Shakuhachi Flute Lesson: Maintaining Strength of a Note

Video Transcript

"Many times when you're playing professionally you have to be playing into a microphone and many times when you're playing into a microphone you have to be playing outdoors. Many times when you're playing outdoors you're trying to play the flute and getting your breath from here into the flute. Playing outdoors there might be a windy day and the wind is blowing into your mouthpiece and disturbing this flow of air so it sounds like you can't play which could be kind of embarrassing. There's a simple exercise if you happen to live near an ocean, or any place where it's really windy. What I used to do is go to the ocean, stand in the ocean and play directly into the wind so that you learn how to blow and focus your wind no matter how much wind is coming this way against it. And then once you get your main note faced into the wind, you play in a complete circle so the ocean or whatever breeze is coming gets to blow at you from every possible angle and you teach yourself how to play no matter how much wind is blowing at you while you're on stage. And you might think this is infrequent but it actually happens quite a lot and you really learn to develop a really strong amount of breath coming out of your body into the shaklehatchi so you can always maintain a note no matter how much wind is being blown against you, which could be very disturbing. Hey thanks very much for listening. My name is David Zasloff, shaklehatchi guy."