Converting Traditional Jiuta Notation to Bunkafu Notation

Notation
#1

Hey everyone!

I’m pretty new to the Shamisen. I’ve been looking for Shamisen music sheets for songs online and found some on MuseScore that are in western style notation.

I found this program from Razvan that converts from western notation style to Koto and traditional Jiuta style notation.
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I was wondering if there was a program that converts traditional style notation into Bunkafu. If not, I’ll either learn how to read these to and convert manually or dig deeper into JCBq’s work with MuseScore to try Western style into Bunkafu.

#2

Hi-ho.

To the best of my knowledge there is no such program - but converting between shamisen notation styles is not very difficult.

Converting from Koto to Shamisen is a bit more involved though! At a glance, your example seems to be intended for koto - it’s a bit different from the Jiuta scores I have on hand.

#3

I forgot to send an update, but I did find this plugin for MuseScore:

It takes western style sheets and exports into Bunkafu style notation on the same sheet. To emulate the Shamisen sheets, you’ll need to set up a sheet for Ukulele and then take that exported material to that. It converts the notes themselves, but doesn’t add any detail such as half and quarter notes, so that’s still something to figure out after.

More details are in this link:
http://www-b.uec.tmu.ac.jp/shakuhachi/MuseScore_Shamisen/

Interestingly, when I tried this out, they only had plugin versions 2 and 3. I got version 2 working with MuseScore 2. But since then, it seems like they’ve added version 4 which might be compatible with MuseScore 4.

© 2020 Kyle Abbott