The shamisen buzzes on purpose, thanks to one deliberately low string
Japan's three-stringed shamisen has no frets, a drum for a body and a lowest string set slightly too low at the nut. That flaw is intentional: it produces sawari, a humming buzz players prize. Each genre then demands its own neck, plectrum and bridge, down to fractions of a unit in height.
The name, like the alternatives samisen and sangen, simply means three strings, and the instrument descends from the Chinese sanxian. Its layout resembles a banjo: a long neck crosses a hollow body, the dō, which is covered front and back with skin. Dog and cat skin, with cat reserved for finer instruments, were standard through the twentieth century, but from around the mid 2000s social stigma and a shortage of skilled preparers pushed makers toward synthetics such as plastic. The neck usually breaks down into three or four interlocking sections, so the whole thing packs away easily.
Size follows genre. The hosozao, or thin neck, is the smallest, suited to the fast, showy playing that kabuki's nagauta requires. The chuzao, a middle size, has a curve near the body nicknamed the pigeon's breast, giving it a higher register and a mellower tone favoured in jiuta. The futozao, or fat neck, serves the forceful music of bunraku puppet theatre and the recent, deliberately oversized tsugaru-jamisen. A heike shamisen, built for a folk song from Shimonoseki, has a neck about half the usual length.
Plectrums, called bachi, vary just as much. The jiuta version is the longest and widest; the gidayu type is the heaviest; the tsugaru bachi is the smallest and nearly always tortoiseshell-tipped. Bridges, or koma, are graded by height, and a taller bridge is louder but harder to control, so beginners avoid them. Nagauta teachers often scorn plastic and insist students use ox bone, while ivory, costly and loud, tends to go to the lead player so the others can follow.
Purists of the older genres allow little variation in wood, skin or bachi. The tsugaru style is looser: it has found its way into jazz and rock, and inventors have fitted it with electric pickups. Played with the bachi, strings and skin are often struck together, much like clawhammer banjo; in kouta the player uses fingers instead. In the 1860s the printmaker Yabu Chosui showed one propped against a lacquer box, hiding a mark that likely named a geisha house.
Source: Shamisen
