Mujitsu and Tairaku's Shakuhachi BBQ

Tongue position is worth experimenting with.

Yes it is possible to play flatter/more meri with tongue.

Also if you raise tongue or arch it  the breath stream will become more confused
giving you a breathy unfocussed sound which is sometimes used in various styles of playing.

also see:

http://www.kotodama.net/shakuhachi/tips.html

2002  april /may

2001 august

2000 nov

1997 several

these tips are always worth revisiting from time to time.


:-)

graham in Oz

Horst Xenmeister wrote:

Tongue sasage=zungenwurst.

Zungenwurst good, Landjäger better.

Bratwurst best way.

That would be cast bore bratwurst?

Yooper wrote:

Illustrations in Koga's book show the tongue touching the back of the lower lip.

And over the teeths to play the higher registers...

Peace

edosan wrote:

To quote directly from Koga-sensei's book (Shakuhachi - Japanese Bamboo Flute, his basic primer):

"Tongue Position

It is very important to have the correct tongue position.

If you play with your tongue rolled back, it is difficult to make a sound, and the quality of the sound will be too breathy.

To produce a sound which is smooth, the tongue should be flat on the bottom of your mouth with the tip touching the top
of the lower front teeth [emphasis mine]."

eB

Yes this is right... 
 
We are not talking about personal opinions, so if we stay on Koga's teaching, we will see on page 76 of the same book refer above, that he says: "push the tongue about 3mm forward [the picture explaining this shows the tongue over the teeth after do that] and slightly raises the jaw then you will obtain a high register note." 
 
 
Let the river keep flowing... while we blew and learned... 
 
Peace

chikuzen wrote:

Try them and other positions and trust yourself at least as much as what someone says in a book or on the internet! Ha Ha!

But... but... the people on the Internet are my heroes!

Thanks for the informative post. Haven't really thought about it that way before. I always saw my tongue as something that I should just put somewhere so it gets out of the way. So far I've been mostly using it to tighten the space near the lip opening so that it becomes easier to get the air to move quickly. For low notes like Ro I just pull it back slightly. Blowing while keeping the tongue completely out of the front of my mouth feels quite strange for me. I'll have to keep on practicing that so that I can eventually take advantage of moving my tongue around more.

radi0gnome wrote:

Here's a thought. Robert Dick, an extremely good silver flute player and teacher, says to vocalize the note you're playing into the flute. He calls this throat tuning. The theory is that your mouth and throat are part of the resonant system that affects the sound. So, by practicing vocalizing the note you're playing, when you stop vocalizing and play normally you've trained your mouth and throat to be a more efficient part of the entire system and your tone should improve.

My father used to play trumpet. I borrowed his old notes a while ago and went through them. There was a lot of interesting stuff there about creating sound, breathing and so forth. The idea of singing out notes was also mentioned there. The notes basically listed sounds that you should try to visualize while blowing different notes. It helped me to get the feeling right, especially as far as throat goes.

radi0gnome wrote:

It's kind of funny though, to place my tongue on top of my bottom teeth when playing feels completely unatural and I've never really tried it before. Even though it's a bit less of a resonant sound and I normally wouldn't want to play like that, it is an additional sound coloring that can be used. To me, this kind of stuff is very cool.

My best guess is that this depends on your anatomy. My head is relatively large (as in, it's fairly difficult for me to get a hat anywhere that fits) and my chin is in different position than most pictures I've seen when I place the shakuhachi next to my mouth. Moving my tongue to the top of my teeth so that it lightly touches my lower lip helps me to lean my lower lip against the tongue. If I keep my tongue at the bottom of my mouth I end up having to hold the shakuhachi with the end raised quite a lot to even get the utaguchi anywhere near my mouth. I'd either have to blow from rather far away (not a good idea) or tilt my head down quite a bit (again, not a great idea). I'm not really sure how to play normally with my head straight and my tongue at the bottom of the mouth while at the same time having my lips near enough to the utaguchi. I'll just have to keep on training my lower lip muscles so that I can push the lip forward on its own and keep it steady.

chikuzen wrote:

How do you sing Hi and dai Kan?

Tough one. When my girlfriend tries to sing along to get her sound going, she usually tries to throw stuff at me when I do Dai Kan sounds. I suspect that throwing stuff or trying to cover your ears is the way to sing those notes.

chikuzen wrote:

Remeber, any one position will have a peak in effectiveness and that's it. Beyond that it's a dead end.

Good point. Right now I'm practicing different ways of blowing. It is very difficult for me at this point to change techniques quickly in middle of playing. Trying to make dramatic changes usually goes nowhere and thus I'm stuck doing things in the one single way I can. It really bothers me because I have no real problems with this technique but I'd also like to know that I can do things differently. Being stuck with one thing makes me wonder if it's just that some parts of me are more developed than others. I'd like to think that my lower lip especially isn't working anywhere near as effectively as it should and that, together with the problem of getting my chin to the right place for other ways of blowing is really hurting me in the long run.

chikuzen wrote:

TONGUE IN CHEEK SHAKUHACHI:
    Try this one: while playing a note role your tongue around in your cheek, over the front and to the other cheek pressing outwards so you see the bulge in your cheek. But don't let the sound get cut off.

....

I wonder if it is a bad thing that I seem to be able to play just fine by placing the tip of my tongue against my cheek on either side, roughly 1cm further away from the point where my lips meet. Sound tends to easily jump to Kan as I move my tongue from the middle to the side but it becomes easier to control again once it gets past the lips. In fact, Ro was pretty nice and round as my tongue was pushing my left cheek rather strongly. And yet, I can't blow a single note if I take my tongue away from that side of the mouth and just drop it at the bottom of my mouth.

Some days I get this feeling that some things aren't meant to be understood.

Okay, stupid question to everyone. When you play, do you cover part of the end of the shakuhachi with your lower lip, chin or whatever? I mean the part where ikigaeshi would be in longer flutes. Playing around while poking my cheek with my tongue, I noticed that I can play just fine for as long as I cover part of the hole with my lip. Problem being, should I move my tongue away I can no longer do that because I simply cannot jam the flute deep enough into my chin.

radi0gnome wrote:

I'm not in the best position to answer this because I don't take lessons, but the end of the shakuhachi gets covered with the bottom of my lower lip. I can get sound with it lifted higher, but it gets sharp (kari?) and a little windy, too high and  lose the sound. From what you said earlier in this discussion about not wanting to bend your head or hold the flute too horizontally I'm starting to suspect you're pushing your bottom lip with your tongue to make a seal because you're not positioning the shakuhachi correctly. I understand what you're saying about bending the head down, I do, but it makes sense that it's not a good thing to do because it restricts breathing some. I checked the players on youtube, and it looks like most of them hold the shakuhachi closer to horizontal rather than letting their head bend down much.

Thing is, I can't figure out any other way to do it except to push my lip forward a little bit. I'm not sure if it is because of my chin or something else but I simply cannot get the shakuhachi close enough otherwise. Even holding it horizontally places the utaguchi too far from the lip opening. Trying for a more realistic angle simply takes the utaguchi so far away that the best I can get is to make the windy sound of air going through the flute a bit more focused. I'm pretty sure that it's not a matter of blowing harder or in more focused way because without a flute I can blow plenty hard enough and the air stream is quite narrow. If I keep that and bring the flute near my lips the chin rest collides with my chin so early on that it's basically impossible to make a sound. It is also not a problem with hitting the utaguchi because I can easily enough narrow it down to the correct spot by tilting the flute back and forth. At no point is there any sort of clear sound at all. Pushing my lower lip forward a bit allows me to make a sound instantly and it's clear and focused. Letting my lip drop back to its original position kills the sound right there.

I've been working on this every since I started playing over two years ago. I often practice blowing without using my tongue for many hours without stopping. Needless to say, not once have I gotten a single sound like that and we are looking at countless hours of trying nothing but different positions. I'd like to think that if it was physically possible, I would have gotten lucky by now. Last couple of weeks I've spent several hours every day with my lips stretched as much as possible to train the muscles around them. That didn't help at all with blowing normally but at least I can now keep my lips more firm then using my tongue as a support.

I'm pretty much out of ideas as to how to fix this. I don't think that home-made chin surgery has a very good chance to succeed. Once I can find some plastic pipe, I'll try to make a shakuhachi with a more severe chin rest. If I can blow something like that it would seem to suggest that the problem is indeed in getting the flute close enough rather than my blowing or lip position. Any ideas are very much welcome.