You've probably heard it without knowing what it is. John Lewis, however, knows all about the mbira...

The mbira is found in many parts of sub-saharan Africa. It is used as a child's toy, a busker's portable accompaniment, a professional instrument requiring considerable accomplishment from the player and as an instrument used in ceremonies to contact ancestral spirits.

Some of its other names are thumb piano, sansa, sanzhi, likembe, kalimba, budongo, and kankobele in Zimbabwe where its music is probably the most developed; dimba, ekende, ibeka and pokido in the Congo; and usimbi to some Bantu speaking people.

Usually small enough to be hand held, sometimes resting on the knees, it is basically a set of wooden (bark or cane), or metal (iron, steel or occasionally brass) tongues fixed across a bridge mounted onto a hardwood soundboard. The sound is produced by plucking the tongues with the thumbs or forefingers, giving a clear ringing tone somewhere between a piano and a xylophone, like a piano recording played back too fast.

The number of keys varies from five to 50 and are arranged with bass notes in the middle and notes ascending (shorter tongues) towards the edge of the soundboard. Two or more rows of keys mounted one above another is not uncommon particularly in Zimbabwe. The higher manual will sometimes give octaves of the notes mounted below it and sometimes duplicate notes or unplayed keys sounding in sympathy with others, accounting for the high number of tongues.

The use of the mbira is as widespread and with as varied a role within its cultural context as the guitar is in contemporary European and American music. It can be a solo instrument to accompany singing, with or without percussion (rattles, cabasas, handclaps, drums) and although groups of three to five players is most common among the Shona of Zimbabwe, groups of over 30 including bass mbiras have been known. It has also traditionally been used in combination with xylophones and is now widely used with Western instrument in African pop music. In short, it can be used in combinations of any number with any other instrument.

The playing technique is rhythmic or percussive in the sense that, due to its lack of sustain, slow melodies suit it less well than faster sequences. A player will improvise a repeated sequence with the bass notes more or less constant, interspersed with chord work and single note runs just as a jazz or blues guitarist would.

The sound is amplified by fitting the soundboard onto a wooden box or some other kind of resonator, traditionally a dried vegetable gourd, but more recently anything from tin cans, cigar boxes and plastic drums to moulded fibreglass (I would like to see Pilgrim or Ovation make one). I have one, made by Tongue Drum, mounted on a small box into which I have fitted a Schaller contact mike (costing £6.50) which works well. Sometimes an additional texture to the sound is produced by a buzzing, set off by the vibrating keys in one of three ways; by rattling pebbles or seeds inside the sound box; by a membrane (lizard skin, spider egg sack etc) stretched over a hole in the resonator like the paper in a kazoo or some Chinese flutes, a method more common to African xylophones; or by rattles made of either small pieces of metal (like bottle tops), shells or chain attached to the soundboard, or by coils of thin metal wound round the tongues. This sound may well disturb a studio engineer unfamiliar with the instrument, he would tend to associate it with those annoying rattles in close-miked drum kits. To mimic it, put a speeded up piano track through a distortion and a noise gate triggered by your original track to cut off the sustain. Or get an mbirA.

Tunings are very varied and a good player often makes up his own tunings taking into account overtones and sympathetic vibrations to add to the chordal subtlety, but two tunings which seem to be relatively common are used by Will Menter on his instruments which are good, mahogany replicas of Shona mbiras.

The mbira karimba is the smaller, with 15 tongues tuned to a six note scale. It measures 6¼, by 8½ inches. The karimba is used mainly for entertainment, although some larger ones have ritualistic uses.

Will Menter's karimbas are around £30 and he makes a version tuned to the European scale of F major.

The mbira dzavadzimu is Will Menter's other mbira, a larger instrument (8 by 9 inches) with 22 keys and optional buzzing bottle tops. Its name means mbira of ancestral spirits and it is used to communicate with the dead and to induce a light trance. Don't be alarmed though, it has secular uses too. Will sells these for around £55.

I have seen mbiras made by three sources in this country: Tongue Drum, who make them mounted on a box resonator (there is no resonator with Will Menter's); Kevin Renton who also makes a bass version. (These are close to Will Menter's in price and all three are keen to be approached for custom orders); and Tekke whose relatively hi-tech brightly coloured, boat shaped fibreglass backed instruments, for sale at Ray Man's in Covent Garden, are more expensive than the others and with less keys but they do have good sound.

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