I don’t really have any musical talent above the population average, just an open mind, some intense aesthetic spirit and too strong creative ambitions for my own good. (Maths and computers, those are the easy things for me, and trolling on the forums of course )

They made us all play a soprano recorder (that’s a common kind of internal duct flute) at school. In the end I made just a little progress, more than most. I think that can be entirely attributed to dutiful practice. But the main thing I learned was how hard it really was.

Since then, I haven’t touched any musical instrument, besides playing around with a synthesizer once, and sometimes attacking a piano or a cheap electronic keyboard and playing some random notes. My taste in music was always electronic (I just loved all the weird sounds) and on occasion I tried making some music (or something reminiscent of music) using soundtrackers, and playing around with some software synthesizers on the PC.

However, Japan has had a special place in my heart for over 30 years.

Fast forward into the late 2000’s. For the first time in my life, I had started enjoying music with actual vocals (a bit of gangsta rap at first, then Nightwish and finally, the wonderful, the magnificent japanese genre of enka). I discovered one of the great enka star Fuji Ayako’s masterpieces, Yuki Shin Shin. The performance started with a little solo by this guy with this curious japanese instrument (you may guess which one it was), making some cool near-electronic sounds. I started to become captivated - another enka singer, Nagayama Yoko was combining her enka singing with some serious playing of the shamisen, and at this time I also bumped into the work of Kevin Kmetz on Youtube. It had become a dream of mine to acquire and play a shamisen.

Soon after, I visited Japan. A perfect opportunity to pick up the instrument. Only, I had read replacing broken skin, as well as learning to play the instrument without a teacher, would be issues. I dropped the subject as I didn’t have time to do further research. Years passed.

Then I found Bachido, and now I’m expecting the delivery of my first shamisen (the Beginner Shamisen, a nagauta). It’s a bit funny how quickly the skin replacement and learning became non-issues.