Looks like one of our visitors found Karakui through a search with the keywords “okinawan sanshin tuning”. I could possibly upload an mp3 (or m4a) file of my tuning of a sanshin but it’ll be a whole lot cooler to download this wonderful freeware app called “Sankichi-kun” (available versions for Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, and Windows). I’m a Mac user so I can tell you guys that it works awesomely on a G4 Mac (I assume it’ll work just as well on an Intel Mac too), but PC guys are on your own (sorry).
Tune Your Sanshin with Sankichi-kun
An english version of this program would be cool. I could really use a tool like this.
I was thinking of putting up an English “guide” to it…
[…] are still a lot of you who are finding us through a search for learning to tune your sanshin. We posted an entry about a neat little freeware app called Sankichi-kun at the beginning of the month. The only thing […]
I just got my sanshin and It came with a kit but I am not very good at reading kanji are there any websites that I might use to learn about the basics in english.
Mrcookingpt: Websites in English about anything Okinawa is very limited but it’s something that we’re definitely working on. May it be uploading instructional clips to YouTube or creating a Podcast in the future (yup, I wish I could do this full-time). If you have any questions about the sanshin, feel free to email me at karakuipress [at] gmail [dot] com. 😉
The Mac version doesn’t seem to work anymore – “power PC not supported’ or something apparently….
I tried to install the sankichi application on Windows-7 but it came up with illegible error messages (assume in Japanese) which I could not read because they had ??? and strange symbols there. So I can’t even install it as yet. Something like this would be handy as the only tuner I can get from my sanshin shop does not come equipped with a tuner and I suspect I may be an octave out, but am not sure. Is there a site with the relevant tones for the ujiru, nakajiru and mijiru? I need to use G-C-G tuning for my class.
Sorry meant the tuner does not come equipped with a pitch facility, so I could be tuning to the correct note an octave too low.