The Dragon Flute

When my daughter was really small we joined in with a wonderful set of father/daughters known as the Indian Guides at the local YMCA.  I was traveling for Unisys and needed to have long hours of time with her.  If you saw the movie, The Man of the House, you will have an idea as to what it was all about with vests, campouts and candy sales.  I bought a book on Indian Crafts at the local Tandy store while purchasing a drum kit.  Deep within it's pages I found the Plains Indian love flute and decided to make one.  That first one was a bit crude as I had to carve it in hotel rooms from Delaware to San Diego.  Much later I wanted to improve upon that first one and with some cherry 'scrap' a friend had given me I went to work.

The flute is about 20 inches long and is made up of four parts.  (1 &2) The barrel is carved as two halve which are glued together after the interior is carved out.  It's a bit different from any other wind instrument in that the air doesn't blow thru the length.  There is a small chamber at the back end with regulates the flow of air.  When you blow into it the air comes straight out the top.  (3) The air has to be redirected over the sounding hole.  The device which does this is called the 'bird'.  The Cherokee carve a channel on the bottom side of the bird for this purpose.  (4) The Plains Indian version has a separate piece that the bird sits upon.  The movement forward or backward along the barrel governs the amount of air allowed to pass over the sounding hole.  In this way the instrument can be made to sound loud or hauntingly soft.

It has six note holes but, not being a trained musician, I cannot tell you the key.  It does not have any thumb hole, as does the recorder, to modify the notes in anyway.  Notes are modified by varying the wind pressure and by slightly offsetting the fingers when placing them over the holes.

No power tools were used on this one.  The interior of the barrel was carved with a curved knife that I made from a piece of an old handsaw, bent over a vice and fitted into a handle.  The note holes are 1/4 inch and were made entirely with the smaller blade of my ancient Case pocket knife.  The finish is three coats of Tung Oil sanded with 500 grit paper except for the final coat.

My daughter was reading all the science fiction/fantasy novels about dragons at that time and wanted me to carve a dragon for the 'bird'.  This was a challenge.  The wings had to be unfolded so I put a reinforcing buttress under them to keep the fragile cherry wood from breaking off.  The tail was exposed to the same danger so I looped it and made contact with the back for reinforcement there.  Danged if the little piece didn't start to look like something out of the Assyrian empire thousands of years ago.

I don't read music.  The 'tunes' I play on this little wonder are really loosely based on what I've heard of the music of Carlos Nakai, Douglas Spotted Eagle and others.  My tunes are completely adlib.  I hope the one playing in the background, made with the instrument pictured above, hasn't hurt your musical ear too awfully much.  My 'recording studio' was a cheap headset mike plugged into the soundcard on a PC and given an echo effect with the capture software.