Mujitsu and Tairaku's Shakuhachi BBQ

amokrun wrote:

First, there is a fingering that is the same as ? but with the lowest hole also closed. I recall reading from somewhere that it is occasionally used in honkyoku in some specific context. The sound is similar to ? but doesn't have the sharpness of ?, if that makes any sense. Does that fingering have a name or a symbol? I find it very nice and occasionally use it both alone and for quickly shifting between it and ? repeatedly.

You certainly have ever seen this in scores :

1 utsu = tap first finger (lowest hole)
This notation is used for trills too.

amokrun wrote:

Next, is there a name for a fingering where only the second hole from the top is open, specifically in ? register? One of the charts I have lists it as ? something (the names are somewhat unreadable, especially small characters)

If the chart you're speaking about is the Neptune's one, the unreadable small characters just mean "dai kan"

amokrun wrote:

First, there is a fingering that is the same as レ but with the lowest hole also closed. I recall reading from somewhere that it is occasionally used in honkyoku in some specific context.

The stock ending of many Kinko school honkyoku is re - ro. In this context, the bottom hole is covered when playing the re, so that only 2 comes down to play the ro.

amokrun wrote:

Next, is there a name for a fingering where only the second hole from the top is open, specifically in 乙 register? One of the charts I have lists it as チ something (the names are somewhat unreadable, especially small characters) in 大甲. There is no such note in any other registers in any of the charts I have. The sound is at roughly リ中メ pitch but plays a little softer for me.

In the dai kan register, that fingering (only 4 open) is how you play a chi. It is sometimes notated as a yon no hi. See the entry "Dai kan notes" in http://nyokai.com/tips/. In otsu, that fingering is an alternate way of playing a ri meri.

amokrun wrote:

Finally, is there a name for ウ with the bottom hole open as well? This, I think, appears in no charts I know of. The sound goes up a slight bit from ウ. It sounds especially nice if you go from normal ウ to this and then to チ while keeping the amount of メ the same. The difference is very slight but quite interesting.

There are several ways to play an u pitch (hovering around A flat on a 1.8). A very common one is 1 open and 3 partially covered. You can think of it as an otsu chi meri, with 2 covered to bring the sound down. If you play u that way, you often need to open up 3 all the way as well to be able to do an atari on 3 -- common in Jin Nyodo honkyoku. I guess that is the u you're talking about -- 1 and 3 open. All forms of u in otsu are meri.

amokrun wrote:

First, there is a fingering that is the same as レ but with the lowest hole also closed.

I know this fingering, played meri (or chu meri?) as ni no re.  (Or ne no re?)  Played dai meri, it achieves the pitch of tsu.

There's a signature (I think) phrase in Shingetsu that goes:
u
u meri
tsu meri
tsu dai meri
ni no re dai meri
u
u meri
tsu meri
re

amokrun wrote:

Finally, is there a name for ウ with the bottom hole open as well?

I think your question was limited to otsu, but in kan register, I know this fingering as ru, played dai meri, found in lots of honkyoku after a shaded-1 chi meri.  I believe ru can also be played with the 1 hole shaded on jiari.

I can read your symbols fine but I can't easily type the new ones back for you.  There's a fingering chart at SSBC, if you haven't already found it, with ni no re, ru, and probably other fingerings you'll enjoy here

-Darren.

Last edited by dstone (2006-11-13 14:30:34)

nyokai wrote:

The stock ending of many Kinko school honkyoku is re - ro. In this context, the bottom hole is covered when playing the re, so that only 2 comes down to play the ro.

Ah, makes sense. No special notation for it, then? I assume that it doesn't normally appear in notation apart from such special cases?

nyokai wrote:

In otsu, that fingering is an alternate way of playing a ri meri.

Is that done with or without Meri? I tried it with two flutes and the pitch with no Meri was almost exactly Ri Chu Meri rather than Ri Meri. It could be just me, so I wanted to check.

nyokai wrote:

There are several ways to play an u pitch (hovering around A flat on a 1.8). A very common one is 1 open and 3 partially covered. You can think of it as an otsu chi meri, with 2 covered to bring the sound down. If you play u that way, you often need to open up 3 all the way as well to be able to do an atari on 3 -- common in Jin Nyodo honkyoku. I guess that is the u you're talking about -- 1 and 3 open. All forms of u in otsu are meri.

Yeah, I believe that is the one. By the way, is there a reason why U is always done Meri in Otsu?

Thank you for the answers. Clears up quite a few things.

JF Lagrost wrote:

I'm on Mac OS X. I can read and write japanese characters, but they're replaced by "?" when I submit or do preview.

Indeed quite strange. I was curious and checked. This board suggests that the character encoding is Latin1. Technicalities aside, something somewhere along the chain of command is interpreting those characters you copied wrong. It may be your machine or it may be the board. As much as I feel the need to tweak something (habit of mine when it comes to computers, sorry), I think that the best solution here is to use images instead. That works for everyone, even if it's not as pretty nor scalable.

JF Lagrost wrote:

You're right : if I change the character encoding in Safari, I can post messages with japanese characters in the forum. But, oddly, not all characters : I can't post any a hiragana, and any wa or ro katakana :

Oddly enough, the characters you posted just now were in Shift-JIS encoding, which is one of the encodings for japanese language. They show correctly if one switches to Shift-JIS but turn out as garbage in anything else. I have never had to make any web software that deals with japanese so I had to do a bit of experimenting.

The characters I typed in the first message appear in the page as encoded UTF-8 characters. This means that no matter what browser, encoding or whatever you have, they will show up correctly. The characters you just posted, however, are in pure Shift-JIS and thus appear either correctly or incorrectly depending on which encoding you have turned on at the moment. In most modes they are meaningless garbage, however. That is the case with Latin1, which is the default. Thus, most people see those as garbage.

One thing I'm not entirely sure of is which part does the conversion. For example, when I type 乙 (otsu kanji), it gets turned into character number 20057 on the forums. Anyone with suitable fonts should see that character perfectly regardless of their encoding. I don't currently know whether my browser is kind enough to turn that into suitable format first or whether the forum software is clever enough to do it.

Try this one. Turn the encoding into "unicode (UTF-8)" and post again with some kana in the post. Remember to turn the encoding on before hitting reply so that it actually takes effect. Lets see if that works.

edit:

A bit of inspection done. Apparently my browser sends characters already encoded properly so that showing them on the page, no matter what encoding, will work. Your browser, by default, seems to send something else that turns into garbage when it gets sent over and stored to the server. That's either Latin1, Shift-JIS or UTF-8 if my guess is right.

I'm not entirely sure why your browser works that way by default. Technically it could be "fixed" if the server would parse the messages and encode them properly or if your browser would send them already encoded like mine does. If you get a chance to try out the UTF-8 mode, we'd know at least whether or not the browser is sending them as raw UTF-8 or as encoded strings.

Last edited by amokrun (2006-11-13 17:17:01)

JF Lagrost wrote:

OK, I try it with hiragana :

Okay, got it. Your browser sends everything as raw characters instead of encoding them. This works fine if the encoding for the page is same as the encoding that you had when you sent something. Now, however, our page sets the encoding as Latin1 but your text was in UTF-8 and was thus garbage. Forcing UTF-8 mode makes the characters work just fine. It would be sensible, thus, to assume that in the earlier cases your browser also sent everything in raw Shift-JIS/Latin1, which is why you had bunch of question marks instead.

I did some looking around and found various details of the issue. Basically, some browsers choose to send encoded characters if they think that whatever you sent won't display correctly. This is the case with my browser. It's a decent solution with some problems, but it works nicely in our case. Then we have browsers like yours that will send raw characters or question marks if the given encoding can't show the wanted characters. Thus, your browser in UTF-8 mode would send in two bytes, 7B and 8F, for koto which is somewhere around garbage for Latin1.

The best solution would be to have the site use UTF-8 so that sending in stuff would always happen in UTF-8 and thus everyone would see and be able to reply with japanese characters. This may or may not work easily, given that the language this board is written in, PHP, has a rather abysmal support for Unicode. I think I might try running a copy of this board on my own computer and see if it works in Unicode or not.

Last edited by amokrun (2006-11-13 17:44:04)

Hello amokrun. I've just downloaded the last version of Firefox and... it works ! すごい ! I think my versions of Safari and Internet Explorer were too old. So, I can write and post in japanese.