I wanted to say first that I agree with Norm and Eric, learning the traditional way of playing will give you a base that will stand you in good stead later when you want to experiment with new ways of playing. Still it can be fun to fool around with other musical forms, even at this early stage.
With that in mind, I’ve uploaded a couple of simple chord charts I made a while ago.
The first is here:
At the top of the page are a bunch of ways to play I, IV and V chords in niagari (e.g. C-G-C). The black arrow in each row indicates what I think are the easiest fingerings for the particular chords.
The bottom of the page is a simple version of the walking blues that most of you should recognize once you start playing the notes.
It’s a melody line, so it doesn’t actually use chords, but it does follow a chord progression. Once you get it down you can record yourself, then play along live by playing the chords at the top of the page where they are indicated in the score. Or you can record yourself playing the chords then play the melody line along with it.
The second is here:
This one just presents some of the same material in a different format. I was trying to show that there are several ways to make any given chord by using a combination of notes that ‘work’ in that chord. For example assuming we are tuned to C-G-C, we can make a C chord in any of the ways you see in the first line. There are even more possibilities than I have shown. The first and third string can be played with 0, 3#, or 6, and the middle string can be played at 0 or 4. Any combination that involves those notes will work as a C chord, including just playing two of the strings instead of all three. To make a C7 chord you need to play 3 on the middle string – this is the note that makes it sound like a C7. So to give a strong feel of switching from C to C7, you can play:
3#------ 3#
4--------3
3#-------3#
The other chords work the same way.
The simplest way to play the I-IV-V chords is by barring the strings with your index finger at 0, 4, and 6 respectively , but these aren’t very interesting, and you’ll get bored of them pretty soon, so you should experiment with the other fingerings.
The last thing I should say is that since the shamisen is fretless, it can be tough to finger the chords accurately so that it sounds in tune – this is why frets were invented, after all.
There is obviously a lot more to say about chords, but I’ll leave it at this for now.
