Mujitsu and Tairaku's Shakuhachi BBQ

If you live in Seattle you don't have to worry about humidity, there is plenty of it. Just don't let your shakuhachi get in direct sunlight or near a heat source and you should be fine.

It was recommended by my teacher that I keep one of those green snake viola humidifier things in my shakuhachi, then seal the bag.  Big mistake!    Perhaps I misunderstood his instructions.  Anyway, I hadn't played it for about a week or so and, when I got it out again, there was mildew in the bore.  It had a rather unpleasant odor, too.  Eventually the blowing edge insert even loosened up and had to be repaired.  After that unfortunate experience I got into the habit, if I didn't play my flute for a couple of days, of simply blowing a puff of warm breath into the bag and resealing it.  No more humidifiers.

Cheers,
   Brian

Also don't leave your flute out in an airconditioned room.  Probably most people wouldn't do that but I did have a friend from Japan who returned to Florida, left his shakuhachi out all night in an airconditioned room and found it cracked in the morning.  In Japan we're lucky having the humidity so I leave most of the flutes which I'm playing regularly in a glass cabinet along with a glass of water.  Just a week ago my teacher mentioned that he had gotten a big shock as a 2.0 that he had had for several decades in a glass cabinet split; he had neglected to replenish the water in his glass, though, and hadn't played the flute in some time.    I keep my other flutes in cloth bags inside plastic or paper tubes for keeping documents and so far have had no problems.  I visited a shakuhachi player friend in Paris a few years back and he always double wrapped his flutes in plastic bags and then cloth bags after he finished playing as the climate was dry, but he didn't use any dampits or put anything inside his flutes.

I live in Utah, in the high desert.

Here's what I recommend (and it's not at all an odd question...):

Get a dishwashing sponge and cut about an inch off one end so you have a piece about 1 x 2 inches (3 x 5 cm).

Wet the piece of sponge and squeeze out the excess water so it's still good and damp, but not dripping.

Put your flute into the plastic bag so that the root end is toward the opening.

Place the damp sponge into the bag so that it's not quite touching the shakuhachi and loosely fold over the end of
the bag (so that the sponge is not excessively squeezed in the bag).

Seal the bag with a rubber band wrapped around the bag/flute.

See an illustration of this here: http://www.yungflutes.com/log/archives/ … our_s.html

BTW: The 'spit rag' is called a 'tsuyutoshi' 

eB

Last edited by edosan (2007-12-24 10:08:07)

Mold:

1: Play your flute often, and wipe the bore well when done.

2. Change the moisture in the piece of sponge often (at least weekly).

3. Once every month or two, soak the sponge in a mild solution of bleach (say, a teaspoon or two in a pint of water),
then rinse it well, and re-use as before.

4. If you do happen to get mold, you can use that same solution and an old tooth brush to scrub is off the outside surface
of the root end, where it almost always appears. I have done this many times on flutes with no ill tffects, and this will
inhibit mold growth for a long time.

Some flutes seem to grow mold much more readily than others--two of mine, by Kobayashi, never do, for some reason.


eB

For me the route to take was quite simple since the main enemy to your bamboo is humidity.

Since all that was written about wet sponge and wetting the inside of the bag etc never really totally helped here in Montreal and people I know still had flutes crack on them even if they did all this I decided to take another route.

I put all my flutes in a plastic bag and then insert them in the hermetic bag that Monty Levenson sells and make sure to always put them back in the hard tube when I am finished.

I take all my flutes and make sure I oil them once a month with Tsubaki oil (Camellia). All my hard cases are stored in a wood drawer that has a plastic container with a wet sponge at all times and keep a humidity gage in the drawer and also another one in the house  to compare humidity levels just to make sure.

Now for the house I have 2 humidifiers one in the room the flutes are in and the other in the main room so I basically keep my humidity all year round between now 45% to 50% and never had any issues since then.