Mujitsu and Tairaku's Shakuhachi BBQ

I visited Alan Adler today and thought I might write a short note on that. Apologies to Ken--I meant to invite him along but it ended up being something squeezed by chance between some other things, so no time to really organize that, for which I am sorry, as I wanted to meet Ken. Hopefully the next time I am in town...

Alan is a lovely and knowledgeable fellow, and I was intrigued with his flute designs. He uses a very wide blowing edge, and that combined with the angle of the top made them a bit difficult for me. Unlike Ken, I found that the wide utaguchi did not develop less volume than a standard shakuhachi utaguchi, but neither did I find that it developed more. My feeling was that the wide utaguchi was most effective at lower dynamics and blowing velocity, where it seemed to be more efficient at coupling with the air column, but that it reached a maximum sooner so that the effective dynamics were squeezed into a smaller range of blowing velocities. However I freely admit that my embouchure was very mediocre and this could be a false impression based on my own lack of familiarity with how to blow such an utaguchi. Alan gets a very nice sound on his flutes. I know he prefers to play in the first octave, but I found that they played well in the second register as well (at least as far as my limited embouchure would allow). All in all an entertaining and enlightening afternoon for me, and I hope for Alan as well. It will be interesting to see where he and his fertile brain go from here with these instruments.

Thank you Alan for your hospitality

Toby