Ok I bought a shamisen with broken skins for my wife for christmas. Plan was to reskin them this weekend. Problem: I cant find a skin source that can deliver to socal before christmas eve. So:
can I just buy a drum or banjo head from guitar center and remove the ring?
does anyone know a socal source I can just walk into to get what I need.
I guess I can promise ill fix it but a btoken gift isnt gonna get me lai… lets just say its not gonna make me look as cool and I kinda like this lady.
Hi Robert!
Welcome to Bachido!
Ooh, that is an emergency. Yeah, if you can find a drum/banjo with a natural head, you can remove the ring, moisten the skin and it should be ready to stretch again. I’m not sure how tight you’ll be able to stretch it, so be careful, otherwise you’ll have to buy a few more banjos. 
Nice profile picture! I get the feeling you’re a luthier, or like to make instruments for a hobby?
I made an F-style mandolin a few years ago. Was a fun project, though making all the jigs was the hardest part of the process.
Good luck getting lady points by stretching animal leather! (Admittedly, explaining the process of skinning shamisen never did me well on dates)
Sweet.
That is about as far as ive gotten on my mandolin project. Couple templates and jigs. Work, kids, animal skin stretching, actually playing mandolin, it all gets in the way of building one.
Thanks for the help.
There’s more than one way to skin a cat.
I wonder if anyone has ever used “road kill” as a source to skin their shamisen?
Be pretty unique to have the only shamisen skinned with badger.
Don’t know about Bedford, UK, but around here people give kittens away by the boxful outside grocery stores. I suppose you just grow them up and make shamisens from them - I’m not certain, as I am not a cat person.
I have a feeling I’m gonna get some mail from people who are…
Tomo Hamel…Oooooo!..Ohoooooooooo!!! Not being a cat person is no excuse. I cut my damaged skins off and replaced with goat velum designed for banjos. Tho i suppose goats have feelings too. Never heard of khama?
I’m vegan and don’t really raise cats for their skins.
Karma is a lovely concept - wish it were true.
I am a birder - cats kill like deranged maniacs. If karma were real, then cats would choke on feathers. Or their owners who let them outside would.
You can bet goats have a full range of emotions - my neighbor has a flock he rents out for weed abatement. Goats are delightful beings.
No free lunch is a concept I do believe in. Synthetic skins may be the only way to skin a shamisen without skin, but we and the whole planet die a little with every new oil well, and oil is where all synthetic membranes begin.
It seems the only way to not do harm is to not get out of bed in the morning. And staying in bed all day feeds the dust mites living in the pillow and mattress!
OK, I think I have solved it. When people have bariatric surgery they sometimes need to have flesh “trimmed” back as the adipose tissue shrinks and their skin hangs loose. That might be a source of shamisen skin, though I will bet that skin is already going to help burn victims. Hmmm, maybe we can talk older relatives into donating their skin to us? Roadkill also seems like a very good idea. But roadkill or Auntie, either way tanning leather is a messy business, but both are good ideas, right?
There’s no way around it,even violins are glued with animal glue. And i hate to think where all the bowhair comes from!
I just got this image of a line of cat treats leading off the pavement into a dank,dark cellar, where someone waits with a well-sharpened knife…
What about sustainably harvested woodfibres mixed with rubber solution, and spreadout in thin sheets?
http://www.drumfactorydirect.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=14_92_102_172
Fish skins. My SanXian is python skin (more than 50 years old and so far no holes) and that makes me think of all the alien pythons in Florida that need to be removed from the habitat. Fish skin seems like a good match to cat - deer skins (which are given away at hunting slaughter houses where hunters take deer to be turned into sausage) are another possibility, but likely too thick.
I cannot believe that sturgeon are non-threatened in the Nile river, but I can find no data on this population. Birdlife International does operate in Egypt, and the Egyptian Ministry of Environment puts out high-minded goals and papers but not action. Regardless, fishskin might be a good way to go - buy a whole salmon and work from there. In Japan, fish skin glue is a go to for shoji paper fastening.
Considering the tone of the shamisen it is tempting to think of making a National guitar-style shamisen with a shiny nickel-silver top.
The tropical hardwoods that are used to make shamisen are of more concern to me than the skins. Sustainable and harvest are two words that really do not go together - as a naturalist, I have done surveys of single oaks and found dozens of species living in one tree. That number goes up hugely when looking at rainforest trees. Every tree that falls is a whole universe to the creatures living there.
Buy old shamisen and rehabilitate them. It is the most responsible thing one can do, I think.
Celluloid (and the resultant cascade of plastic in the world) was created to replace ivory - to make cheap balls for pool tables. In the end it did not help elephants and now we have oceans capped with floating plastic that is beginning to degrade to a foam of plastic (interesting news there is that new ecosystems are already emerging that make use of the plastic, from naturally occurring bacteria that digest long chain polymers to fish that lay eggs in the debris, the bad news is still the bad news - dead albatross, etc etc). Mylar was the miracle that replaced skin for drum heads, playable in all weather. Mix in Kevlar and you have a material that you can beat on and breaks down to asbestos-like fibers of kevlar in the landfills.
Then again, here I am typing on a machine whose manufacture has left one of the most toxic pools of black sludge/heavy metals in China:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/40°37’32.9"N+109°40’10.1"E/@40.6433994,109.6801445,6460m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m2!3m1!1s0x0:0x0
Turns of that to make pretty and shiny you must separate out the ugly and awful.
Very interesting topic!
Just wanted to add that similar to deer skin being the biproduct from hunting slaughter houses, dog/cat skin is the same for shamisen. The skins are prepared in China, Laos, and other places where those animals are cuisine (though it’s becoming less so as their population gets wealthier and gets a taste for beef) restaurants/eateries take the meat for eating, and the skin is the biproduct.
Too bad the East is getting a taste for beef. Cows are the epitome of non-sustainable agricultural practices. Cat used to be one of the ‘street meats’ sold in Rio de Janeiro when I was a kid - I remember it as very tasty.
Its difficult that what one culture would regard as a pet,or a sacred animal,others regard as a by product. As a quaker who tries to tread lightly on the earth i like byproducts that use what would otherwise be dumped,but as an english person with a cat sitting on my feet right now i cant get my head round the idea of eating cat and dog.
This is exactly the inner soul searching i went through before i got my shamisen.
I think getting a secondhand instrument then replacing the skins is the best idea, then each person can use what they prefer and hope their conscience doesnt wake them at 2am. My cat frequently wakes me at 2am. Is she trying to tell me something?!!!
“FIBERSEN”
So there is a non_animal alternative,thats nice to know.
Dear Pennysan, what your cat is trying to tell you at 2 AM is simply that it is a nocturnal animal.