African Music – The Blog of Samite

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I have been teaching myself to play a new African instrument; one that you may have read about here a few years ago. It is called an adungu and it is indigenous to northern Uganda. I have admired musicians that played it and about 9 months ago, a guitarist who often plays with me, Charlie Shew, called me and told me that he just bought one. He strongly encouraged me to do the same… and I did! Rarely has there been a day since that I have not played it.

Charlie introduced me to Martin Klabunde, a master of this instrument. Don’t worry, you can have one too, Martin sells them in America at Collective Awakening.  Here you will find videos that teach you how to play the adungu, books, and a variety of other instruments as well.

Playing the adungu is meditational and you don’t have to be a master to start playing a song – the instrument will play you for awhile before you can play it. Unfortunately you won’t remember what you have played for awhile, but I stopped worrying about that because it has given me so many songs already that it seems endless. It took me about 3 months before I could play the same song again and now I have begun to introduce the instrument to my audiences and I hope to start recording with it soon.

Nearly all African music instruments in the United States can be categorized in three ways: string, wind and percussion.  Let’s begin with the string instruments.

Another name for string instruments is chordophone.  These create sound from vibrating strings made of metal or gut, and within the family of strings there are three sub-categories:

Harps- which mount their strings in a right angle to the soundboard.

Citres or Zithers- instruments which don’t have a neck and use the body for the string-mount.  A common zither or citres in the U.S. is a piano or harpsichord.

Lutes – a device with strings supported on a neck and with a resonance chamber.  Americans know this type from guitars and violins.

There are a variety of ways to produce sound from a string instrument.  Musicians can pluck the strings with their fingers or with a plucking device like a pick or even a feather.  Some instruments are played with the assistance of a bow of horse-hair or similar synthetic material.  By moving the bow across the strings, the strings vibrate and create sound.  Lastly, struck string instruments involve hammer sticks to make sound by hitting keyboards attached to strings.

Another category of African instruments in the U.S. are the winds.  Among these are flutes, reed pipes, lip vibrated instruments and free reeds.

Another word for wind instruments is aerophone, both the pipe aerophone like flutes and trumpets, and the free aerophone such as the mouth organ and accordion.  The pipe aerophones create sound by resonating air blown into or over an opening.  The free version controls the pitch by lengthening or shortening the length of the reed.

In some countries reed instruments are made from metal such as the harmonica or the accordion, however the African music instruments in the United States typically use wood and other materials that come from the land.

For great African music click through to Samite Mulondo’s website CD order page.