Choose a quiet place, pour a cup of tea, the spring breeze is warm, play the piano and exercise. On a bright spring afternoon, a small guqin gathering with ancient sounds and elegant Han costumes was staged in a courtyard in Deqing.

In the crowd, a young man with simple clothes and a calm appearance sat quietly and played the strings. His name is Lu Yunkai, a post-90s violinist in Luoshe, Deqing, and making friends with qin is his most willing to participate in activities besides violin making.

In the past 4 years, Lu Yunkai has "nested" almost every day in a guqin studio renovated from his own farmhouse, accompanied by hundreds of qin tools and various half-finished guqin products.

In addition to using professional skills to make qin, Lu Yunkai, a "technical man", collects various guqin documents, establishes databases, and does computer programming. He is committed to popularizing this obscure traditional musical instrument and making it wear modern theoretical clothing." walk" up.

Or go to Poland for an annual salary of 500,000
Either resign and specialize in guqin

Lu Yunkai, who was born in 1991, studied computer science at University, and later jumped to a car safety system company. The laboratory of the factory has an annual salary of 500,000 yuan. At this juncture, he chose to resign.

In fact, he has always had an obsession with guqin in his heart. When I first heard the sound of the guqin on TV when I was a teenager, I fell in love with it. While other students were playing games in Internet cafes, he went to various forums and posts about guqin, but there was very little information about guqin at that time, and his love for guqin was temporarily put on hold.

At the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, a long and long guqin sound suddenly began, pouring out the long history of Chinese culture between the strings, and touching the heartstrings of Chinese people's cultural identity. Since then, the guqin has gradually entered the public eye.

In 2015, Lu Yunkai, who had been working for three years, never let go of his obsession with the guqin. He was introduced by people and met his teacher Tan Shaofei. He was born and raised in Deqing. He once studied under Xu Kuanghua, a master of guqin from Zhejiang school.

"Guqin tuition is very expensive, but Teacher Tan doesn't charge tuition, not only because he wants to make a little contribution to the Guqin culture in his hometown, but also because there are very few people who can really insist on learning it." Lu Yunkai said that Guqin sounds elegant, But it is boring to learn, and it takes a day to practice just simple hooking.

From the teacher, Lu Yunkai not only learned to read the piano score and play the guqin, but also learned the skill of the qin, and his love for the guqin became even more enthusiastic. He usually went straight to the piano room after get off work at five o'clock and practiced until about eleven o'clock in the evening. He also bought a stack of guqin materials. Later, the company wanted to send Lu Yunkai to the Polish company, and the annual salary could triple to more than 500,000 yuan. However, due to long-term work and staying up late to learn the piano, health problems have arisen.

"We must make a decision, either go to Poland or resign to become a guqin." After hesitating for a year, Lu Yunkai felt that he could never put down the guqin. "In my heart, I want to study the guqin deeply, and I want to make it my career. After studying with a teacher at that time, I also have confidence that I can make a living from the guqin in the future." In 2018, he became a full-time qin master.

2 years to carve 1 piano
Each is a "handed down" good piano

After resigning, Lu Yunkai created his own Guqin studio and invested hundreds of thousands of his savings into it. He joked that his quality of life has plummeted since then. But the power of love is strong. He stays out of the door almost every day, knocking and beating in the studio, to undertake the production of guqin and the sale of silk strings as a source of income.

Walking into his studio, the small room of less than 10 square meters is filled with various qin tools and more than a dozen semi-finished guqin products. Modular springs, grooved calipers, adjustable pneumatic closures, automatic constant temperature and humidity chambers, winding boosters, etc... These tools are unheard of and unseen by ordinary people, and Lu Yunkai talks about them with relish. Among the hundreds of large and small qin tools, many of them are his own inventions.

It takes time and accumulation of experience. It takes at least 2 years to complete a piece of qin through a dozen steps and 200 processes, such as shaping, grooving, opening the bottom plate, closing the qin, and painting the lacquer. Zhang Qin, which requires a "Qin master" to have multiple skills: carpentry, lacquer, tuner, engraver, painter... "Qin is a synthesis of various disciplines such as craftsmanship, mechanics, acoustics, and materials science. "Lu Yunkai said.

Since opening the studio, Lu Yunkai has produced and sold more than a dozen guqin pieces. "I am deeply impressed by every transaction. Every violin is like my own child. I don't want any defective violins to flow out." Lu Yunkai said that there are many people who make guqin in the country, but the real There are very few people who are good pianos, and he requires that every piano he makes is a good piano that can be "handed down".

Because he also loves the guqin, Lu Yunkai met his wife Ji Jing, a Suzhou girl. Her father and grandfather both worked in the Suzhou National Musical Instrument Factory and taught her a complete set of silk string production process. After marrying in Deqing, Lu The main room of Yunkai's hometown became Ji Jing's string studio.

Every day, she carefully combs the semi-finished products in her hands. It is made of thousands of slender silks and is a key accessory for the production of guqin. At present, only two factories in the country have mastered the production process of silk strings, one is Ji Jingzai. Suzhou's mother's family, the other is the "semicolon" opened by her and her husband. In order to make the strings feel better, Lu Yunkai also improved the traditional production equipment to make the quality of the strings more sophisticated.

computer programming for guqin
Let traditional musical instruments realize digital inheritance

In addition to cultivating personal hobbies, this science student who pays attention to data and methods also wants to use his own efforts to do something for the inheritance of the guqin.

Lu Yunkai told reporters that the teaching of guqin in history was mainly based on traditional oral traditions, each of which was divided into genres and had no standard system; Compound characters formed after reducing the strokes), only the fingering, chord sequence, emblem position, but not pitch and rhythm are recorded. Knowing the words often requires searching sentence by sentence in a large amount of historical data, which is tantamount to looking for a needle in a haystack.

Gradually, Lu Yunkai came up with the idea of digitizing Guqin data. He collected more than 1,000 years of historical documents such as scores, fingerings, and qin from the vast sea of literature and classics. Using his expertise in computer science, he programmed more than 50,000 documents and 300G of data, and developed Guqin literature retrieval on the computer. system.

Lu Yunkai demonstrated to reporters in front of the computer: by inputting the strokes of the word block on the piano score, he could retrieve which piano scores the word block was recorded in, and restore the actual meaning and fingering of the word block. "My data presentation logic is that it only takes three clicks to find specific information. In this way, people who learn Guqin don't need to ask people or flip through paper materials, which greatly improves learning efficiency." Lu Yunkai's tone with confidence.

Lu Yunkai said that the ancient Chinese traditional way of recording and researching the guqin is relatively implicit and abstract, and it all depends on the learner's own understanding and understanding, which naturally has its charm and reason, but also leads to a high threshold for learning. It is difficult to understand the meaning of it.

"If possible, I would like to make my studio a modern guqin theory system, which can make it easier for more people to learn and understand." Lu Yunkai hopes that more young people can be like him , fell in love with this quaint whisper.

Last year, the couple's guqin studio had an annual income of more than 200,000 yuan. Although this income was less than the annual salary when he resigned, Lu Yunkai was relatively indifferent. "When I chose to become a qin master, it was a very pure idea." Right now, his order for guqin is three or four years later, but he is not in a hurry. It is better to be short than to waste, pure and not mixed, this is his character as a qin craftsman.