i started playing on nagauta shamisen and was very exited about getting tsugaru shamisen.
now i have one and i have mixed feelings, i dont like the sound of it so much, when i play it all buzzes and rattles and makes strange noises and even the first string has this kind of wah-wah sound to it, which is a bit odd…
the more i play it, the better it gets, though, perhaps i am just getting used to it, but i reckon it is because it is a new instrument and it needs a time to settle and ripe, or something …
or perhaps i should have gotten a different one???
Hey Sid,
I don’t think that there’s anything substantially wrong with your shamisen, especially if you just bought a new one. It’s probably a problem with the adjustment on your azuma sawari (the little bump right under the nut on the first string). There’s a screw on the back of the shamisen’s head that allows you to adjust it. You need to make sure that all the strings are in tune to get it to work right. I tune to C-G-C (niagari) and when it’s in tune you slowly adjust the screw so that when you strike the third string, you should get a light sympathy buzz from the other strings. If you have too little or too much sawari, it’ll sound pretty bad because it won’t buzz correctly. Also, whenever you change tunings, you need to adjust the sawari again because the string tension changes.
Hope that works, most of this has just come from my own personal trial and error over time.
i dont have any screw on the back of my shamisen though. i also tune to C-G-C, but it rattles even when i play high position notes it is all very strange, well, as i said it is getting better the more i play it…
i love the think neck though, compare to the nagauta type before it feels great…
Hmm, maybe try looking at your koma to see if the notches for the strings are too big. If the string is too small for the notch, it’ll rattle around in the extra space and cause that unwanted buzz. I had that for a while…Unfortunately, all I can think of doing in that situation is buying a new koma :/. There’s a couple you can find on ebay for around $40 each or you can go to chordscanada.com and buy a tsugaru koma from them. The people at Chords are really helpful and they also have other accessories like cases, stands, strings of various gauges, and high quality neo and yubikake. I think that the Chords koma costs around $30, so it’s a pretty good deal.
If the koma doesn’t look out of the norm, then the last thing I can think of is that the strings aren’t tied low enough on the neo. If they’re tied too high, the there won’t be enough tension on the koma and the strings might buzz. You want to tie them low enough that the strings will run over the edge of the dou. See Bachido Lesson One, Part 4: Stringing
Hopefully that’ll help. Both of those problems are pretty easy to fix, but if something else is going on, then I’m not really sure what to do. If all else fails, look around on your shamisen and make sure that the string isn’t touching anything that would cause the rattling.
i dont have any screw on the back of my shamisen though.
Sid, is it the shamisen you’re playing in your profile pic that you say has no screw on the back? If so, I’ll post another comment after you confirm that…
No, that is my old nagauta shamisen. The new one i have its tsugaru, but i guess very cheap version, its ok for me for now, since am just learning. got used to the sound and now am quite liking it. am havin great time playing it.
actually the one on the photo is not nagauta shamisen either, just remembered when i was told that the neck differs slightly …forgot the type though??
It’s a jiuta (chuuzao) one. Ok, if that’s not the shamisen you were talking about (and I knew it wasn’t a Tsugaru one, that was one of the issues…) then my comment wouldn’t be helpful anyway. 
what kind of music is juita? is it similar to nagauta?
The word “Jiuta” literally means “songs of the earth” or “songs of the country”. In the Edo period, it referred to songs, performed with self-accompaniment on shamisen, from the region around Kyoto and Osaka. Jiuta was and is a genre of shamisen in its own right, but it also paired up with koto around the 17th century (and eventually, first with kokyu and then with shakuhachi, became an important part of sankyoku). So jiuta is also the style of shamisen played by koto people/teachers. (Strange as it may seem, in most koto schools in Japan, in order to get the most senior koto teaching credentials, you also have to play shamisen…)
At a certain level, jiuta, nagauta, min’you, gidayu, Tsugaru, and all the others - too numerous to list here - can all sound kind of similar to each other (especially to an “untrained” ear). There are a number of common techniques, after all, and it kind of depends on what it’s playing. For instance, if you listen to this clip of the tegoto (instrumental) section of a classical jiuta piece, I think it sounds rather like nagauta pieces my friend has performed - what do you think? (It starts slow, but gets into it from about the 1:10 or 1:30 mark) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3RckVKwDdY. For most people, though, they tend to think jiuta is just the very slow, classical repertoire, such as this one - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kN-E5M7Mrc. (See my discussion with Kyle in one of the other topics in the forum.) But jiuta is also this - http://www.komuso.com/audio/789%20---%20Track%204.mp3. There’s some “wilder” jiuta stuff out there, too, but it hasn’t made its way online yet, so I can’t find samples to offer.
Nowadays, with all the contemporary and fusion stuff that’s being written, “jiuta” (to me, anyway) basically signifies that the piece is for playing on a chuuzao instrument and indicates the sheet music will be written in jiuta style (a tablature which uses R to L vertical notation written in Japanese characters, not the 3-line “score” with Western numbers used in bunka-fu like Tsugaru and nagauta).
oh thanks…what an explanation…, i see there are even more styles than i thought, i suppose different parts of Japan developed different styles… well the juita music does sound similar to nagauta…