Learning the Shakuhachi

Awesome post. I still love drum and bass to this day, and have an entire room full of jungle vinyl rom the era which sampled this instrument. Had not the faintest idea it was this! Did you make any drum and bass at all? I'd love to hear it if you did

Nah not really... A couple tracks here & there trying for the same vibe, but nowhere near as cool or well made, I never figured out how to program drum loops like the jungle dudes did! My stuff was more headphones listening "IDM" inspired stuff, rather than groovy & dancefloor oriented. It's all on eryngi.bandcamp.com ... A whole room full! That's a lot of records, wow... I haven't been listening to much electronic music for a while, but occasionally do bust out some DnB tapes.. Few favourites that come to mind are Atlas - 'Drifting Thru the Galaxy / Second Heaven', Futurebound - 'Sorrow', Skanna - 'Find Me'...
 
A little over a month ago I went on a DNB/Jungle kick. There's something about the fast paced beat I find invigorating. It's possible to just play it live with samples on MIDI controllers:


I was playing around with importing amen breaks into Audacity. This video shows a lot of different ones:


There was a cool series on youtube some years ago called Rhythm Roulette where people would go to vinyl stores and randomly buy records and then make a song out of the samples. It was fun to watch but I don't see too many of those now.
 
Here's a small sort of bluesy jam, on a bass shakuhachi I made..

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Thank you, Brandon, for sharing your play!:flowers: I downloaded a number of your works to my phone and recently conducted a short meditation with your music. It was an accident. Your flute started playing automatically after my recording with affirmations, but it was at the right moment and I really liked it. Very relaxing.🤗
 
Thank you, Brandon, for sharing your play!:flowers: I downloaded a number of your works to my phone and recently conducted a short meditation with your music. It was an accident. Your flute started playing automatically after my recording with affirmations, but it was at the right moment and I really liked it. Very relaxing.🤗

Hey Korzik, aww that's really cool :) Glad you liked it!

I'd like to make a lot more music that'd work & be relaxing for meditation, but am really nowhere near good enough yet to play it consistently - without losing the flow, and keeping the tone nice - and with the extremely controlled breath that I think that kind of thing needs. Slowly improving though... I can't help but compare my playing to the shakuhachi masters I listen to, hehe..

Today I uploaded a little 25 minute album onto bandcamp, messy little improvisations, just for fun. Probably not really worthy of an album release, but releasing albums is what I do.... badger creek shakuhachi 1, by eryngi - some recordings I've already shared here, some new ones.

Here's a track from it, recorded yesterday in a bathroom with good echo/reverb... inspired, in my simple way, by medieval music / plainsong / etc..

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I modified my bass shakuhachi a bit, changing the angle of the blowing edge, among other things... At first I thought I'd ruined it, because I could no longer immediately play really nice sounding tones. But now I've found it's just that it requires much more lip and breath control than previously... Must pay utmost attention while playing, or I lose the good sound. Maybe if I can get good at playing this shakuhachi, proper well-made ones will become a breeze!

Here are a couple rough improv sketches from yesterday...


Sun sea song
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Moon sea song
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.. made a new little shakuhachi album, containing the two pieces above (I attempted better takes on the same themes, but preferred the feel of the originals) and a couple others.. Basically my musical diary.. Can be downloaded here if you want a copy: badger creek shakuhachi 2, by eryngi


I'm starting to get to where I feel competent enough to start learning some proper old honkyoku & other written pieces.. Need to buy a book, learn how to read the Japanese notation, etc..

I read this good little article in a shaku newsletter, by Riley Lee, on why he likes playing the music of Hildegard von Bingen (12th century composer, abbess, philosopher & other things lady) on shakuhachi:

So, why do I feel so connected to Hildegard’s music? Why do I think it works so well on my shakuhachi? I can think of at least three reasons. Two are general musical ones, while the third is shakuhachi-specific.

I don’t know much about medieval modes, but I believe that music from this period in Europe
frequently revolved around and resolved on two notes or pitches, called the Final and the Cofinal. Though somewhat related to the better-known tonic and dominant pitches of much of western music, they differ primarily because the former are more ‘equal’ than the latter. The music often started with and usually ended on the Final.

Pieces in the traditional shakuhachi repertoire are called the ‘honkyoku’ [“main”, or “original
music”]. They work in a similar way. There are typically two ‘tonal centres’. One might be a bit
stronger or might appear slightly more often a honkyoku than the other, but often they are equal in frequency and duration. Either tonal centre might begin and end a piece. The other notes in the music swirl or dance around, and ultimately resolve on one of these two tonal centres.

Typically, the melodies in both medieval music and shakuhachi honkyoku are constantly
returning to these important notes. They allude to a foundation or drone, even if there is no drone. They give the piece a satisfying coherence.

The second reason that Hildegard’s music is so well-suited for at least my style of shakuhachi playing has to do with a shared concept of rhythm or duration. The Japanese term for this concept is ‘ma’. ‘Ma’ means space, both physical and temporal. The music of Hildegard and the shakuhachi honkyoku do not have a beat. For example neither of these musical forms can be conducted. When more than one singer or player performs these pieces, they must be aware intuitively of the ‘ma’ that the other performer/s are using.
The durations or ‘ma’ of both the notes and also the non-sound between the notes are not
random. There is a correct timing or ‘ma’ for every musical event, every sound and every
silence. In both Hildegard’s music and the honkyoku, this sense of correct timing or space is intuitive, and not related to a regular beat or a meter.

The final reason why I so thoroughly enjoy playing Hildegard’s music on my shakuhachi has to do with how the shakuhachi is constructed and played. There are only five finger holes on the shakuhachi. The basic finger positions produce only five pitches; the top finger hole produces the same pitch as the fundamental (with all holes closed) of the instrument, or rather the octave above that fundamental.

Other pitches, including, but not limited to the rest of the 12-tone chromatic scale, are made by manipulating one’s embouchure and sometimes also partially closing one or more of the finger holes. Producing these ‘other’ pitches is a basic, though challenging technique for shakuhachi players.
These pitches are called ‘meri’ notes. The ‘main’ pitches produced with just the open hole fingerings are called ‘kari’ notes. It’s difficult to explain, but the ‘meri’ notes are softer and often breathier or earthier. The ‘meri’ notes are considered ‘yin’ notes, compared with the five louder,
more focused ‘kari’ or yang notes.

In most shakuhachi music, including honkyoku, the performer has to go back and forth between meri/yin and kari/yang. Where the meri and kari notes occur in the music in relation to each other is important. It creates a real, quite strong feeling or sensation in the shakuhachi player. This is distinct, though related to the differences in timbre between them. Often the feeling is neutral, or it might not feel quite right. But sometimes the yin and yang notes seem to be in just the right place. The physical sensation of oscillating between them exactly in the order that the music dictates, heightens the beauty of the melodic lines for the player. This is nearly always the case with the traditional honkyoku. Occasionally, it does happens with nontraditional pieces, including modern pieces.

So, here’s the interesting thing. The meri/kari or yin/yang pitches in Hildegard’s songs seems to always be in just the right order or place in relation to each other. It feels ‘right’ playing them on the shakuhachi. Why this is so may be one of the many unknowns that we have to accept, at least for now, as just one of life’s little mysteries. I would like to think that Hildegard would appreciate all of this.
 
I'm still playing shakuhachi as often as possible. Haven't had much time lately, progress feels very slow, though occasionally I get moments where it all flows. I made a start on trying to learn to read shakuhachi notation, learning a very simple piece called Kyorei from circa 680 AD apparently. I can play the notes but not in a good sounding way yet :) Don't have a recording of that, but here are a couple phone recordings of testing two new flutes I made. The first is higher pitched, the second is a bass one I made as a gift for my dad.. that one has a really nice tone to it.

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Proper shakuhachi makers usually burn their maker's mark into the bamboo, near the thumb hole, so just for fun I experimented with burning marks by hand on these two flutes, with a soldering iron. They look ok..sort of.. well, a bit shaky and chunky (rather than the beautiful delicate lines made with a hot metal stamp).. haven't come up with a cool lookin' mark yet :)

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I came across this great document about making flutes, and wanted to share this bit which nicely explains something I love about the shaku sound:

You want to know something about the mystery of the Shakuhachi? Much of it can be found in the mystery of the airstream. Let's first talk about what you need for a basic flute. You need an air stream, an edge and a resonator. That's about it.To make a flute work, direct an airstream onto an edge which is coupled with a resonator (usually a tube of some kind) and a sound results. Simple, right? Well,maybe--kind of.Since we're talking generally about the Shakuhachi, we're talking about an airstream formed by the lips (and maybe the mouth, throat, lungs, etc.). Let me say maybe because it turns out this airstream isn't a simple affair and isn't understood very well. The thing waves and flaps around--something like a flag in the wind. And why does a flag flap in the wind?

Two Zen monks were arguing about a flag. One said, "The flag is moving." The other said, "The wind is moving." The Sixth Patriarch happened to be passing by and he told them, "Not wind, not flag; mind is moving."

Jun Zhang, a physicist at New York University, has a slightly different answer as can be seen in the graphic below.

turbulence.png

We're not going to settle the flag debate here, but will adopt the preceding graphic as something conceptually close to what the airstream looks like. As the airstream moves from left to right it flaps up and down. Why? It just does.

First, let's combine an airstream with an edge. Blow on the edge of a credit card.Actually dig one out and blow on it. What do you hear? Kind of a hiss? Good. Thisis called edge tone(s). Why does blowing on the edge create a sound? It just does.If you need some kind of explanation, it's the flapping of the airstream which flapsabove and then below the edge. But how does this result in a sound? We're back towhere we started--it just does. Here's the point of this paragraph: An airstreamnaturally has a dynamic turbulent flow something like the graphic above. It'snon-linear and for the most part, unstable. The thing is alive and sensitive to mostany influence. You can employ the Navier-Stokes equations, Reynold's Number,spread on a good layer of Bernoulli, and/or learn Chaos Theory and mess with bifurcating points--but you'll just end up with the fact that the thing's alive and sensitive to most any influence.

So to me, shakuhachi is hardly at all about pure tones (though those are just lovely sometimes), or the notes themselves, but much more about timbre. My idea (which might just be imagination) is that Honkyoku music tries to imitate that natural air turbulence in macro-scale, twisting and turning around its course, or suddenly switching to a new course. For example:


Makes me visualise a water course evolving over aeons, or a microscopic view of wind hitting a rock... I can't do anything like that yet :) I'm usually still stuck in playing-notes-and-songs land when I try to improvise.

Notes and songs are beautiful too though. I leave you with a couple videos by a Russian player I found on youtube, who has such a gorgeous tone to his playing. He's using flutes he made himself even!



Look how happy he looks :D
 
Finally becoming able to consistently(ish) get a good sounding tone that I'm pleased with, on my self-made shakuhachis. So here's a recording where you can't really hear that, because it's drowned in reverb :P I was experimenting and found this sound I really like. The breath/noise component of the shaku, because of this reverb, ends up sounding almost like cymbals. Like it's being played next to a rack of percussion or something, making the metal cymbals resonate.

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Thanks @tschai, glad you like it!

You can click the button (the three little dots) on the right end of the music player, to pop up a menu with a download option. Does that work?
 
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