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A little while back I commissioned an odaiko stand from master-drum-maker, Mark Miyoshi. The stand has arrived… and it’s everything I wanted!

Sexy close-up photos after the break.

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I was curious how the shape of my batchi path changes as I play faster. Here are a few images showing the difference between 30bpm, 60bpm, and 120bpm.

The first image is my right hand playing at 30bpm. The faint blue lines next to my head are the path of the batchi tip as I strike toward the drum. The batchi rebounds off the drum and is then reset into alignment with the arm at the beginning of the pull-up. This reset causes the “kink”, a short, horizontal path of the batchi tip before it raises up for the next strike. By 60bpm (the second image), the arm is moving quickly enough that the bounce of the batchi is smoothly incorporated into the pull-up.

As the tempo increases, the height and width of the loops decreases. More specifically, the exaggerated path of the pull-up nears the path of the strike. (And when playing shime-daiko at even faster speeds, the pull-up path and the strike path are essentially the same.) Note that in all three images the arc just before striking the drum is essentially the same. Interesting!

After a long day of Eastern Taiko Conference workshops and taiko fun a few of us returned to the dorm to find all the doors locked. With some time to kill and my workshop materials on hand, we made some silly lighted batchi images. Cheryl arrived just in time for a cameo!

Basic strike experiments continue with the lighted batchi. Here is a series of images from a workshop I taught at Eastern Taiko Conference. The series shows each player’s right and left hand strikes at a slow tempo on betta (upright). I am at the top of the series and the workshop participants follow.

Although it’s hard to draw firm conclusions from this limited sample size, the path of the batchi seems to be somewhat different for most players’ right and left hands. The left hand also appears less consistent for most players.

I am gradually developing a sense of these shapes and can deduce from them certain strike tendencies. In this series of images, the elongated shape of player three’s strikes, for example, indicates she is using less elbow bend than average. Player four is letting the batchi bounce off the drum more than player five, for example. However, I have not yet found the ideal application for the lighted batchi in my practice or teaching. In most cases, a mirror provides much of the same information in a more immediate form. If nothing else, the lighted batchi focus attention on the path of the tip of the batchi and provide a new way to conceptualize the basic strike.

I will continue searching… If there is an experiment with lighted batchi that you would like to see, please let me know!

(click image for larger version)

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Thanks again to all the participants! Now that the ball is rolling… looking forward to revising and refining the solos and battle concept!

Thank you to Kim and Ayano for this great, HD video!

Derek vs Louis – structure 10

Jason vs Mike – structure 405

Aki vs Andrew – structure 101

Mark vs Tomomi – structure 405

Gorilla vs Candice – structure 101

Kerry vs Dan – structure 134

Gorilla vs David – structure 134

Jason and David vs Maz and Kris – structure 405…

Battle ending

Thanks to the work of Matt Gallizzi and the last-minute help of recording-engineer Mikael, we got a nice audio recording of the concert and were able to distribute free CDs not long after the show.

I don’t have quite all the tracks yet, but here’s what I have thus far.

03_fuji_ondo
04_dagakki
05_06_hisashi_9.0
07_kagamijishi
08_re_recycled_beats
09_jack_bazaar
10_tally_ho

(For those of you who took home a CD, sorry if the tracks were out of concert order… there was a little bug in our script. Here are the names of the tracks on your CDs. 1) Dagakki, 2) Tally Ho, 3) Re-recycled Beats, 4) Kagamijishi, 5) Fuji Ondo, 6) Hisashi, 7) Jack Bazaar)

Yuta was in town this week and asked me to teach a series of intensive workshops on all-things-slant-drum. As part of that series I prepared the following video to explore basic form and strike.

For the last few months, friends and I have been working on the lighted-batchi technique with the hopes it will enable more detailed comparison of one’s right and left-hand strikes, as well as comparisons of different players’ movements.

The video below is excerpts of right vs left hand comparisons and Yuta vs Kris comparisons in both betta and slant-drum position. We tried a two-camera shot, as well as more complicated moves at the end. If nothing else, they’re pretty to look at!

With practice, I hope lighted batchi will be a useful tool in our taiko exploration toolbox!