Tone Holes in a Native American Flute

Video Transcript

"So once you have the sound of your flute going and with no holes in this flute, I'll close all the holes, you might get a sound like this. You're really lucky! Once you have the sound kind of figured out where it's decent at the beginning, then you need to think about the tone holes. So I'm going to go through some of the principles of where you set the holes and how many holes and such like that. Most of the native flutes as the traditions have kind of come into the 21st Century, most of the flutes have either five holes or six. Really acoustically there's not much difference. The pentatonic scale that you're used to hearing with the native flutes...this is a five hole flute and you just lift one hole at a time and you get that pentatonic scale. You'll notice in this five hole scale I'm leaving this finger down and there's no hole there, but it helps to hold the flute as you lift all the other holes."