Oki-Hawaii Crossbreed March 11, 2010
Posted by Elisa Hough in Music.Tags: Hawaii, musical instrument hybrid, sanlele, sanshin, Sanshin Day, ukulele
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I mentioned before going to the Sanshin Day concert last week — but I only just learned that it’s celebrated on March 4 because it stands for the third month (san) and the fourth day (shi). Clever!
There was a vendor at the event selling a hybrid instrument called the sanlele, a sanshin-ukulele combo. As far as I can tell from their website, which Google translates into English pretty haphazardly, Sanlele Okinawa has produced the hybrid exclusively since 2004.
It has the wooden body of a ukulele, though rounded off, and only three strings like a sanshin, tuned in the traditional Ryukyuan pentatonic scale. It has a pretty nice sound, don’t you think?
[...] over at oki yo! blogged about the sanlele about a week ago and I’ve been meaning to reblog about here at Karakui.com. The funny thing [...]
could you explain more what you mean by “tuned in the traditional Ryukyuan pentatonic scale”? i understand that’s basically 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, but i’m confused about which one of the following that refers to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanshin#Sanshin_tuning