Hello, all
I was speaking with a friend of mine who is japanese and we started discussing shamisen music. She sent me some really lovely examples and I started wondering if I could adapt it to the mandolin, hwich is my main instrument. I normally tune my mandolin ADAE. I was reading and one of the tunings I read about for Shamisen was basically the top three strings of my mandolin. ADA. I figure I can dorp the high E strings down to a D or something else to hit on those sympathetic vibrations.
I am blind so normal shamisen notaiton would not work for me. Does anybody know of any resources of text-based notation like ABC notation that I could pair with the audio to learn to play a few traditional japanese tunes? I primarily play TRaditional Irish music on the mandolin but I find Traditional Japanese Music very interesting and pleasing to the ears.
Thank you all for any imput.
If you can drop your high E string down to D that would put your bottom three strings to D-A-D which would make what we would call raised second tuning (ni-agari in Japanese) which is the tuning most tsugaru jamisen music uses. If you could drop the A string to G that would make D-G-D which would make shamisen standard tuning (hon-choshi in Japanese, there is normally a u as in choushi as the cho here is elongated, but I was worried it might mess with your text to speech reader so I will type choshi instead). This standard tuning is more common in traditional music. The tuning ADA is called mizu-choshi and it is very rare. It would normally require different strings than what we would normally play with as this is a very low tuning. Naniwa-bushi is the only song I know of that uses it. I am not familiar with ABC notation and I could not really find anything interesting with a quick web search, but I did find that one can convert things like midi files to ABC notation so I tried to write tsugaru jinku with a simple midi editor and ran it through a ABC file converter. It did some really funny things to me, but maybe it makes sense. If you can try it and it sounds sort of like Japanese music, maybe I did not mess up too bad. If I could learn to write in this notation I would not mind transcribing a few pieces, is there a piece in particular you are looking for?
X: 1
T: from tsugarujinku.mid
M: 2/4
L: 1/16
Q:1/4=80
% Last note suggests Dorian mode tune
K:F % 1 flats
%%MIDI program 77
%%MIDI program 77
V:1
%%MIDI program 106
x8|
x2
A,2 A,2 C2|
D2 F2 G2 A2|
A2 A2 G2 FF|
D2 D2 F2 G2|
F2 FF D2 C2|
D2 FF D3/2-[D/2C/2-] C3/2x/2|
D2 D2 D,2 C2|
D4 A2 A2|
A,2 A2 A2 A2|
A,2 A2 c2 c2|
A2 G2 A2 A2|
G2 G2 A2 c2|
A2 A2 G2 FF|
D2 D2 F2 G2|
F2 FF D2 C2|
D2 FF D2 C2|
D2 D2 D,2 C2|
D2 D2 D,2 C2|
D2 A,2 A,2 C2|
D2 F2 G2 A2|
A2 A2 G2 FF|
D2 D2 F2 G2|
F2 FF D2 C2|
D2 FF D2 C2|
D2 D2 D,2 C2|
D2 D2 D,2 C2|
[D8-A,8-]|
[D8A,8]|
%%MIDI program 107
%%MIDI program 107
%%MIDI program 107
%%MIDI program 106
%%MIDI program 116
All I know about Shamisen is what I stumbled on to while reading the wiki article. Could tunes in other tunings just be transposed, since all of the tunings are basically the same with the patterns of the notes? i.E ADA basically = DGD? same intervals between the notes. I will litterally be playing the music on a mandolin, so strings and such won’t really matter to me. I can dorp my E down to a D but I would prefer to keep it at E cause irish tunes use the E a lot. I am going to take my mandolin now and fiddle around with that tune above. I honeslty don’t have any particular tunes in mind, just looking to learn a few things, perhaps some Geisha tunes, those sound rather rpetty and interesting.
I was looking up an audio example of this tune and accidently hit next, and found this:
This is pretty great, really reminds me of irish, seems very dancable.
The method of abc worked above a bit. I am just having difficulties tell if the F’s are supposed to be F’s and F flats are supposed to be E’s, not quite sure. Is there anything incredably beginner, like, twinkle twinkle little star for Americans? I’m completley ignorant of this music but really enjoy the sounds of it and am eager to try it on mandolin.
Also if anybody could point me in the direction of listening matterials, it’d be appreciated. Listening is the best way to get a feel for the style in my opinion. LInks to albums of this music that are on itunes or amazon would be appreciated. If there is any vinyl of this music, that’d also be nice with some links 
If I understand the notation correctly the conversion program I used put it into a F major scale which was kind of an odd choice, but I guess it is not really trivial to convert something like that so I won’t complain. The F flats should be Fs, there are no F flat/Es in this piece when played in D-A-D. Technically A-D-A is perhaps the same relationship as D-G-D, but it sounds very weird to me from a traditional perspective. Ultimately it is really a matter of taste, as long as we understand it is not a traditional method we can use whatever is convenient to us. If we can play the correct notes and our tuning supports good finger positioning it is not really that important as most Japanese music is not chordal in nature. Sakura Sakura is the most recognizable Japanese folk song and holds the same basic place to the Japanese that Twinkle Little Star does to westerners. It also happens to be pretty easy to play. Probably the second most famous song is Soran-Bushi, a song that seemingly no Japanese person escapes school without learning. Both of these songs belong to the category of folk song called Minyo. The link you had belongs to a style called Tsugaru-jamisen which started out as a type of minyo but has become a rather popular style of new-ish music known for its flashy technique and speed. The artists are the Yoshida Brothers who were rather popular for a while. Other famous players of this style are numerous, but you can easily find albums of Agatsuma hiromitsu and Mashiro Nitta in the west. The Kevin Kmetz that frequents this site is another very good tsugaru player that has records available and quite a lot of youtube videos that are very enjoyable. The style of shamisen most closely associated with the geisha in Japan is called Kouta, which are usually very short songs played with the fingers, but I find most people in the west are not very familiar with this style and tend to somewhat incorrectly associate other forms of shamisen music with them. The classical style is known as Jiuta and probably the most famous song is Kurokami, Yugao or maybe Tsuru no Koe. The music of the theater is called nagauta, famous or at least typical songs are the so called lion dances like Yachiyo-Jishi or Naniwa-Jishi. It is actually somewhat hard to find albums of styles other than tsugaru-jamisen in the west, but I think there are a few on itunes/google play/amazon. These styles are also more known by their various lineages and schools than by any particular player. There are many other styles of shamisen music, but these are at least some of most accessible/recognizable.
I’m going to keep the mandolin as ADAE for now. See if this musical experiment works. Now that I know the F flats are just going to be F’s, I’ll continue trying to learn the tune. When I"m finished I’ll post up something so you all can tell me how much I am mangling the music 
I’m kidding. HOpefully I can produce something that isn’t too offensive.
Hello and welcome Andrew,
I’m curious about what computer aid for blind people can do today. How does it work when you navigate this forum for example? Do you get a description of each interactable part of the website?
I don’t think many of us know about the ABC notation. I guess that in Japan you would have a teacher tell you what and how to play instead of using sheet music.
The courses on the website do have a slow versions and line by line. Unfortunately it varies a bit if the positions are spoken or just shown. However you would be able to listen to it at a slower pace. Just wanted to let you know. If you haven’t already done so, try the crash course below. The videos won’t proceed by themselves so you either need to click the next part on the left side or increment the number at the end of the link.