Home
What's New
Site Map
How to Play Free lessons
Buy a Flute
Learn to Play
Breathing
Vibrato
Ask a Question
Flute Music Flute Repertoire
Repertoire Class
Free Sheet Music
Christmas Music
About the Flute Listen Up!
Metronome
Figurine Gallery
Flute History
Buy Flute Gifts Cyberflute Store
Christmas Store
Site Info About Cyberflute
Contact
Privacy Policy

Subscribe To This Site
XML RSS
Add to Google
Add to My Yahoo!
Add to My MSN
Subscribe with Bloglines
 

Make your own bamboo flute



Make your own bamboo flute for fun. It's also a great exercise in learning the tuning of the flute.

Needed tools are minimal, and you can even use an old bamboo fishing pole. The materials cost less than a dollar and it takes less than a day to make one.

The bamboo flute is called a "Shakuhachi" in Japanese. These flutes are played vertically like a recorder, rather than transversely like the classic Western flute.

The size, shape, and placement of the mouthpiece and finger holes determine the accuracy of pitch, along with the length, internal diameter, and thickness of the tube.

If you want to go "high end" with your bamboo flute, you'll need to get madaké bamboo, giant timber bamboo which is quite scarce. Although bamboo is a very fast-growing wood product and quite popular as a flooring material because of it, the bamboo prized for flutes is harder to come by.

Harvesting of bamboo is done only in the winter before the sap has risen in the plants. Some of this bamboo is cured for 30 to 40 years, but it is more common to be cured for just a couple of years.

Of course, these high-end bamboo flutes are much more difficult to make, so if you want to make your own bamboo flute, especially if you're a beginner, you might want to stick with less expensive materials.

Key of flute is determined by the length. Here are some examples...

Key of A - 14 inches
Key of F - 18 inches
Key of D - 21 inches

The inside diameter is about 3/4 inches.

Get instructions here to make your own bamboo flute.

Fingerings for your newly-created flute are found here.

The International Shakuhachi Society exists to further education about the playing of the Shakuhachi bamboo flute.


David Zasloff plays the Japanese Shakuhachi Flute.




Top of Make your own bamboo flute


footer for make your own bamboo flute page