Mujitsu and Tairaku's Shakuhachi BBQ

That explains why on humid days my flute will sound better than others. I was thinking it was me( the stress of the day, etc...).

purehappiness wrote:

That explains why on humid days my flute will sound better than others. I was thinking it was me( the stress of the day, etc...).

I've noticed this as well... in Taiwan the humidity is usually from 60~80%. When I head to the Rockies to visit my parents, the dry air makes my flute sound terrible until I've played it a few days thereby sealing additional moisture inside. Even then, it still doesn't "sound like home".

Zak

It just goes to show how organic the flute really is.

purehappiness wrote:

It just goes to show how organic the flute really is.

What it goes to show is how organic all wind instruments are, because they all do it...

dopio esspreso helps with my intonation

andyshak wrote:

Probably the most useful thing to realise is that sound waves are BIG and therefore it may help to make your body 'resonant' cavity (mouth, throat, chest, diaphragm) as big as possible to encourage resonance.

I don't quite understand this. That would be true when singing, ie. when the body itself is the resonator. But in the case of shakuhachi it's the resonance of the flute that matters. Of course making various parts of the body (abdomen, chest, throat, mouth cavity) "big" is a way to develop stronger and more consistent breath and an unimpeded airflow, which will lead to a more beautiful resonant tone -- but the human is the sound driver, not the sound resonator. Unless there's something I've been misunderstanding for a long time, the size of sound waves has no bearing on how we develop good blowing technique, other than maybe as a working metaphor...

Back to the temperature/tuning issue. Every koto player I've played with has understood very well the need to retune and retune again for environment, and some are also amazingly adept at retuning on the fly. So assuming they're seasoned players their pitch is usually not going to be TOO off due to environment. Let's say they're 20 cents off and because your flute is cold you're 30 cents off in the opposite direction. That's a difference between you of a quarter-tone. Every shakuhachi player, I think, should be able to adjust by a quarter tone pretty easily without detrimentally affecting timbre, at least in ensemble music where the timbre is not quite so exposed as in honkyoku. I think it is good practice to play along with recordings where you have to adjust your pitch, sometimes even more than a quarter-tone. But of course it's very pleasant to have your shakuachi completely warmed up and in tune!

Shakuhachi makers please correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that flutes with a lot of ji take a bit longer to come up to temperature in cold weather. I know that cast bore flutes, with their thick liner, certainly do. (This is NOT a criticism of jiari or cast bore flutes, so don't get your lederhosen in a bunch, Horst!)

Last edited by nyokai (2009-11-18 12:17:00)

The math is beyond me! It seems to say, if I am reading it correctly, that slight and often unconscious adjustments to the player's airway shape -- not just the embouchure -- affect the quality of the instrumental sound by reinforcement of various partials -- in other words, the entire airway plus instrument is a system, including feedback, that can be manipulated through adjustments to the airway. I think this is evident to shakuhachi players, especially if you practice overtones and multiphonics a lot (which I recommend) or if you use vowel sounds to shape your airway while playing -- they affect not just the shape of the embouchure but of a lot of stuff behind it. But that is different from considering the player's body a macro-level resonator for the resultant sound waves. Maybe this micro-adjustment is what Andrew was talking about?? It is also unclear how things would differ not having the "pressure barrier" of the reed creating back-pressure, which is the assumption in the article. Again, I am nowhere near competent to understand many of the technical aspects of this...