Hello. I play a beginners nagauta shamisen. It has a nice sound, but does not have a sawari azuma installed so it does not buzz. I noticed someone selling a shamisen capo with a sawari adjuster on another site. Here it the link:
http://www.kotosandmore.com/capo.html
I was wondering if anyone was familiar with this device and knows if it might be able to be used to produce sawari on my shamisen?
Hi Chris. It should buzz even without azuma sawari installed ! A nagauta shamisen buzzes anyway… The azuma sawari just allows to increase or decrease the effect, but it exists in every shamisen if well manufactured… Anyway Kyle posted a little video to help to increase the buzz (in the beginners shamisen’s page).
Hi Chris,
I agree with Patrick about watching Kyle’s video. The tape thing seems to work too…
A capo is meant to change pitch on a stringed instrument but I don’t think it is needed on the shamisen because it is easy to tune it in another pitch. Since Shamisen was used to accompany singers it is made to be tuned accordingly to the pitch of the singer. No one has the same range of voice so you need to switch a lot sometimes and no one uses capo.
The fact that this capo mentioned the sawari is probably because a simple capo would block the sawari sound when you use it so they emphasis on this to sell it.
Thank you both for all the valuable info! It really helped clear things up for me. Ive been using tape to increase the buzz and its been working well for me!