Name: The TRUTH About The Japanese Shamisen | Wish I Knew Sooner…
Uploaded: 2022-03-29T01:20:14.000Z
Duration: 16 min 27 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

the Japanese shamisen seems to be showing up everywhere lately.

Gerund

It sounds awesome, no doubt about that, in fact, so awesome that many people end up wanting to play, but over the past few years of doing shamisen related videos and even helping Japan's top players started online, shamisen school.

Past simple

I've gotten countless DM emails, questions and stories of heartbreak from people who took the plunge often before knowing the stresses, risks and costs involved.

So let me to start by saying that this is not one of those do not be interested in the shamisen videos, if anything is very much the opposite.

A little bit of context can go a long way in giving a lot of appreciation and for those who are actually interested in playing or starting the shamisen?

Hopefully this will help get you off to a better start at a lower cost and give you a list of things that I wish I knew before I started playing the shamisen, the first one and by far one of the most important is that shammy sen do not last forever.

We're going to loop back to this one because it connects to a lot of the other points, but they are very much an expendable resource that wears down over time and that comes in big when you're choosing what level of shammy sen do you buy?

Do you buy expensive one again, as we get into the later points, I just want you to understand right at the beginning, that unlike a lot of instruments like guitar, you don't just buy a shammy sen and have it forever.

In fact, in many ways, the cheaper you start, the more it can cost you in the long run, both in actual money and in time and care.

And there's a lot, there's a lot to keep in mind there.

The second point and this is one that I get a weird number of DMX and questions about from people who have already bought their first home is why won't my shamisen stay in tune?

And the short answer is they don't, not for very long at least, especially if you have a fresh new set of strings on your shamisen, they'll go out within moments of playing you'll be playing and all of a sudden it will be out of tune and you've gotta tune again.

This is such a defining feature of the shamisen, especially the Subaru shamisen, that you will often see players tuning their shamisen as they play the song.

Now you can mitigate this a bit by kind of stretching out your strings at the beginning, when you play, but around the time that your string's finally settle and they get to the point where they're fully stretched out more often than not, they'll break pretty soon after that, it's not uncommon to see a shamisen player even break a string in the middle of a performance or in the middle of a competition and if that happens that is it in a performance, maybe they can quickly re string and everyone's waiting and it's a little bit awkward or they'll have a backup shamisen.

But in a competition, if you break a string in the middle you are out and it is something that happens insanely often.

Now there are a bunch of other small factors like making sure that you do not touch the wood on the inside here of the Tamaki, the tuning pegs that where your natural hand oils don't get in there.

That will cause these Ito Maki to slip and go out of tune much more easily as well as the humidity or a really dry day.

Any change in that level of humidity can just make these go and all of a sudden you're playing one minute and then it pops out and unravels.

So making sure that you know how to hold and tune your shamisen properly will help keep it in tune just a little longer but won't keep it there forever.

Now, another one that surprises a lot of people is that a shammy sen cannot just be left like a guitar.

You can't just put it on a stand and leave it in your room and pick it up and play it whenever you want.

The bridge here needs to be taken out needs to be wiped down every single time to protect it from the humidity.

It needs to be placed inside of something called a washy Bouguereau, preferably one wrapped in plastic then wrapped up placed in a non zero and closed up in a case and then every single time that you want to play it, you need to pull it back out.

All of this is to ensure that your shamisen lasts as long as possible.

They are not meant to be set up and left like this for an extended period of time.

Even the ones here, I had to pull them out of their cases and set them up just for this video recording.

If you were to just leave your shamisen like this, you'll ruin your shamisen is basically also they need to be played nonstop because of the amount of natural material in a shamisen.

It is much more likely to warp or the skin is much more likely to rip.

And really that brings us to our next point that the shamisen is very much an incredibly sensitive instrument.

It doesn't really like huge changes in humidity.

You should be keeping it in an environment that is around 40% humidity.

I keep mine properly wrapped up in their case and I keep those little dry packs, like a ton of those little dry packs and other ones that they do not eat all throughout my case at all times.

And I try to keep my house around a solid 40% humidity as well, huge changes in humidity can do things like rip the skin, make it much harder for it to keep in tune or if it's left in a humid environment and not touch for too long, you can even see warping of the neck and as soon as something like that happens, it is done now in the past couple of years.

Things like worrying about your skin ripping and whatnot is slowly becoming a thing of the past as they're using less natural skins and more synthetic skin.

This time he sent back here has a rip skin and that was the last time he said I ever got that had a natural skin on it.

Every Shammy Sen that I have here now have synthetic skins which last a lot longer in principle they could last forever over time the sound will decrease, the volume will decrease, it will loosen up so it's every five, maybe 10 years, it would still be good to replace it.

But if your shammy sens skin rips due to humidity that can cost you 3 to $500 in japan.

So if you live overseas sending that out and getting it repaired and sent back can potentially cost you much much more.

In fact costs in general or something that you should be aware of.

Not just for the shamisen, which we will get to, but for things like string, The largest string here alone right now is about 10 to $15 per string.

I go through about 2 to 5 of these strings in a month.

So I'm looking anywhere between 20 to 50 plus dollars just for the first string every single month as well as your bucky and electra um which do wear down chip break all of that.

Like these ones here, there are a lot of synthetic options coming out by more reputable Bochy makers, which is really exciting to see.

The cost is also down to about 10% of what the cost of one of the original biko traditional shammy sen Bochy would cost.

But they can still run you a pretty penny and without the right knowledge on how to properly take care of your body or your shamisen, the neck, the skin, all of it, your costs can grow quite a bit, especially because the shamisen itself isn't cheap and this is where I want to talk a little bit about the shamisen being an expendable resource.

Now, first things first, no matter what cost bracket you go for.

I always recommend purchasing a shamisen from a reputable japanese dealer.

I will link one in the description, they make this here, the shovel, which is a beautiful beginner shammy sen as well as this one right here, which is probably by far the best entry level shamisen that you can get.

In fact, if you want to hear and see the differences, I will link an entire video about that above as well.

But if you go too cheap on shamisen, your biggest risk is that it will be made out of soft wood or hard wood that doesn't really resonate well, which means you're either going to get a bad sound or the most likely scenario is you're going to get a shamisen that over time the neck of the shamisen wears down quite a bit.

You can have it planed so that it's fresh and ready to play again.

But there are only so many times that you can do that before the shamisen is completely useless.

It's one of the reasons I don't recommend the lowest level shamisen because the wood that they're made of is just too soft and you're really only going to have that shamisen for maybe 5 to 10 years of regular practice.

It is a low level shamisen and within about 3 to 4 years of playing it.

I think I've got about one more time that I'd be able to plan it out before it wouldn't be usable anymore.

Honestly, I wish I had paid just a little bit more for a mid level shamisen.

After that I had saved up and upgraded to this one, which is a high level shamisen, which I have probably played 3 to 4 times the amount that I played that one, How many years of him?

I've been playing this this number of years so far and the neck on this still looks brand new.

You wouldn't even know other than maybe the odd dent here and there, that it was even played this shamisen most certainly will last me my entire life.

I will never need to purchase another performance level shamisen.

This is the one that I use for stage performances and everything like that and I love it, but it was not cheap.

It is not as simple as more expensive Shamisen equals better, cheap equals bad.

But knowing that these type of gaps and these differences exist is a starting point that I wish I had when I first started timing sense because a lot of people would jump in and go as cheap as possible if you're gonna go as cheap as possible.

Honestly go for one of these Szabo style ones, there's still a ton of fun to play with.

But if you're serious about it, I highly highly recommend checking out one like this.

We've been using this one for Shamisen lessons very, very regularly for the past couple of months.

It sounds great and it's still in good condition.

I can see this one easily lasting 10 plus years without issue one of our last points and this one tends to be a really big surprise for people is that learning to play songs on the Shamisen is not like learning to play songs on the guitar, you're not going to sit down and pick up a song in a day or a week while you might be able to pick up the basic tune of a song within a day or a week.

Getting the intricacies and properly playing a song well, can take you months if not years in order to do.

In fact, the main song in Security meeting called cigarette joan Gara bashi is a song that each player has their own rendition, their own version of and spends a lifetime working on and perfecting.

When we go to competitions, the tai chi, everybody gets up on stage and plays their rendition of got a bushy.

And this brings me into the last point that I really want to make, which is nobody plays perfectly.

And that's one of the other big differences between shamisen and something like a guitar, is that not only does it take longer to play the songs, but you are rarely to never get the song perfect.

I like in Shamisen less to a musical instrument and more too golf or bowling or something like that with bowling and golf, you're not going to get a perfect score or holding one's all the way through.

You're trying to do better than you did the last game, but there's always going to be slip ups and mess ups along the way in shamisen is a lot like that.

The strike of the budget, for example, with a shamisen is very, very similar to the approach of swinging a golf club.

You don't want to squeeze it too hard, you don't want to hold it too light, There's going to be that follow through, you're using the weight of it is honestly, if you've ever played golf or tried bowling and gotten kind of serious at it, I would draw a very strong comparison between the swing of your arm or your golf club to the swing of the Bacci and getting a feel for it how you use this, but contributes so much to the sound, just by changing the angle of the bucky ever so slightly, you can completely change the sound of the song.

Now, if you're interested in hearing more examples of this, I did a Shamisen video maybe about a year and a half to maybe two years ago that I will link up above that talks about what it's like to actually play the shamisen and all of the intricacies and everything like that.

And come to think of it as a bonus point, the shamisen is incredibly difficult to travel with as well.

A unless you have one that breaks down into pieces and yes, some of them break down into pieces, it's really hard to carry it in its giant case and even if you do have one that breaks into pieces, you will get stopped a lot at the airports guarantee they want to open it up, they want to know what type of wood it's from, they want to know what the Bacci is.

It has to be carried on, It cannot be checked luggage, they are very easy to break, but that's also something that's usually reserved for professional players, but who knows that might be your goal.

But if you are interested in playing, I will link all the necessary information and resources in the description box below as well as shamisen lessons by Japan's too.

Top shamisen players covering everything from those basics that you would need to properly take care of your shamisen without driving up costs all the way up to playing techniques and phrases, songs, originals and everything in between.

In fact, if you're on the fence about playing the shamisen and this video hasn't given you enough information, I would highly recommend trying out at least a month of those shamisen lessons and looking at the basic stuff, the stuff that talks about how to properly take care of the shammy sen and everything that goes into shamisen ownership.

A lot of people get their shamisen and then are surprised or overwhelmed by the amount of care that it takes just to own one of these now as somebody who has been playing the shopping center for well over a decade and has done so professionally here in Japan on stage on television and everything, I can tell you, this is a journey that is very, very much worth it.

I still play every single day and love every minute of it.