Wild shot in the dark: Any primitive instrument makers in the area?

[genevra-mcneil.livejournal.com]

So my daughter (who you may remember from the Alexandrite question some time ago) now wants a "bone flute like the ice age shamans." 

I've got a bone (we had lamb shanks for dinner just for this!). I've got a drill. I even found a few diagrams online... but they make no sense to me. My brain just can't understand them for some reason. Lack of sleep, perhaps.

So, do any of you lovely folks happen to make bamboo/bone/primitive whistles in your spare time? If so, would you be willing to trade some of your time in exchange for one of my hobbies? I can cook, bake, make jam, and make Waldorf dolls. In a pinch, I'd love to just borrow a book with non-sucky diagrams. 

I'm hopeful that, in the city that brought us Honk!, this isn't quite the wild shot in the dark that it would be anywhere else in the country. Thanks.

Comments

[dibalh.livejournal.com]

Perhaps you should contact the folks at Parts and Crafts (http://partsandcrafts.org), who post their events here from time to time and could probably help your daughter make the flute herself (depending on how old she is).

[genevra-mcneil.livejournal.com]

She's five, so I may wait on handing her power tools for another year or two.

But the P&C folks are a resource I hadn't considered. Thanks. Thanks also to inahandbasket, I'll try Artisan Asylum, too.

[inahandbasket]

Try the Joy St. geeks as well, http://artisansasylum.com/
They're really good people and would probably love helping you figure it out.

I have a friend on LJ who plays wind instruments and loves tinkering as well, I'll point him at this post in case he misses it.

If you get REALLY stuck, drop me a message via LJ.
I have no direct experience but it sounds like something I might be able to help you figure out if you can't find someone who actually knows what they're doing. No promises. ;-)

[genevra-mcneil.livejournal.com]

Oooh, I had no idea this existed. This will be my next stop if you DSLJ folks don't produce a miracle.

(BTW, in a head-to-head race between DSLJ and the Internet Public Library, you guys win by a mile.)

[siderea]

What diagrams did you find?

[genevra-mcneil.livejournal.com]

Let's see:

http://housebarra.com/EP/ep02/17vinstr.html

http://rootandrock.blogspot.com/2011/03/bone-flutes.html

http://www.ehow.com/how_4844025_bone-flute.html (though that's ehow, so it barely counts)

http://www.greenwych.ca/fl-compl.htm

And I found this guy who is really neat, but doesn't seem to have an instructional video that I could find: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnFjKf3II4A

[siderea]

OK.

The first link (housebarra.com) is instructions to build a viking panpipe. Something else entirely.

The second link (rootandrock.blogspot.com) is for building a fipple flute. Fipple flutes are much, much, much, much easier to sound (play), but much, much, much, much harder to make. The instruction there involve using clay to sculpt a closed-fipple mouthpiece. The German mammoth-bone and vulture-bone flutes and the Chinese (Jiahu) crane-bone flutes don't have closed fipples -- and I should warn you, they are end-blown flutes, which are generally harder even than modern (transverse, side-blown) flutes to get any sound out of at all. Does your kid have any experience playing flute? She just want to own this thing for pretend, or does she want to play it?

The eHow.com instructions are actually quite good, and will give you what you request. It makes one assumption upon the user's knowledge: that you understand you're making an end-blown flute. As such one end of the instrument needs to be cut square to the axis of the instrument. (Not the only way to make an end-blown flute, but the assumption of their approach.) Hence the instruction that, since you'll be putting your mouth there, sand carefully. Bone can make surprisingly sharp edges -- I've cut my hand on a bone spoon that had developed a crack, and it was so sharp and clean an edge, I didn't even notice I'd cut myself until I saw the blood.

Those instructions also makes one assumption upon the user's goals: that you don't much care about being able to make conventional music on it, so aren't too concerned about hole placement. Hole placement on a flute is what (mostly) governs which notes it produces. Putting holes on a flute so that it generates, say, a modern scale, or an pentatonic scale, or any other specific scale, is The Hard Part. (A friend once responded in shock to learn what one of my smaller instruments would cost new, saying, "That stick of wood cost a thousand dollars?!?" I replied, not entirely joking, "Oh, no! Not at all. The stick of imported boxwood cost about $50. The holes cost about $950. The stick of wood is just where I store them.")

Ignore the greenwych.ca site entirely. At best, it's for academics. However, in fact I have a suspicion the author is a crank.

Here's a schematic you can use:
http://www.markshep.com/flute/Holes.html

That will mostly give you a modern scale (which the greenwich.ca dude argues is what the Neanderthals were using anyway), though he explains that that's a starting point, and you're supposed to try-and-adjust, which means learning how to get sounds out of it. It's for a side-blown flute, not an end-blown flute, but that's a simple adaptation: instead of measuring from the mouth hole, measure from the end you blow into. All those percentages are percents of the indicated length. So you measure your flute, punch the numbers into a calculator, and there you go.

[genevra-mcneil.livejournal.com]

Wow. Thank you so much. This is great and you're enormously generous to spend your time explaining it to me.

My musical friend explained that getting the notes to sound "normal" was going to be nigh impossible. Since I'm largely tone deaf, I figure anything that makes a musical sounding noise is good. "it's good to expose children to non-western scales," said my friend. Then she explained about scales and octaves and modes and things.

(I was politely asked to leave chorus in the 7th grade. Music is ... foreign to me.)

Looks like I'm going to try the fipple thingy. Wish me luck. And again, thank you very much.

[siderea]

P.S. Your daughter might be interested in another primitive bone flute of note.

http://www.straight.com/article-154732/sequentia-resurrects-swanbone-flute

Unlike the others, this one has been reproduced and played in concert. I heard it here in Boston in 2005. There's a CD of that program, Lost Songs of a Rhineland Harper, and there at Amazon, one can listen to a sample of that piece: track 6 "Cigni".

[genevra-mcneil.livejournal.com]

ooh. I'll buy that for her for easter basket!