Mujitsu and Tairaku's Shakuhachi BBQ

Yungflutes wrote:

Hi axolotl,
My main shakuhachi is the one I made with Kinya in 2003. If it left me, I'd make a new (and improved) one

Bravo! Funny how that is just the nature of things!

geminishadow79 wrote:

I only have one flute, one electric guitar one acoustic and one bass, I can't afford to replace any of them, if I lost them, I would feel lost.

Donna... judging from your admirable approach to life, I think you'd get by just fine!

[Ooooh, nice job on the Popeye avi. That's an OLD Popeye. Very nice indeed.]

axolotl wrote:

A mutual friend of my wife's and me recently broke his violin--he's a professional Arabic violinist.  Naturally, he's heartbroken.  I was chatting with her about this and wondered whether he had insurance or not.

Her response was, "regardless, the violin is irreplaceable.  He'll never have that instrument back again."  The implication here was that no instrument would be as peerless.

I wonder about that.  There's something about spending a lot of time with one instrument, particularly instruments like violins and shakuhachi, that are so uniquely different, one from another,  that put you in tune with the attributes and shortcomings of the instrument.  Masa Yoshizawa lent me a Rampo hassun for about 8 years.  The flute had been a gift to him, so he couldn't sell it.  Given it was a really sweet flute, I was in no more hurry to replace it than he seemed to be to get it back.

Years later, when Masa died, and I was given the task of dealing with his instruments, I picked that Rampo up and playing it was like coming home.  I knew precisely how sharp the Chi was, and how much to correct, where my finger should be placed for the best otsu-no-tsu-no-meri, etc.  The flute eventually went back to its original owner.

If you have a good instrument, and you spend a lot of time with it, you develop a rapport with the instrument that cannot be replicated or replaced.  When you lose the instrument, you also lose the years you spent playing it.  You can put an equal number of years into the replacement, but they're not the same years.