Chikudo : The Bamboo way
I am making bamboo flutes since 2003.
Inspired by many travels to discover traditional music especially Oriental music.
I got freely inspired by several traditional models of flutes sometimes adding my own touch of style.
After ten years of flute making and research, I entered deeper and deeper into the world of the Japanese Shakuhachi flute on which I now devote my art.
I am constantly trying to improve my skills and attempt to reach high quality flutes in order to satisfy the needs of professional players meanwhile I also want to keep affordable students models to spread this great instrument widely and avoid making it too elitist.
The specificity of my work as a flute maker is the use of natural bore.
While wooden flutes have controlled regular bore profiles, the Bamboo, naturally hollow, is inconstant by nature :
each piece of bamboo has its own unique characteristics (diameter, length, wall thickness, conical ratio…)
It is then my duty to adapt my work to the plant and not the opposite.
Every single piece of bamboo is carefully selected in order to reach the best acoustical result from it.
Thus, every flute is unique.
I work with different bamboo species using each one’s qualities;
I harvest myself every winter all of those bamboos from either local groves in France or during trips abroad.
Making Shakuhachi is an art in which you need to devote completely. It is essential to study deeply the instrument, its music and its culture beside the making itself.
From 2013, after 3 years of self teaching on the Shakuhachi, I started to study under my master Gunnar Jinmei Linder representing in Europe the Chikumeisha branch of the Kinko-ryu school in the lineage of the great Yamaguchi Goro.
By focusing on that particular style of playing the Shakuhachi, I aim at a specific type of sound in my research as a flute maker thus I would not pretend being able to make Shakuhachi perfectly suitable to other styles.
In this way, I feel part of the perpetuation of this Shakuhachi tradition taking sources in the very beginning of the XXth century with Yamaguchi Shiro and Miura Kindo (calligrapher of the notation I study) both masters in Shakuhachi making and playing as it was usual at that time.