My first homemade bamboo sax
Before my bamboo flute building adventures, I've purchased a little instrument called the Xaphoon. It looks like a small recorder with a saxophone/clarinet like mouth piece. But somehow, I never got good at it, I find it hard to produce a nice stable sound from it. Unlike the saxophone mouth piece, the one from the Xaphoon is much thicker making it more difficult to bite against to keep it in your mouth. I'm sure it's me since there are a lot of good Xaphoon players. But the Xaphoon ended up collecting dust.
Since I've been making bamboo flutes, I thought I could use the same methods for making a bamboo sax and it turned up to not be that difficult. I first found a cheap soprano sax mouth piece on eBay. It turned up quite fast. I already had a 1.5 reed that I used for the Xaphoon and transferred it to this new mouth piece.
I then took a piece of bamboo and started drilling finger holes into it after taking some measurements of the full length including the mouth piece. To my delight, the prototype worked very nicely. The thinner mouth piece made is much easier to keep in between the lips and I had no difficulty playing it.
After a day practicing it, I decided to record a little sample. It sounds like a hybrid between a sax and a clarinet. I kind of like the sound and will try to do a longer song next time mixing it with other instruments.
Happy Christmas time everyone
It's that time of the year again, so I've decided to record "Silent Night" with some pan flutes.
The first pan flute featured in this video is made from bamboo by Robert Moreno. I met Roberto last year before all the lockdowns. I was looking to buy a pan flute and he sold me one of his multiple Sikus (aka Zampoñas) he bought in Chile from Luthier Jose Luis Matus Muños.
Roberto mainly makes pan flutes while his father makes Quenas and Quenachos. He wanted to try the Native American Flute (NAF) and bought one that didn't produce a nice sound. So we decided to swap our flutes since I'm making NAFs but not many pan flutes. Roberto's pan flute was rather large compared to the pan flute I made a while back. It has much longer pipes than mine which gives it a lower pitch. Also shortest pipes have larger diameter so even though they produce higher pitch, their tone is warmer.
Overall, I like how Roberto's pan flute sounds like, it has a very warm and deep voice. It took me a little more practice since this flute was ordered in reversed way compared to mine. Usually pan flutes pipes are ordered with the lowest pipe on the right hand side but Roberto ordered it the other way around like a piano. I got used to the new direction easily and I'm now enjoying it a lot.