hi everybody,
On youtube we can watch videos people playing shamisen mario bros, james bond 007, or zelda and pokemon( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQriQpnbhO4 , http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XakomZp8WfY ) , i have searched but i don’t find notations shamisen for playing music videogame NES, SNES and other.
Hello Matthieu
Welcome to Bachido.
Well, the possibility to find game-tabs, esp. for shamisen, is equal to none. Most musicians/youtubers will learn the melodies just by listening to the music and try to play along.
So did I with the super mario theme. You have to learn in little chunks and combine them little by little.
Hope this helps.
Ale
thanks alessandro
Perhaps one of our Japanese members would know more about if this exists in the Japanese community. Other than that Alessandro is correct. We are basically the community for international shamisen and if there would be a database of game tabs then we would probably be aware of it.
However some members might be interested in the challenge of maknig a cover so you could still try and make a request and see if someone wants to do it.
Most musicians/youtubers will learn the melodies just by listening to the music and try to play along.
I suppose it’s an acquired skill - I’ve felt quite tone-deaf when I’ve considered anything like that before though.
I wonder if there could be a howto created for how one goes about it and picks up the skills for it? Or can our accomplished musicians share a few tricks and tips?
Unfortunately it is like most things which means it comes with practice. However the skills you need come from stuff you want to learn for other purposes, so that’s good.
There are only 12 notes and they match the 12 positions on the shamisen from 0 to 10b or 1 to 10. You should start to learn a couple of scales on the shamisen. You can head over to the little tool I made http://shamisentest.karlhedlund.se/scaleviewer
I would recommend starting with Major and Natural Minor as these are two very common scales used in western music. Natural Minor is very common in heavy metal. When you’ve played a scale long enough you will start to feel the notes to play when you hear a song, and if there is another scale then it usually only has changed one or two notes from the scale you already know which means you learn to adapt to that new scale as well.
My tip is to select a song that you like and listen for all the notes in the song. If you can sing the melody with your voice you should be able to slowly follow the melody on your instrument, but otherwise you will have to rewind and take everything note by note. You will probably end up with 7 different notes or less. This will be the scale of the song and once you know which notes that exist in the song it will be much easier to sit down and find out which of those notes are played in which order.
If you are unable to hear when two notes played from different audio sources, like your shamisen and the song being played, you can find videos on youtube for hearing if two notes match. There is a lot of singing videos where they teach you that.
Thanks Karl for the explain.
Karl’s explanation should really go to the wiki, so we can expand it. Wikipedia also has stuff on scales&modes to give a bit of the theory background.
Karl, Wiki-ize that gold!
One trick could be taking a look at what your tuning app says for the notes and try and write it down… Might not work if/when there are several instruments playing.
Have to try this at some point!
Probably the best way is to download the music in eg. midi format, many of the retro tunes have such available from the later fan community. (Discussed this in another thread too.)
If you are a beginner, one of the easiest to play is Usagi Yojimbo, look it up on youtube or the retro sites!
The game (originally on at least commodore 64) is based on a manga about a 17th century samurai rabbit, and you must fight off ninja, rival samurai, monsters and so on.
Put your shamisen in niagari (C-G-C) and type the scale C D F G A in eg. shamisen scale viewer from Karl. The starting/main melody is really easy when you alternate between 2 strings, it should make a lot of sense when you look at in the scale viewer.
Eg.
D-F-G – becomes --> I/2-I/4-II/0 (ichi 2, ichi 4, ni 0)
D-A-G – becomes --> I/2-II/2-II/0
I’ll have another look at Usagi Yojimbo soonish, as it’s a rather straightforward tune. The problem with some other midi/C64 tunes I took a look at is the fast playing required - eg. they have 3/16 notes etc.
I think the original game and theme could be considered abandonware, and there’s probably no issue with linking tabs and such. However the franchise seems to have continued with mobile games and I think even the manga enjoys some popularity still.
Remake of original music:
A nice metal remake - this could be a nice arrangement for multiple shamisen! (The “original” could work nice with shamisen, koto, shakuhachi and hand drum? 
)
oh my I remember that white rabbit samurai and firebird didn’t play that one much but it was among the many games I came across when I had an amstrad cpc in the second half of the 80s . . .
From the midi version I have, I think one could extract 2 shamisen parts. The main theme is easier and I’ve been working on that. The 2nd part would probably require an advanced player to play in ensemble.
3/4 of the main theme is decrypted into tabs, I was using F-C-F tuning as that goes nicely to my nagauta - not sure if it’s well suited for tsugaru?
Link, can you guys access that?
Another interesting piece, Internation Karate:
The section 4:10 to about 5:20 sounds nice and a bit familiar, does it use the same scale as Sakura? Could be very good stuff for intermediate players to work on.
I tried downloading midis but seems it’s mostly the main theme and doesn’t include this part. Notes there seem to be standard length and no 3/16 weirdness so sounds promising.
Apparently the 80’s musical genius, Ron Hubbard, recycled a well known movie theme for this:
