Striking a different chord
The kalimba is one of the friendliest instruments there is. It fits in two hands, it is inexpensive, and it sounds lovely before you can play a single song. Its family tree runs back about 3,000 years, but the crowd picking it up today is new: hobbyists who grew up on game controllers, not piano lessons.
Kalimba Klub asked us to design one for exactly that person. Someone who has never held a kalimba, but already knows how to hold a controller.
Start with the grip
A traditional kalimba is a flat wooden board with a straight row of metal tines. It is beautiful, and it gives you no clue where your thumbs go. New players spend their first few minutes figuring out the object instead of making a sound.
We started with the grip everyone already knows. Where your thumbs rest on a controller, how your fingers wrap around the back, how it sits in your hands without a second thought. Then we shaped the body around that grip and set the tines where thumbs actually land. Pick it up and your hands are already in position.
Make it sing
A kalimba's warmth comes from the resonance chamber inside the body, and once the body changed, the chamber changed with it. The first prototypes felt right in the hand and had lost some of their tone. It took several more rounds of tuning the internal volume before the new shape gave back the sound a kalimba should have. That is where the project was won.
To tooling
We carried Kalimba Klub from concept sketches through sketch models, prototyping, strategy and renders to production-ready tooling. The video shows the sketch-model stage.
