Shamisen Week 13 Lesson

The instructor often stays with the same material we learned the week before. Usually because I have not mastered it or even "near" mastered it. However, we move on to new material this week, although not radically new.

One new note and several new techniques are introduced. The new note is Position 9 on the san no ito. I wish I could tell you where it is located. I cannot. I am having a devil of a time figuring out exactly where that note is. We did not replicate it enough during our one-hour session together for me to anchor the position in my mind. Complicating matters is that the note is played with the second finger. The second finger is on the note while the first finger trails immediately behind it.

An additional challenge is the transition from Position 9 back to Position 6 on the san no ito. My fingers feel glued to the sao and they don't want to move. When they do move, my second finger is spread too wide from the first finger when I reach Position 6 from Position 9 such that the note is off.

Position 6 is played with the second finger while maintaining the first finger on Position 5. When I slide down to Position 9 those two fingers get further apart from each other. When they slide back to Position 5/6 (first finger on 5, second finger on 6), the Position 5 finger is close to where it is supposed to be, but the second finger has been splayed as I move up the sao so that Position 6 is not correct. Since the note required to be played at this point is Position 6, this becomes extremely frustrating.

The new techniques are not really new--just new musical representations of something learned before. For example, hajiki, as mentioned in Lesson 12, is the plucking of the string with the finger (not the bachi). You pluck the note that immediately precedes the hajiki symbol. But suppose you want to pluck a different string--not the one that appears previous to the hajiki symbol? For this, the hajiki symbol appears immediately to the left of the position you are supposed to play.

Example: ^5 is hajiki, position 5, san no ito. So here, you pluck san no ito with the third finger while holding down position 5 with the first finger. This is not difficult, and although the musical symbols for the action to take are straightforward, interpreting them quickly enough and consistently takes me lots of practice.