Shamisen Instrument: Guide, Tunings & Free Online Player

Tuning a real shamisen? Use the free Shamisen Tuner — set hon-chōshi, ni-agari and san-sagari by ear or with your microphone.

Open the Shamisen Tuner →

The shamisen (三味線), also known as samisen, is a traditional three-stringed Japanese musical instrument celebrated for its distinct percussive attack, fretless fingerboard, and buzzing acoustic resonance called sawari. Originating in the 16th century from the Okinawan sanshin and Chinese sanxian, the shamisen instrument became central to kabuki theater, bunraku puppet plays, narrative folk songs, and virtuosic Tsugaru-jamisen performance.

Whether you are researching what a shamisen is, studying its construction and classic tunings (hon-chōshi, ni-agari, san-sagari), or looking to play one firsthand, this guide covers the complete instrument alongside an authentic, interactive shamisen playable online for free right in your browser.

The playable instrument on this page reproduces a genuine shamisen: three strings (ichi no ito, ni no ito, san no ito), bridge (koma), nut (kamigoma), fretless fingerboard positions (bunkafu), and bachi plectrum strikes. Driven by a 41-note palette of real shamisen recordings with Web Audio synthesis fallback, it lets you test scales, tunings, and traditional melodies with zero installation.

It is deliberately not a piano with three notes on it. A shamisen has no frets, no fixed A, and a gesture — the bachi crossing all three strings in one fall — that no other instrument in the world plays the same way. This page reproduces that instrument, and the practices that go with it.

What is a shamisen?

The shamisen (三味線) is a three-stringed Japanese lute and one of Japan’s most iconic traditional musical instruments. Descended from the Chinese sanxian via the Okinawan sanshin in the mid-16th century, the shamisen instrument has been played across Japan for more than four centuries. Its body (dou) is a small square wooden frame traditionally covered with skin, its neck (sao) is a long piece of fretless hardwood, and its three strings are struck with a large wooden, plastic, or ivory plectrum called a bachi rather than plucked with fingers.

Because the neck has no frets, pitch comes entirely from where the left hand stops the string along the neck, which is why the instrument slides, bends, and glides so freely. As a versatile instrument, it is heard in classical kabuki and bunraku puppet theater (nagauta), lyric storytelling (jiuta), festive folk songs (min’yō), and the lightning-fast, highly percussive modern Tsugaru-jamisen style. The interactive shamisen instrument on this page reproduces that layout — three strings, a fretless neck, and dynamic bachi strokes — so you can hear and explore its sound directly in your browser. See the Shamisen article on Wikipedia for further historical background.

Japanese shamisen types: hosozao, chuzao, futozao

Shamisen are classified by the thickness of the neck, and the neck decides both the sound and the repertoire. Hosozao, the thin-neck instrument, is the oldest form and the one used in nagauta, kouta and kabuki — light, agile and quick to bend. Chuzao, the medium neck, sits in the middle and is favoured for jiuta and min’yō, where its slightly fuller tone carries a singing line. Futozao, the thick neck, is the largest and loudest; it is the Tsugaru shamisen, built for percussive solo playing, heavy sawari and hard bachi strokes. The instrument selector in this tool mirrors that split: Tsugaru, nagauta and jiuta change the koma height and the brightness, so the same stroke sounds short and cutting on Tsugaru and rounder on jiuta.

Shamisen strings: ichi no ito, ni no ito, san no ito

The three strings are counted from the player’s side out, and the names are simply the numbers. The nearest, thickest string is 一の糸 (ichi no ito, “string one”); the middle is 二の糸 (ni no ito); the far, thinnest string is 三の糸 (san no ito, “string three”). Traditionally they were silk, which stretched, broke and had to be re-tied constantly; most players today use Tetron (a polyester) for tuning stability, or nylon for a softer, cheaper tone. The gauge runs thick to thin — 一 is heaviest, 三 is lightest — so a given position sounds higher on 二 than on 一, and the third string is usually played open because it is the highest and the least responsive to stopping.

The three classic tunings

A shamisen tuning (調子, choshi) is defined entirely by the intervals between its three strings. Read from the thickest string, 一の糸, upward:

Tuning	一	二	三	1→2	2→3	1→3
Hon-chōshi 本調子	root	+P4	+P12	P4	P5	octave
Ni-agari 二上り	root	+P5	+P12	P5	P4	octave
San-sagari 三下がり	root	+P4	+m7	P4	P4	minor 7th

Hon-chōshi is the base tuning and the backbone of nagauta. Ni-agari raises the second string a whole tone, which flips the fourth and the fifth and gives the bright, showy colour that tsugaru and celebratory min’yō lean on. San-sagari lowers the third string instead, which leaves two perfect fourths — a minor seventh across the outer strings — and the plaintive quality of jiuta.

There is a memory trick that makes the relationships obvious in the ear: the perfect fourth sounds like Amazing Grace, the perfect fifth like Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. Every one of the three tunings contains at least one fourth, and san-sagari contains two, which is why you can move between them without a thought once you have them in your ear.

There is no fixed A — this is what 本数 is for

The shamisen is an accompaniment instrument, and the thing it accompanies is a singer. So the player picks the height of 一の糸 to suit the voice, and the interval structure stays the same. That choice is called 本数 (hon-sū):

• 一本 — the first string is A
• every additional 本数 raises all three strings by a semitone
• 4本 — the first string is C
• 6本 — D
• 8本 — E

This is the shamisen’s substitute for a piano’s transpose. The finger positions never move at all; only the strings do. The tool offers the full 1本–12本 ladder, from A2 up to G♯3, which covers both the range thin-neck instruments normally use (B to D) and the higher register thick-neck players reach for (G to A).

Shamisen tuning notes: C-F-C, C-G-C, C-F-B♭

Because the shamisen has no fixed absolute pitch, the three tunings are usually written as intervals from the first string. With 一の糸 set to C they read:

Tuning	一の糸	二の糸	三の糸	Intervals
Hon-chōshi 本調子	C	F	C	P4, P5
Ni-agari 二上り	C	G	C	P5, P4
San-sagari 三下がり	C	F	B♭	P4, P4

Shift the whole set and nothing else changes: with 一の糸 on A, hon-chōshi is A–D–A, ni-agari is A–E–A and san-sagari is A–D–G. The absolute pitch is chosen by the singer, which is what 本数 describes; the intervals are the tuning. If you arrive from a Western instrument, play the C row against the free instrument tuner to hear that D is a perfect fourth above A and E a perfect fifth above it.

Tuning by ear, in two positions

You do not need a tuner to set the second and third strings. Set 一の糸, then press a position on it and wind the next peg until the two match:

Tuning	二の糸 matches…	三の糸 matches…
Hon-chōshi	position 4 on 一の糸	position 6 on 二の糸
Ni-agari	position 6 on 一の糸	position 4 on 二の糸
San-sagari	position 4 on 一の糸	position 4 on 二の糸

That is the whole method, and it is the first thing a teacher shows you. The tuning panel on this page plays both notes of each pair so you can learn the match by ear instead of by eye.

The positions are not guitar frets

This is the part that trips up every player who arrives from guitar, ukulele or bass, and it is the reason a shamisan neck is worth learning on its own terms.

A guitar has twelve frets to the octave, numbered 1 to 12. A shamisen has twelve positions to the octave too, but they are named differently — the count skips 4 and 7 and spends a ♯ and a ♭ in their place:

position:   0   1   2   3   ♯   4   5   6   7   8   9   ♭
semitones:  0   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9  10  11

Ten is the octave above zero, and the octave above the ♯ is written 1♯. So bunkafu position 4 is a perfect fourth above the open string — five semitones, where a guitar player would say fret 5 — and position 6 is a perfect fifth, seven semitones, where they would say fret 7.

Hirajoshi makes the difference unmistakable. Its positions on the first string read 0 2 4 6 8 10 — flatly even, which is exactly what 平調, “even tuning”, means. Read the same six pitches off a guitar fretboard and they come out 0 2 5 7 9 12, with the ♯ and the 4 in each other’s places.

The tool prints both the bunkafu digit and the kana kan name (ニ, サ, ハ, ニウ, ヲ, カ, ム, キ, フミ) on every position, and places each one along the neck by the actual string law: a string pressed at distance x from the nut speaks at 1 − 2^(−n/12) of its open length, which is why an octave always lands at exactly half the neck and why the low positions sit wide apart while the high ones crowd together towards the bridge.

One more range limit is real rather than a simplification. The third string is the highest-pitched and is played open almost everywhere in the repertoire, so the neck stops it at a minor third. The first two strings run the full range out to position 19.

Sawari: the buzz that makes it a shamisen

The sound everyone recognises is not the string, it is the sawari (さわり) — the shimmer the first string makes as it chatters against the nut or the leather patch on the skin, sometimes called 東サワリ on tsugaru and min’yō instruments. A good sawari rings on for seconds after the attack has gone, and a shamisen without one sounds like a lute.

Two details are reproduced here rather than approximated:

1. Sympathetic coupling. When you strike the second or third string, the open first string rings too — but only when the note you hit is a low-order harmonic of it. That is why the first and second strings seem to sound on nearly every stroke in real performance. The coupling term here is the actual harmonic distance, so it is loud for 三の糸 an octave above 一の糸 and silent for a second string a fourth up, which is no harmonic at all.
2. The tuning changes the buzz. The Yamaha TSUGARU SHAMISEN manual puts it plainly: ni-agari lets the sawari ring out best, san-sagari dampens it, and hon-chōshi sits between the two. The three tunings here carry that ranking.

How to play a shamisen

Start with posture: sit upright with the body resting on the right thigh, the neck angled slightly up and out, and the left hand free to travel along it. Hold the bachi in the right hand with the tip angled across the strings and the wrist relaxed — the motion comes from the wrist and forearm, not the elbow. A down-stroke (打つ) crosses the strings in the order 三の糸, 二の糸, 一の糸, and an up-stroke or スクイ rakes back the other way. The left hand stops each string at a bunkafu position instead of pushing it onto a fret, so intonation is a matter of ear and muscle memory rather than of looking down. Every one of those gestures — the down-stroke, the スクイ rake and each left-hand position — is something you can try in the tool above, which lights up the positions as they sound.

The practice desk

Tuning. The two ear-tuning positions for the current tuning, each playable as a pair so you can hear the match. Under them, an interval quiz: a tuning sounds, you name it as a perfect fourth, a perfect fifth or a minor seventh, and the verdict tells you which was which. Aimed squarely at the thing most beginners find hardest — hearing 調子 rather than calculating it.

Scales. 平調子 (hirajōshi), 陰旋法 (insen) and 津軽節 (tsugarubushi) — the three scales a beginner actually meets. All three are built on the open string rather than imported from Western theory, and each plays up and down on any of the three strings with the positions highlighted on the neck as they sound.

Phrases. The open-string stroke drill, which is the first thing any teacher asks for and the same gesture the strum button performs. The opening of さくら, which is a real tune and needs only six positions — 2, ♯, 4, 6, 8 and 9 — and a walk from position 0 up to 9. All of them have a tempo slider, because the right answer to “it fell apart” is almost always “slower”.

Shamisen scales: hirajoshi, insen, tsugarubushi

Three scales cover most of what a beginner meets. Hirajōshi (平調子) is the warm, even-sounding scale built on the shamisen’s own positions — six notes, no Western equivalent, and the default colour of nagauta and much folk song. Insen (陰旋法) darkens the same shape with a semitone in the upper half, and it is the sound of melancholy min’yō and much of the older repertoire. Tsugarubushi (津軽節) is the Tsugaru folk scale, close to hirajōshi but with a raised colour in performance, bending and sliding rather than sitting on fixed steps. On the fretless neck these are finger shapes, not printed notes, which is why they move between 本数 without changing. The practice desk above plays all three up and down on any string, with the positions highlighted as they sound.

Biwa vs shamisen vs sanshin: what’s the difference?

Three Asian lutes get confused with one another. All are plucked, all have a short neck and a body partly covered with skin, but they are different instruments:

	Shamisen	Biwa	Sanshin
Strings	3	4, usually	3
Neck	Fretless, long	Fretted, short and wide	Fretless, long
Body	Square, dog or cat skin	Pear-shaped, often thin skin	Small, python skin
Plectrum	Large bachi	Large bachi	Fingers or small plectrum
Home	Mainland Japan	Japan (gagaku, narrative)	Okinawa
Voice	Bright, percussive, heavy sawari	Deep, resonant, rarer	Softer, warmer, rounder

The sanshin is the shamisen’s Okinawan ancestor, and the two are close enough that players cross over easily — but the sanshin’s python skin and shorter scale give it a gentler, less biting voice.

Tuning your own instrument

This page plays the instrument in the browser. To tune the real one, use the shamisen tuner, which measures the pitch of 一の糸, 二の糸 and 三の糸 separately in cents against the same 本調子, 二上り and 三下がり targets this page uses.