My Shakuhachi Yuu

First a little disclaimer: I am NOT a musician, or a Shakuhachi player (yet) giving a review from an area I'm an expert in. I'm, in Kung Fu Panda terms, at Level Zero. I am just sharing my impressions of the Shakuhachi Yuu I acquired for Xen Meditation.

It began when a friend of mine showed me an Asian flute she had in SecondLife. It was a really wonderful thing for a mere $75 linden - you can get your own here (its' on the table to right). It seems to play a random series of patterns and I found it quite peaceful to sit on this mountain top and play it. I found that affordance of SecondLife to be very refreshing. I am working, on a side note, on a collection of peaceful places in SL for people who's real life doesn't allow them access to places you can expand and connect with the universe, or at least feel connected to a natural environment.

After a few days of enjoyable playing in SL, I decided to attempt to learn to play in real life. I went to Amazon and looked for bamboo flutes. I found a bamboo shakuhachi for $14.95 (and $8.00 shipping - yikes!). So I ordered it. I did do enough research to find that the shakuhachi was the zen meditation flute I was looking for.

But it was very superficial research. The flute was of reasonable quality but impossible to play for a beginner teaching themselves. I am in a small southern town so there is no local shakuhachi master to teach me. I searched the internet for instructions and found some help but after a few days I realized It was going to take quite a while and a great bit of effort just to master the basics. I read in one article that someone had found a cheap flute like mine that the instructor could play easily but was very difficult for the student to play. The cheap flute I bought was an EE. That means as Shakuhachi's go it is pretty small. My bottom lip filled the hole. One instruction video on youtube said just try to get a sound out of it with all the holes uncovered. Which I did for about 3 days with wildly uneven results. As I kept looking for more instructions on how to play the shakuhachi - I kept finding more information about the flutes themselves.

One thing I discovered was that flutes sold from $14 (like mine) to $3,000. The majority of what I would call "regular" flutes were in the $300 to $2,100 price range. $300 would be out of the question for me right now, so the $2,100 just seem even more impossible. Then I found one called the Shakuhachi Yuu. It was not made out of bamboo or wood but rather ABS plastic resin. It was less expensive that it's bamboo counterparts at only $125, but the most compelling feature was that it had an adaptor (and additional $27.50) that turned it into a Native American style flute allowing you to play it right away regardless of your ability to make the embouchure (the way you hold your mouth to play the flute). It also was waterproof, a big selling point for me considering the amount of spit I blew down the other flute trying to get a note out of it.

I found where they were also being sold on eBay. So I bought the flute and the Yuu adaptor there. It arrived Express Mail extremely well packed. It looked better in person than it did in the photos on the web site. It's lightweight and feels really solid. It came with instructions on how to put it together and take it apart, a certificate for a free lesson with Michael Chikuzen Gould (worth $50), an end cap for the mouthpiece, and a tube of cork grease.

The Yuu adaptor was a godsend.

There are several dynamics in play when learning to get sound out of a shakuhachi by yourself. One is how to blow the edge of the end piece. Another is how hard to blow since you can bend the pitch a whole tone or more. Still another is how to hold all your fingers correctly as you can make vast changes in the sound by partially covering a hole (something you don't know you are doing until sound is actually coming out of it). By installing the adaptor, you can work on how hard to blow and how to hold the flute without worrying about how to hold your mouth. Now instead of hoping all the dynamics come together at once simultaneously and consistently, you can work on how to blow, and how hard to blow and how to finger separately. I'm practicing longer because the frustration level has dropped and I can spend part of the time practicing actually playing the flute.

The flute itself is really attractive. It looks like a  bamboo shakuhachi. I can also play it without the worries associated with having a $500 flute and I'm sure it will be much lower maintenance over time compared to organic material. And if you are wondering, per Wikipedia, ABS plastic is recyclable - though I can't imagine why you would recycle your flute.

As far as sound goes, it sounds great. I was reading that the sound of the shakuhachi is not created by the material the flute is made from, it's created by the "void" in the flute - the hollow space. That is where the sound comes from. There are several sample mp3s on the website, I encourage you to check them out.

Shown at right the Shakuhachi Yuu with the adaptor installed next to the EE Mid East Bamboo Shakuhachi

You can see the size difference. The price of the Yuu with the adaptor was well worth it considering the progress I'll be able to make with it teaching myself. Also when you factor in the durabilty of the instrument and the mental destressing that will come as my ability to play rises, it's well worth roughly two months of regular cable (no HBO), or one month's cell phone bill, or 8 DVD's.

Learning to express yourself musically will also allow you to tap into new areas of the brain too.

I give the Shakuhachi Yuu two enthusiastic thumbs up. It is one of the few recent things I've purchased that the experience far exceeded the expectation.

Now, how do you get to Carnegie Hall?

Practice, son, practice!

Or put a more Xen way, how do you reach the mountaintop?

You ride the wind.