Shakuhachi Introduction 1: The Instrument

hi i'm marcus and i'm a shakuhachi player [Music] this is a shakuhachi it's a traditional japanese flute that is made from bamboo it originated in china and came to japan in about the seventh century and its history in japan is very much intertwined with the so-called komuso the monks of emptiness and nothingness the kumusu used the shakwachi not as a musical instrument mainly but as a tool for meditation but that's actually a rather long story and if you ask a japanese person there is still a very strong association of the shakuachi with the komuso but as this is a very long story maybe this is the stuff for another video the name shakuhachi comes from its length it is one shaku and eight sun long this standard version of the flute ishaku is a traditional japanese unit of measurement it is about one foot in today's measurements and sun is one tenth of a foot so a shakuhachi is one shaku and eight sun so this is about one foot and eight tenths of a foot which is about 55 centimeters or 21 and a half inches long um these days shakuhachi are made um in various lengths much longer shakuachi also very short shakuachi but the name stays the same so you don't say nisha yon-sun or something like that for a long flute for example in addition to bamboo there is also there are also flutes made from other materials these days you can get flutes made from wood or from plastic all kinds of plastic some forms of resin and you can even make quite good sounding flutes just from plumbing pipe and what's a bit frustrating is that these flutes already sound very good so for a beginner they are really good flutes but nothing really beats the the sound of a bamboo shakuhaji a really well made bamboo shakuaji this type of flute goes back to prehistoric times although flutes made from wood or perishable materials don't exist anymore or at least they have not been found yet we have some flutes made of bone or of stone and the overall construction of these flutes is really very similar to this type of flute um the chaquachi is an end blown flute so you hold it like this and this is where you where you blow the flute the root part um so this is the bottom part of a bamboo stalk and usually in flutes um the the root ends are left on so in this root for example you can see the root end is still there and you can't see where it was in the ground but this is really left on for decoration and it doesn't have any influence on the sound historically chakra chi were made from all parts of the mobu stock and some makers still do that but the most common type of construction these days is that you take the root part of a bamboo stock and you take ideally the first seven nodes to make a shakuhachi as you can see it doesn't have a headpiece so most of you will be familiar with a very famous western instrument that is actually very similar in construction to the shakuhachi and that is this instrument i know some of you have quite bad childhood memories of having to learn the recorder it's actually a very very nice instrument if you want to learn more about the recorder i recommend that you check out the team recorder youtube channel um there are very very nice videos about the recorder and what an awesome instrument it is [Music] playing the recorder is made up of three elements that is your air your fingers and your tongue i bring this up because the recorder actually is not very dissimilar to the shakuhachi the main difference is that in the shakuachi you don't have this headpiece this mouthpiece so um the function of the set piece in a recorder is that it directs the airstream to this bit here the labian which is where the tone is produced so if you blow into a recorder the airstream is directed directly here in shakarachi there is no headpiece so this actually makes it a bit tricky to start learning the instrument because you have to learn to make a shape with your mouth so that you direct the airstream towards this bit here the blowing edge or the uttaguchi in japanese so in a sense the shakuhachi really is a recorder sorry zack my name's zack zinger and this is not a recorder so having to form the airstream with your mouth um is a bit tricky but it allows you also a great degree of freedom you can play quite clean tones on the shakuhachi something like this it's not western flute tone clean because this is a natural material after all so it is quite rough but this would be a quite clean tone on the shakuhachi but you can produce also very rough tones for example like this and you can play around with where the noise starts and where the tone begins and where the tone stops and the noise begins there are two main types of shakuhachi one the one type has lacquer inside so like this flute here you can see the black lacquer inside this is called urushi and this is the same lacquer that you find on japanese artisan boxes and things like that the function of this urushi is to make the tone louder and a bit cleaner a bit clearer so that for example if you want to perform in a concert hall it's really much easier to play on a flute that has this urushi these flutes are called chiari so they have g the lacquer but there are also flutes that don't have the slacker they are called jinashi so they don't have the g inside and these flutes have a slightly more mellow tone a more natural tone but they're also quieter [Music] [Music] so [Music] it's really a personal preference if the player prefers to play on giardi or jinashi flutes and there is no no right shakuhachi really the shakuachi has five volts there are four in the front two three four and one in the back so this means it is a pentatonic flute just by opening and closing the holes you can produce five notes and back again one octave higher in the standard shakuhachi that is one chaku and eight zone long the lowest note is the d that's the d above middle c and then we have f g a c and again d [Music] uh the actual japanese symbols are different they are taken from the katakana alphabet and again grow the traditional chakra g plays two octaves although modern flutes sometimes sometimes can play the complete third octave as well but that is actually quite tricky and most of the traditional repertoire really only uses the bottom two octaves plus a few half tones above that so as i just explained um it's a pentatonic flute so just by opening the holes you can only produce five notes but as you may have noticed the holes are actually quite big so again if you compare this to the recorder these holes are really very big and one of the reasons or the main reason for that is that you can half hole so for example [Music] actually by doing this you can't produce any frequency really this is one way in which you can produce additional notes additional frequencies on the shakwachi the other is madikari and this means you change the angle in which you blow into the flute [Applause] so this medicati system mary means going down and curry means going up um gives the shakuachi a lot of its characteristic sound because the merry notes you have to play softer you have to play quieter [Music] this variability in pitch also means that controlling pitch is another big topic for playing shakuhachi because in particular if you're playing with other people you want to have the same pitch as the other people so you have to be able to produce the correct pitch on the flute however the shakuachi was a solo instrument i mentioned i mentioned to komuso earlier and they really only played this for themselves and always as a solo instrument so for them tuning was not really very important but once the shakuhachi was used to play together with other people with other instruments of course this became a very important issue so there are really two things that stand out for playing shakuachi one is that you have a very wide range of tone colors that you can produce many different sounds the other is that you can produce any pitch and like with all wind instruments or with many other instruments as well you can develop a tone over time so in that it is for example uh quite a different type of instrument than a piano where you only hit the string and then it starts to vibrate and you don't have any control over it anymore and also the range of the sounds that you can produce is very limited of course the piano has other advantages like you can't play multiple notes at the same time which in a shankwachi is not really possible or only by cheating a bit so this is just a brief introduction to the shakuhachi it's a very rich instrument there is a long history to the instrument um a lot to learn um about all techniques about very fine nuances in technique um it's a lifelong endeavor as with any other musical instrument you find this interesting please get in touch i'm always happy to talk about shakuhachi also if you like this video please like and subscribe please leave a comment down below as always i know you hear this for every youtube video but it really makes a difference and i would really appreciate this and i hope to see you in one of my next videos thank you you

Channel: Markus Guhe

Views: 20,521

Keywords: shakuhachi, how to play shakuhachi, shakuhachi flute, how to play, how to, japanese flute, shakuhachi lesson, lesson, japanese traditional, japanese traditional music, japanese music, meditation flute, shakuhachi tutorial, shakuhachi instrument, shakuhachi flute how to play, shakuhachi lesson 1, shakuhachi beginner lesson, how to play shakuhachi flute, japanese traditional instruments, japanese music traditional, bamboo flute, japanese bamboo flute

Id: v_AOjJfxlqs

Length: 13min 26sec (806 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 27 2021