Ngoni West African Harp

We are very excited to partner with N'goni maker and professional musician Arouna Diarra who is from Burkina Faso, a country and region in West Africa where N'gonis have been created and played for many generations.  Arouna Diarra tours and plays with the group Rising Appalachia and other artists and is the real deal.  He creates N'gonis with very high craftsmanship and infuses his positive energy into every piece. Now we can offer his beautiful instruments to the Beautiful Sounds community! 

N'gonis (aka West African Harp) can be played both acoustically or amplified (with the optional pickup) giving us many ways to include this instrument into our sound healing work with groups or individual sessions...and definitely our personal enjoyment.  

We love Ngoni because their pentatonic tunings are designed for allow for easy music creation right away - no wrong notes (when tuned up properly)!   And because it's a string instrument, you can experiment with a variety of tunings over time or to match other instruments in your collection.

The Ngoni features nylon strings which along with the gourd resonator as the body of the instrument give a very soothing, gentle and warm sound.  What's quite unique for these specific Ngoni is that Arouna personally plays each Ngoni he makes for at least 2 weeks before sending and this allows the strings to stretch out and settle so we don't have to do the main tuning work ourselves to start out.  That tuning process can be very time consuming, so this is a gift!

Features

• Choice of 5 Pentatonic tuning of your choice (most popular scales)
  • E minor, D minor, C minor, B minor, A minor
  • 440 standard but can be retuned easily tune to 432

  • Minor scale standard but simple to retune to major scale

• 12 nylon strings with 2 full octaves
• Optional Padded Travel Bag to protect your Ngoni in transport
• Optional Electric Pickup for amplification

Listen

Listen to the 5 different tunings available for the N'goni below.  The original sound sample was created with our demo Bm N'goni here at the shop, and we transposed the same sample into the other tunings and there may be a small amount of sound distortion on these transposed tracks.  However, you can get a great idea of what the other tunings would sound like in person.  Enjoy!