Native American Woodland Flute

Video Transcript

"After I've been making flutes for a couple of years, I decided that a smaller flute would be really good for people who wanted to backpack. That's something that I'm fond of doing myself, and that I found that with the Winnipesaukee flute with the external piece on it, the fetish or the bird, I really needed a case to keep it safe because there are 2 pieces that can kind of smash against each other. So I came up with the woodland flute, and alter on after I had been making these for years, I discovered that some of the northeastern tribes actually made flutes very much like this. You can see kind of my recorder influence again in that the edge is not on the top of the outside of the flute but it's kind of indented a little bit. It's cut into the bottom of the wall of the flute there. So you have wind right here that's farther down into the flute and the edge is farther down, and that helps to protect it also. If you're imagining this flute in the woods, you want to keep it as safe as possible. These really don't even need a case. You can just pop them in a backpack or a suitcase. I make these flutes in 3 different sizes. Another unusual characteristic is the oblong bore; you can see it's kind of oval. I just came up with that by experimenting basically. The round flutes were fine but the oblong bore sounded just as good and they're a little bit narrower, so I thought they'd be a little more convenient even. "