How bekkou bachi Is made

I was searching things about bekkou bachi on the internet,when i found this:

http://www.taiyougakki.co.jp/syamisen-dekirumade/dekirumade-bekkou.html

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Thank you, Shinji san. I enjoyed seeing Taiyo Gakki pages. They are trying to produce electric shamisen with backside dog skinned, for the better sound effect.

Thank you Shinji , i was pretty sur it was made this way but i needed a confirmation with pictures , so thank you very much !

Kyoko : So they try something very different from the Mugen21 wich has a solid backside right ? Do you know what kind of amplification device they are trying to get a good electric shamisen sound ? I really think about trying some Piezo pickups in the futur on an fully acoustic shamisen to hear what it sounds like.

Oh, Florian, I am sorry I don’t know much about electric Piezo pickups on the instruments. And all what I read about the new electric ones is that the store wants the customers to just wait for the better electric sound with dog skin on the back.

Thanks Kyoko , well i hope we will soon have more news about those new electric shamisens :slight_smile: !

I’m breaching the limits of my ignorance, but I believe the mugen has a preamp built in? I’m only guessing because a battery goes inside it.

This is what Masahiro uses. I think I’m going to install one in mine. The mic is stuck right to the skin (but doesn’t affect sound quality, I don’t think)

Thnak you for the informations Kyle , i guess they use this type of contact microphone then
http://nickstutorials.com/BlogPosts/ContactMic/recording_setup.jpg
I was really wondering if that this type of mic would sound good or not with a skin .

Well yes , if there is a battery it’s i guess for a preamp so you can control the EQ , volume and gain of your microphone . I usually think about batteries as a big issue , but i’m stuck with my old guitarist way of thinking , i had so much pedals and active pickups , i was using tons of batteries , but into a shamisen i guess it will last a long time ! I will try on the first shamisen i’ll build that type of microphone , if i can make a good sounding electric shamisen it will be a big reward for me , even if i will never use it plugged i guess :smiley: ! Well that was a very long and boring post , sorry ! :slight_smile:

Since I play electric guitar, I’m definately interested in hearing ANY progress in terms of electric shamisen. So far I haven’t been impressed, but I am confident that science will find a way to make it special.

Well nothing fancy about using a contact microphone in a Shamisen , it’s used on almost any acoustic instruments , even drums is using some of these now , but it’s still a good point to have a electro acoustic shamisen :slight_smile: !

I really wanted to try to build a shamisen the way we built an electric guitars , with magnetic pickups , but here is the problem , with that type of pickup you get a great sound but you need steel string … i don’t think it would be a good feeling to play steel stringed shamisen so i left that idea out for now.

So for silk strings we could use silkworms that dance to the vibrating silk. It makes sense.

Haha good advice , we need to experiment ! Bad point is that we need to feed de Shamisen !

I would think if you want to get skin vibrations and everything without changing the sound, I would install the pickups on the Nakago or have them supported by it somehow, then we can experiment with the windings in order to pickup the vibrations easier that way you’ll get the string and skin vibrations.