octave marks. A bare number is a note in the middle octave — 1 is the middle C, 2 the D above it, up to 7. One dot above the number means play the same note an octave higher, two dots means two octaves higher, and a dot below means an octave lower. That is why a 21-key kalimba writes its four extra bass tines as 4 5 6 7 with dots underneath: they are the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh degrees, one octave down.
Will 17-key tabs work on the 21-key?
Yes, unchanged. A 21-key is a 17-key with four bass tines added below it, so every note from C4 to E6 exists on both and sounds identical. What changes is where those notes physically sit: adding four tines below the centre pushes everything else one place further out, so the tine you reach for is in a different position even though the number in the tab is the same. If you learned a song on a 17-key, the numbers transfer perfectly and the muscle memory does not.
Why can I not play Für Elise or Greensleeves here?
A factory kalimba is diatonic: it has the seven notes of one major scale and nothing in between, so there are no sharps or flats to reach for. Für Elise opens on E–D♯ and Greensleeves needs a raised seventh, and neither note exists on the instrument. This is not a limitation of the simulator — a real kalimba cannot play them either, which is why kalimba arrangements of those pieces always change the notes. Everything in the song library here was chosen to be playable exactly as written.
Does this sound like a real kalimba?
It is synthesised rather than recorded, and it is modelled on what a tine actually is: a steel bar clamped at one end, whose overtones fall at roughly 1 : 6.27 : 17.5 times the fundamental instead of in the whole-number octaves a string produces. That inharmonic 6.27 is the bright metallic ping you hear on the attack, and it is the thing that makes a kalimba sound like metal rather than like a music box. The trade-off is honest: a recording of a good instrument has more character. What synthesis buys you is that the first note sounds the instant you touch a tine, with nothing to download, and that changing the key or your concert pitch produces a genuinely correct note rather than a stretched sample.
Can I play the songs I actually want, like anime or film themes?
You can write them and play them, but you will not find them in the library here. The songs in the library are all public domain — traditional melodies and classical pieces old enough to be free for anyone to publish. Modern songs are still in copyright, and an arrangement of one is a derivative work whether it is written as sheet music or as kalimba numbers, so publishing a library of them would not be ours to do. The tab editor is the way round it: write out the notes yourself, press Share, and the tab is encoded into the link itself. Nothing is uploaded here, so your arrangement travels in the URL you paste to a friend.
Is a kalimba the same thing as an mbira?
Not quite, and the difference is worth knowing before you buy either. Both are lamellophones — steel keys clamped at a bridge and plucked with the thumbs — and a single key behaves identically on both, which is why they sound related. But the kalimba on this page is a modern instrument: one rank of tines, factory-tuned to a Western major scale at concert pitch, with numbered tabs written for it. A traditional mbira dzavadzimu is 22 to 28 hand-forged keys across three separate manuals, it has bottle caps nailed to the soundboard to make it buzz, and it has no standard pitch at all — its tunings are sets of intervals rather than pitches, so two correctly tuned instruments can sit several semitones apart. There is a playable one on this site if you want to hear the difference.
Is there a free app to learn kalimba?
This page works as one, with nothing to install. Practice mode is the learning part: pick a song, and one tine glows at a time and waits until you play it, so you learn where each note lives at your own speed, with no score and no timer. Autoplay shows you the whole melody first. It runs in the phone browser you already have, so a bookmark is the whole install. When you move to a real kalimba, the song tabs page has every song printed in numbers and letters, and the kalimba tuner checks that the instrument itself is in tune.
Which size should I pick if I am thinking of buying one?
A 17-key, almost certainly. It is the standard, it covers two full octaves plus a third, and virtually every tab and song chart you will find online is written for it. A 7 or 8-key is a genuinely limited instrument — one octave, and many melodies simply run off the end of it. A 21-key adds four bass notes that let you accompany yourself, at the cost of being wider than most thumbs comfortably reach across. Try each of them here before you spend anything; the ranges above the instrument are the real ones.