Mujitsu and Tairaku's Shakuhachi BBQ

robert wrote:

I am a practicing Zen Buddhist and I am a luthier. My former shop mate makes shakuhachi flutes so I am now on the path to building my first.

Welcome Robert,

Hard, dense culms are usually best. Including the root end will give you the advantage of a tapered bore.

Here are some other bamboo possibilities:

An economical way to start making shakuhachi while developing your sound is to use tonkin bamboo. These hard, dense culms can make surprisingly nice shakuhachi. They are available at many nurseries and online bamboo warehouses. Look for culms cut as close to the ground as possible.

Chinese root bamboo is also inexpensive and can make decent shakuhachi. Various grades are available online.

If you want to go right into Japanese Madake, Mejiro in Japan will ship specific sizes to you. Sometimes, makers have extra culms to sell. But not always!

Good luck!

Ken

Hi Robert.  Exciting quest you're on!

robert wrote:

what diameter should I be buying?

Hard question to answer unless you tell us how long and what style of flute you're going to make.

Inner diameter is just as important, and every culm will present a different wall thickness to you.

But 30-42 mm outer diameter might be a good ballpark for "normal" flutes (1.6 or 1.8) right up through wide, long (chokan) jinashi flutes.  You can read about aspect ratio on the forum on or Nelson Zink's site.  A flute that's wide for its length can sound really great in the low register but might be hard or impossible to tune in the upper register and beyond.

Take a pieces of string or strips of paper with hole position templates along for various lengths of flute you think you might like.  (You can find these formulas on the forum and elsewhere on the web.)  Then you can see if the hole placements relative to nodes is reasonable.

Good luck!  (Disclaimer... everyone else knows it here, but I'm an amateur.)

-Darren.