DANSO BASICS

In order to properly learn to play the danso several basic steps have to be learned in order. We call these steps the house of danso.

We will begin by showing how to breath from the stomach.

Next we will do several warmup exercises.

Now we will learn how to proplerly hold the danso

Part of holding the danso is correctly opening and closing the holes along the body of the danso in particular patterns. These patterns along with some other techniques you will learn in a few minutes allow the tones to be distinctly produced.
The danso is designed to play a pentatonic scale of five notes. To do this we will utilize four of the five holes along the danso body starting closest to the lips.

The danso can play many more notes than these five, However, the remaining notes are more difficult to play and require that the student exercises the lip and breathing in order to produce them clearly. The basic notes are marked with stars in the following chart.
Notice that there are two rows of notes for many of the fingerings. This is because producing notes in the higher registers is a matter of blowing, not fingering.

We will begin by practicing opening and closing the holes along the body of the danso in order from highest note to lowest note.

Now we will actually begin to make a sound.

Before playing music we must cover one more item. Reading the Korean notation. King Sejong the Great invented this notation. It is quite compact and yet versatile for the type of playing involved.

We have already seen the notes, but we must also consider the timing of the notes. In Korean notation the value of the note and the amount of time the note is played are separated unlike Western notation. The music is read top to bottom, right to left in a manner similar to the traditional way to write Chinese or Korean characters. Each box is assigned one whole beat but can be divided into sub-beat by the way the note value is written in the box.