Could you please describe the entire first year of shakuhachi study?

[xris]

Just in a nutshell. I don't have any time to waste.

[Clinton Moy]

The first year of shakuhachi study is like a savory pecan waiting to
be slathered in hot, buttery caramel and eaten slowly like a ripe peach.

[xris]

Perfect. Cannot be said any better.

Topic closed.

[octavedoctor]

But that Clinton guy is wrong. The first year of shakuhachi study
consists of 1 hour a day trying to hold onto a note and another hour
telling people on shakuhachiforum that lessons would be a waste of
time until I can.

[xris]

Good point.

You should spend at least two hours on shakuhachiforum each day.

Hope this helps.

--x.

[Clinton Moy]

But that Clinton guy represents the players that immediately seek out
a teacher from the very start, so that he can avoid reading redundant
experiences of people trying to learn on their own on the forum ,
like a monkey trying to open that savory pecan shell with a sharp twig.

[Clinton Moy]

I spend at least two hours a day trying to donate money to the forum,
but it seems to be closed for the holidays.

[Clinton Moy]

Naked, vulnerable, and hopeless, washed up on shore covered in a
savory chocolate mousse.

[octavedoctor]

Dude, your missing the point. The monkey might look stupid at first,
but rather than having the right tools handed to him, he gets the
reward of figuring something out for himself. Whatever happened to the
"it's the journey that counts stuff"? And guess what, the monkey
becomes better at problem solving with experience.

OK, here are the two paths. The one with minimal teacher interaction
involves trying to figure it out for yourself. Maybe you can figure
out from the beginners book how to play the simple folk songs, maybe
not. If not, a lesson or two should give you enough to practice,
particularly for someone who knows how to practice, for a long time.
You shouldn't even be touching honkyoku before you can really play.
That crap is like Mozart, yes you throw it in front of your kid to see
if you might have a prodigy on your hands, but to be realistic most
people aren't going to ever master that stuff. Even the "beginner"
piece, kyorie, has a Ro dai meri in there. It can take years to play
that note reliably. That means if you start there you aren't going to
be able to play it without a blatant mistake for years. The minimal
teacher method, if you do it right, has you playing simple stuff until
it sounds beautiful, and you have it memorized and the song becomes
something you know intimately. You can sing it, sometimes if you start
it on a different note you can still play it in the new key and
surprise yourself in doing so. That means you finally learned the
song. Outside listeners hear this, it sounds like something you
learned, not something you're learning. I started with the children's
song, Toryansi, it sounds incredible now. Rinse and repeat for a lot
of simple songs, maybe you'll be happy with that forever, after all,
you learned how to play.

Now, an example of the typical teacher path. First, there's a
repertoire already laid out for you. Not necessarily songs you know
and love, but most likely will progress from easy to hard. OK, this is
going to take a long time, so the teacher says, "hey you understand
what you have to do play song number X, let's move onto song number
Y". You say "but wait, I haven't memorized it yet and it's fraught
with mistakes". "That's OK" teacher says, "keep practicing that one
and I'll teach you another one with some new stuff to challenge you".
"But wait", you say, "it's going to take a lot of practice to make
this sound good, and I like it". So, teacher says, "Hey what do you
want, for me to listen to you play that every lesson that's a waste of
my time, I told you all you need to know to play it, you understand
it, let's move on". So you say great, and unless you can magically
scrape up more time to practice, you might as well forget about that
song. In the end you end up "learning" a whole bunch of songs you
can't play. It's not a total loss, when you get discouraged because it
seems you've been studying with this teacher too long and still can't
play anything all the way through, maybe you'll just give up the
lessons and go back to that first simple song and work it up so it
sounds awesome. That's if you understand what happened and don't just
give up completely.

Some of the best musicians I've heard are sheep herders (not
shakuhachi, but various ney-like flutes, those Mongolian throat-singer/
musicians, and D'Gary from Madagascar on guitar). Do you really think
those guys got there skills from lessons. It's mostly about the
practice.

And as an aside, in my entire 40 years of studying music, with various
teachers and instruments but mostly flute, I only came across one
teacher (well.., there's another I only took one lesson from) who
didn't speak down to me. Coincidentally, that teacher brought me back
to the simpler pieces, taught me how to practice, and kept me on those
pieces until they sounded good. I would've quit that teacher early if
he didn't get me sounding halfway decent early, even though the pieces
were awful beginner-ish.

[Clinton Moy]

Dude, You are a monkey so overqualified as a musician you can't see
the forest for the trees. There are not only two paths, but many
versions of them, many like you mention, but with individual ways of
being schooled, dependent on the instructor. I can go solo on a
journey, get lost for years, break my leg, cut it off with a
penknife, and then give up the journey in it's entirety. People hire
guides when they believe it will ease the trials and tribulations of
the hard journey. To explain, you have over 40 years of music
study, so you are I assume very capable of self study after one
lesson. You cannot use your argument to speak for all of us ,
because I have 2 years of shakuhachi study with a teacher weekly and
no musical background at all, and I am 53 years old. If I take your
route, I will be well dead before I am anywhere satisfied with my shak
ability. Generally I would say it took more than a year going thru
14 or more trying different styles of embrochure, a year to get the
fundamental and kan notes decent and learning to play the notation
semi automatically on sight, etc. It even took me over a year to get
the concept of beat and to even tap my foot while playing! It
took me almost 2 years to learn even how to practice! Why to you
think most teachers start with honkyoku? Everyone I have talked to
started with children and easy folk songs. Other than fucking
the sheep in the ass, I think that sheepherders have the time to
practice ten or more hours a day. Most of us work, have family, eat
and sleep. We practice when we can. At the end of your email ,
you said you found one teacher you responded you, after rejecting
many, You learned much from your lessons and learned how to
practice. I am not saying you are a prodigy, but it is obvious you
have inane ability. At camp I met a retired woman who has had
over 20 years of constant lessons with a dai shihan, and she says she
is not very good at all, but really loves the shakuhachi, and knows
she will only fractionally ever become more proficient. She is very
happy. Some of us need lessons , or we will either give up, or just
blow long tones forever to New Age music, which is cool. Just
because I have a teacher doesn't mean I don't spend hours playing just
improv and experimental sounds ans playing to stuff on the radio. I
do. My journey can be whatever I want it to be at the moment. I
just need help.

[octavedoctor]

Yes, YMMV. First, if it happens to you or anyone reading, I mean
getting discouraged, rather than quitting lessons and playing, quit
just the lessons, go back and practice mostly tone and the first very
simple songs. See what happens with that before making the decision to
quit completely. You might find you want to continue lessons.

A lot of people come to shakuhachi from the folk music world (I went
from classical to folk to shakuhachi), and most of those people that
fit in that category probably are already taking the kind of path I
mentioned. The problem is with the lesser skilled people. As you point
out, they absolutely need lessons. And it's tough situation, because
weekly, even bi-weekly, lessons for a working adult who can only
practice an hour or so a day makes it very difficult to keep up with
the amount of information that can be transmitted in that amount of
time. Monthly lessons are so spaced out in time that feedback isn't
immediate enough. Shorter lessons aren't efficient because it takes to
long to warm up both musically and mentally.

Unless that student you mentioned was severely learning impaired, 20
years of lessons should have gotten her a nice tone and a few simple
songs to be proud of even if she never practiced at home. I have a
hunch the Dai Shihan who is her teacher is someone I have a great deal
of respect for, I realize they don't just hand those titles out, and
I'll keep in mind that I don't know all the details (like does she
even try? is she really that bad or just humble?). But that's
inexcusable, if she is really trying it shows that the right stuff
isn't being taught. No real progress in a certain amount of time the
teacher should be watching a practice session (in fact, that should
happen anyway), not just asking what the student is practicing, and
giving tips on what and how and how much to practice, and restructure
the lessons from what is working with the more average students.

Have you ever noticed that teachers constantly say to put such an
emphasis on practicing tone. At the very least, 15 minutes. How much
time does that leave in the hour practice session? Another 15 minutes
for exercises? And then 1/2 hour for pieces. Even with focused
practice that's not really enough to learn much. Use the rule for
shorter pieces you know to reinforce and memorize them to repeat them
until you can play it with no major mistakes (it should only take two
or three runs through) and do 2 or so of those songs, you've only got
20 minutes a day left to learn the new song. It's really tough for
working adults to learn, like it or not just the "adult" part is a
disadvantage, then along with the "working" part, some are going to
take forever, but with perseverance and a teacher who's cool with the
pace and works with the players unique strong points, working adults
can learn to play good music.

It's not just the teachers faults (and I only mean the guilty ones),
many students would probably quit if a teacher kept them playing super
simple stuff for as long as it should be worked on. But still, I'm
disappointed at how many teachers wind up unintentionally discouraging
students. It seems like an awful stiff price to pay for doing the
right thing and getting lessons from the beginning.