The , also called is a three-stringed, Japanese musical instrument

Musical instrument

A musical instrument is a device created or adapted for the purpose of making musical sounds. In principle, any object that produces sound can serve as a musical instrument—it is through purpose that the object becomes a musical instrument. The history of musical instruments dates back to the...

 played with a plectrum

Plectrum

A plectrum is a small flat tool used to pluck or strum a stringed instrument. For hand-held instruments such as guitars and mandolins, the plectrum is often called a pick, and is a separate tool held in the player's hand...

 called a bachi

Bachi

Bachi is the name for the straight, wooden sticks used to play Japanese taiko drums, and also the plectrum for stringed instruments like the shamisen and biwa....

. The Japanese

Japanese language

is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...

 pronunciation is usually "shamisen" but sometimes "jamisen" when used as a suffix

Rendaku

is a phenomenon in Japanese morphophonology that governs the voicing of the initial consonant of the non-initial portion of a compound or prefixed word...

 (e.g., Tsugaru-jamisen

Tsugaru-jamisen

Tsugaru-Shamisen is a genre of shamisen music originating in Aomori prefecture in the northernmost area of the Japanese island of Honshū. It is today performed throughout Japan, though associations with the Tsugaru area of Aomori remain strong....

). (In western Japan, and often in Edo-period sources, it is sometimes "samisen.")
The shamisen is a plucked stringed instrument. Its construction follows a model similar to that of a guitar

Guitar

The guitar is a plucked string instrument, usually played with fingers or a pick. The guitar consists of a body with a rigid neck to which the strings, generally six in number, are attached. Guitars are traditionally constructed of various woods and strung with animal gut or, more recently, with...

 or a banjo

Banjo

In the 1830s Sweeney became the first white man to play the banjo on stage. His version of the instrument replaced the gourd with a drum-like sound box and included four full-length strings alongside a short fifth-string. There is no proof, however, that Sweeney invented either innovation. This new...

, employing a neck, and strings stretched across a resonating body.