I live on the East Coast, and I’m wondering how well a shamisen skin is going to fare with the wide variations in temperature and humidity.
How often do shamisens need to be reskinned, anyways?
Also, where can I find a washi bag for my dou to help combat the humidity?
Hey welcome to the forum from another Hoffman(n) 
I take if you don’t need premium sound, the skin might last years. Of course it eventually adds to the expense/trouble.
Do the conditions vary indoors as well?
I suppose you could order washi from Bachido too, as they must be quite common. E-kameya has some too.
Hey Maxine, I used to live on the East Coast, and no need to worry. Your skin should hold up fine, as long as you take a few normal precautions. Here are a few tips I’ve gotten over the years:
-
Play as often as possible. Regular use should knock any excess moisture out of the skin and also keep it at the right tension for playing.
-
Wipe down the instrument before and after play.
-
Store the instrument in a secure place out of direct sunlight and without too much temperature variation, preferably in the comfortable to cool range and on the dryer side. Higher is better than lower, as moisture can be more concentrated closer to the floor.
-
Use that washi bag once you have it!
If you do that, the skin should keep fine. My most recent one had a good life of about 3 years, which seems to be average. It sounds like with regular practice, the normal lifespan of a skin should be about 3-5 years.
I agree with Jamie!
About washi fukuro, I’ve been recently thinking (which I try to avoid doing) about something Catherine mentioned in an earlier thread. The purpose of the washi bag is to suck out moisture from the skin (or at least, keep moisture away from the skin), but once it soaks up moisture, what happens then? Like when a sponge soaks up water, isn’t there a limit to how much moisture it can hold? Doesn’t it have to be dried out in an oven or sunlight?
I’ve recently been considering using a desiccant packet, though am not sure. Perhaps it can split if too much moisture is removed?
1 Like
Yeah, I don’t know about that. Might be good to ask Katoh-san. As far as I know, most people don’t seem to be stuffing their cases with desiccant packets, but it probably wouldn’t hurt to let the washi bag air out every so often.
O Jeeze! I definitely put silica desiccant int my case when my instruments are not in my special dehumidified room I made up. But then, I do live in a bloody rainforest and it’s starting to rain AGAIN!
I even toss about 3 of them (and they are a pretty large size) in my kora bags when I go (infrequently mind) galavanting about.
1 Like
Agree with Catherinesan - just back from Panama and multiple desiccant packs were with everything all the time - the giant lenses, expensive cameras, sound recording equipment - which were all in big ziploc bags. The packs just lasted two weeks - now they go into a low oven to dry out and be used again (stored in ziplocs after being dried out, of course).
I used to transport my Guitarra Portuguesa between sticky summer in Rio and overheated winter in Ann Arbor and had to do the opposite - a piece of apple into the sound hole once a week where it became dried apple quickly. It worked and the wood stayed unchecked.
Drum heads are always going to change with humidity (why Mylar heads were invented). It is a flaw in the design of shamisen that the head cannot be tensioned like a banjo can. I think there is room here for innovation - tradition is all well and fine, but tradition is also a great excuse for doing dumb things again and again.
OK, weird weird factoid: the last thing Marlon Brando did in his life was to patent a device to tune conga drum heads. True! Hey, I come from a time before Wikipedia, when we had to memorize all this crap ourselves.
1 Like
Re: using a washi fukuro as Kyle earlier mentions. I think (avoiding such activity as much as possible too! thinking, what a bother!) that it could also serve well as a sort of insulation from fluctuating environments whether it be humidity, temperature etc. To even out the changes as it were. I imagine that if it gets all water logged like it would up here, a quick spell in a warm oven would clear or rather, dry, that up toot sweet.
The thought came to me that, as I was adding more plastic sheeting to the walls and ceiling of my dry room, as you do… and then covering THAT up with sheets of paper of varying aesthetics, that I was making a washi ROOM.
my2bits. cheers!
Good idea, but what about just letting the fukuro dry out in direct sunlight sometimes to restore its freshness. Japanese do that quite often with their bedding…