Shamisen performance from New Zealand!

General
#1

Hi everyone!

Normally my partner Brian and I just enjoy reading the threads here, but today we decided to share something with people here for the very first time!

Just recently Brian and I played shamisen as a part of taiko & Maori (New Zealand natives) performance - it was a multi-cultural competition. 13 groups entered the competition and we won the first prize!!! Here is the link : -

We play shamisen for the first half of performance, the songs we played are “Yasaburo bushi” (tsugaru folk song) and our original called “fusion”.

We are pretty happy with the overall result, but personally I feel this is beyond limit of plastic skin!!! ( Brian’s shamisen skin is carf, but mine is still plastic :() On a huge stage like this, surrounded by such a noisy instrument ( Taiko!!!), how can we play so loud??? (I don’t want to knock down the microphone, so cannot get it too close to shamisen’s dou.)

We keep making progress with kawahari (skinning) so hopefully we can put a new carf skin on mine and will sound decent very soon!

Sayuri

#2

ist … one of the most …it makes my happy

#3

Congrats on your win!

#4

Woa I like it! About the skin… I really like the sound. I am lisening right now and I didn´t hear the difference. Wow I hear sakura here! sugoiii!! :slight_smile:

and with haka also! totemo sugoi!!

#5

Omedetou on getting first class!! That was a great performance (what a powerful voice!). What impressed me was when the fans all opened at the same time with a big fhrrr sound.

Brian wrote me today about his kawahari adventures (I will write him soon). He’s continually learning! :slight_smile: I was really impressed with his new kawahari kikai. He was actually the inspiration for Taichi san and I to come up with a new kikai ourselves too! :slight_smile:

I know he’ll keep working on it, he’ll make breakthroughs. :slight_smile: What Papa often tells me is, “It’s not the instrument that makes good music, but the person behind it.” You two sound very synced together and it was an enjoyable show. That’s what people really come away with. :slight_smile:

#6

Awesome performance! I really enjoyed watching this! Great job and congrats on the prize

#7

Thanks everyone :slight_smile:

Paco - it’s good you didn’t notice the difference in sound. I think it was only me that was worried about how we were going to sound until the last minutes. Normally whatever the stages we go on, microphone doesn’t pick up shamisen sound much, even though there always is time for sound check before the real stage. Recently we finally realised that there is nothing much we can do about microphone, it’s the shamisen!!! We definitely need better quality ones!

Kyle- finally we decided to go public (grin) ! The video link we sent you sometime ago wasn’t a good quality enough to show everyone, so we’ve been waiting to get a better quality video, and finally we’ve got one! ( Well, obviously this one was filmed by someone professional.) We are happy with the improvement in techniques since ( don’t know how you find it though,), but the better we get, the more desperately we want better shamisen! We thought about possibility to put dog skin on our shamisen a few times, but cost (labour + postage ) is not something we can afford at the moment, so we rather decided to keep trying Kawahari on our own. Thanks for giving us tips a lot, we really appreciate your generosity! We still keep trying, so hopefully one day two of us can go on a stage holding shamisen with beautiful calf skin on :slight_smile:

#8

finally we decided to go public (grin) !

It’s about time you did! With a performance like that, now you have no reason not to! :slight_smile: I look forward to seeing more!

so we rather decided to keep trying Kawahari on our own.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with that. :slight_smile: It’s always good to remember that super-tight skin for tsugaru shamisen is a relatively new thing. The skin which Shirakawa Gunpachiro and such players had was very loose and ‘thunky’, because they couldn’t afford to risk the skin breaking.

© 2020 Kyle Abbott