Making the Bore in a Native American Flute

Video Transcript

"As you can see here the inside of the bore, the native flute has two chambers in it. The first one is called the slow chamber and you'll be blowing into this end later and the air will fill up this slow chamber. There's a block here in the middle and then as the air goes farther down it'll hit the main chamber of the flute and that's where all the sound happens. For you to know once you glue up the flute, where these two chambers are you need to somehow make a hole here where the wind way is going to be. So what I do is I just drill a hole on both sides of this block and then once the flute is glued up you can see where you're working in the inside. You actually put these two pieces together, you get a little light coming in there through that hole. These are two different size flutes but you get the idea and you can see in the inside of the bore and you can see when they line up. So the main objective here is to get both halves of the bore to match really well on the sides so there are no edges, because that effects the sound. Also, to get them flat so when you glue these together there will be obviously no air leaks. In the next part we'll show you a glued up flute and you can see I just do it again with simple hand clamps."