Maybe the first great wall for the beginer. How can we overcome it?
Something that’s always helped me when I’m learning a difficult new guitar or shamisen phrase is to slow it down and play it with a metronome. I.E. If the normal speed of the piece is 120bpm, then I’d slow it down to around 60bpm and practice. Then, as I’d get more and more comfortable playing the new lick, I would slowly increase the bpm until I’d be at the normal speed. The 4300 phrase is definitely tough at the beginning, it took me a couple weeks with an hour of practice a day before I got it down. You have to watch and make sure to play it cleanly from the start, I started off sloppy and had to spend extra time breaking my bad habits…
Hope that helps!
Hi! Denver,
That is a great suggestion. I will try it out!
Great, glad I could be of help!
Alright!!! Shamisen players helping other shamisen players!! The dream is coming true!! 
Good stuff, good stuff. 
Sorry to dredge this up, but I too am having difficulty with this. Is there any particular trick to being able to get your fingers back into position after executing the last “0”?
Does anyone know of a YouTube video of this in slow motion? Thanks so much in advance
Hey Robert, I made a warm up video a while back that has a part on this. It’s a little more about just practicing the technique than teaching it per say, but it does have me playing the sequence slowly. The relevant part starts about here:
Is that slow enough? I could record another video if you want, or maybe someone else on the forums could too.
As far as tips go, can you say more about what exactly you’re having trouble with, or maybe make a video so we could see?
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That’s perfect!
As I play the 4300, my hand tends to curl outward, making it kinda hard to get my hand back in position, ready to play “4” again
I’ve actually bookmarked that video…
guess this is pretty straightforward in principle and just requires practice as for the technicalities but the flavor is what it’s about and I am continously exploring on that
Woot!
This Is the FIRST Bachido forum post.
alright thread #1 !
Yeah, I guess I’d say try to pluck more with just your fingers than your whole hand/wrist. It’s mostly about finding the right wrist angle that allows your fingers to move freely but still reach the strings. If you’re too near parallel with the sao, your fingers don’t have enough room to pluck, but if your too near perpendicular, your fingers have too much room, which I think is what you’re running into.
When I met up with Grant he also showed me the difference of having ni-no-ito and san-no-ito closer to ichi-no-ito when it comes to these 4300 pull-off phrases. I think Kyle mentions it in the book that the pros play like this as well. Basically it will be easier to make a clean pull-off because you can create more tension in the string due to having a larger area to move the string before you let it go with your finger.