A search for “mbira tutorial” on YouTube will bring up many lessons in various teaching styles on how to play different types of mbira. How many of these videos are actually good? How many will lead you down a fool’s errand in your mbira learning journey? Is learning mbira on YouTube a good thing?
Immediately Available Lessons
For many people outside Zimbabwe, YouTube is possibly increasingly becoming a starting point in their journeys to learn mbira. Imagine this; you live in a place where you’ve never seen anyone playing mbira but you have a terrible itch to learn because of what you’ve seen online or heard somewhere. Do you wait until you’ve saved enough money to travel to Zimbabwe or attend a mbira workshop? Or do you buy an instrument first and start playing around, potentially with the assistance of videos on YouTube? This is a dilemma faced by many around the world as the following for mbira continues to grow. However, this is only the beginning of a bigger dilemma for many. How do you know whether the YouTube mbira tutorial videos you are looking at are good or not?How do you know it’s a good mbira tutorial?
I have used YouTube to learn many things that include photography, DIY, and even how to grow and take care of a lawn! It has been a very useful platform but one thing has been obvious, there are good and bad videos out there. I have therefore struggled sometimes to know how to judge what could potentially be a good source of learning. I suppose this often is the same dilemma that aspirant mbira players without immediate access to a teacher face. While writing this, I did quick searches for various videos for Karigamombe and Nhemamusasa tutorials, and boy oh boy, it’s a mixed bag!Tips on choosing your mbira tutorials on YouTube
Unfortunately, as is happening right across YouTube, there are many enthusiasts of so many subjects who are passionate and want to immediately share the little they’ve got. Sometimes they are not really “ready” to share but they do it anyway to try to help others who might face their struggles. Some are just, enthusiastic.- Find reputable teachers – Of course, the quality of tutorial videos on YouTube is heavily dependent on how good a teacher someone is in the first place. This brings up a fundamental question of how someone can know if a teacher is good or not when it’s a new subject. One way you can do this is to go through lists of reputable teachers by digging through the internet a bit. You can find many on Facebook and on reputable websites such as mbira.org.
- Time – Once you have a shortlist of videos/ teachers, unfortunately, you might have to spend time watching through a number of videos to find the video which makes sense to you. It is important that you understand what the hell is going on otherwise no learning will take place.
- Listen – mbira is music more than it is a visual form. It is essential that when selecting videos you also listen to how the music is sounding. My first-ever mbira teacher often would refuse to teach me a song until I could sing out the melody. This doesn’t need to be your exact experience however hearing and knowing how a song should sound helps. So when you are learning a song on YouTube and it doesn’t sound like other versions of the song be clear on why that might be the case.
