>What books and tapes have you found useful learning to play
>shakuhachi? I am using books by John Neptune and Carl Abbott. I
>read western notation and would prefer to work with that. ... Is
>there a good student grade book with western notation that has a
>lot of familiar tunes?
I suspect that it would be more than a little difficult to learn to
play traditional shakuhachi music straight from a book -
particularly honkyoku. Shakuhachi music has too many elements
not found in Western music.
On the other hand, if I wanted to learn western notation and play
"familiar" tunes, I'd get a fingering chart which shows which holes
in the shakuhachi to cover for each note and a tuner that shows
when you're playing the note in tune. Then you could begin working
on any western music. With a couple of exceptions (notably E-flat
and B-flat on a 1.8 shakuhachi), it's not difficult to learn the
correlations between the western notes and the positions on the
shakuhachi.
Tuners are easy to come by. Mine is an electronic one made by Korg
that I purchased in a guitar store. I don't know about the
availability of fingering charts, but have one that I could scan
and stick on the web if there were interest.
bj
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