Shaping the Windway for a Native American Flute

Video Transcript

"So here you have a flute that I've taken apart, taken the bird off the top so you can see the inside of the flute. Basically you see here the first chamber that your air enters your breath enters. Then the breath comes up and kind of goes over a surface there and goes in this direction down into the flute. And then the bird itself will sit on top of that, that's called the wind way or the flew of the flute and if you can see right between the bird and that block in the inside of the flute is a space where the air comes out. That space, the dimensions of that whole wind way and space there are critical for the sound of the flute. Some of the principles that you'll want to observe first of all is that the air comes out in a very rectangular kind of shape and the most important thing about that rectangular shape is that the two surfaces are parallel, the top and bottom. You don't want the wind way to be a little bit skewed to one direction or the other, because if that happens more air will come out in the bigger section than the smaller section. You want a really even flow of air coming out the whole wind way."