Making an Mbira — The African Thumb Piano

The mbira is a hardwood board carrying a row of tuned metal tongues (keys). You press each key down with a thumb and let it spring back, plucking out the note — many springy tongues laid out like a keyboard.

Shape a flat hardwood soundboard — the harder and more resonant the wood, the brighter the ring.

Cut and flatten springy steel into a set of thin tongues (keys) of graduated length — longer keys for low notes, shorter for high. File the tips smooth.

Fix a hardwood bridge across the board and a straight pressure bar just above it. The keys clamp between them, held down at one end and free to spring at the other.

Slide each key under the pressure bar. Push a key IN (shorter free end) to raise its note, or OUT (longer free end) to lower it — that is how you tune an mbira, by sliding not filing.

Rest the board in a big hollow gourd to make it louder, and fix loose bottle-caps or shells to the board so they buzz — the shimmering rattle is part of the mbira's voice.

Hold the mbira in both hands and pluck the keys downward with your thumbs (and one key up with a finger), weaving the interlocking patterns of Shona music.

The mbira is a lamellophone: an instrument of thin tongues (lamellae) fixed at one end and free to vibrate at the other. Pluck a tongue and it springs back and forth at a pitch set by how long, thick and stiff its free part is — short, stiff tongues buzz fast and sound high; long ones vibrate slowly and sound low. That is exactly the tongue of the jaw harp, only here there is a whole tuned SET of them side by side, so instead of one drone you have a keyboard you can play melodies and interlocking parts on. You tune each key not by filing but by sliding it under the pressure bar to lengthen or shorten its free end — longer is lower, shorter is higher. The hardwood board and the gourd it sits in amplify the quiet tongues, and loose buzzers add the shimmering rattle (a deliberate mirliton) that Shona players prize. Made across southern Africa for well over a thousand years — the Shona mbira, the kalimba, the many 'thumb pianos' — it is the ancestor of the modern kalimba, and its cousin is the free reed of the sheng, a tongue set vibrating by breath rather than by a thumb.