Making a Native American Flute With Only a Knife and Natural Materials

[Music] you [Music] hi this is Charlie macho to yellow with blue bear flutes most of you know us already and have found us on our Facebook page blueberry flutes or blue bear arts which is where we're found all over the web of course blue bear flutes calm is our website which is where we sell Native American flutes and flute making materials which you'll get to learn a little bit more about what I have done today is I found me a piece of River cane that I really liked that look like it's plenty dry enough already to make a flute out of now when I choose a material to make a flute out of I like to pick something that suits my needs but is also one that suits environmental needs in the case of River cane thinning out the patch actually makes it grow better so I'm helping the cane patch a little bit by taking this dead piece out in addition to that the dead river cane is actually a better material for making flutes not only is it harder already and more solid but it is dried out in a little less likely to crack River cane of course as you probably know has a problem cracking if you don't treat it properly which we easily do by oiling in wax in these days we don't even sell river cane flutes on our website just in case we do have sawgrass flutes which are another indigenous species of cane there's some I know I passed walking back through this trail earlier but it wasn't large enough and of course it is very seasonal in a winter time it looks like it's pretty dead in a lot of cases and when I say dead I mean flat to the ground whereas this stuff here still stained enough and River cane in addition will die like this piece is just gone because it may have broken earlier or because it just something happened usually it's some outside stimuli bug bit into it somebody stepped on it a squirrel bent it when it was young and it grew that way for a while and then it got too much weight on it and collapsed anything can happen when it compromises the link it's pretty much ready to go so what we're gonna do is make a flute out of this and I've chosen River cane because number one it's hollow already number two it's a convenient plant that I know doesn't it's not poisonous it's non-toxic some plants that you find when you're walking out in the woods and in the trails some of the weeds that you find may be hollow which is great but unfortunately a lot of them are poisonous so you gotta learn what's safe and what's not safe and of course River cane doesn't grow everywhere Sawgrass does no mind you saw grass is available everywhere and we've got other videos you can watch on where to find it we're gonna do is make a flute out of this and see what we can come out with you know I I've had this pocket knife for such a long time I remember the sharpen it which is amazing but my my dad used to carry his pocket knife everywhere and when we got ready to eat something this one hearing very pretty it's got some kind of gummy stuff all over it we would get ready to eat something my mom would be like do you have a knife my dad would say yeah here's this one I haven't skinned a snake with it today which is kind of one of those things but anyway let's see go ahead and just cut some of this stuff here you can score River cane and saw grass like you do PVC with just making a round and round type of motion and you can snap it eventually and be able to see that you've got some fibers in there but it'll be good and I think it'll make a good flue some of this might take a minute you might decide to watch it and fast motion I don't know not too shabby at this point I should probably thank Home Depot for letting me buy this bucket but I'm sitting on thank you all for letting me purchase something from your store can the Fisher behind me there one more piece little pre-cut piece there helped me out quite a bit save those two for later now wouldn't it have been handy if I had brought my tape measure with me yeah we'll work to determine how big or where to place the fingerings on this guy look how smooth it it's turned out pretty good it's just a matter of taking your time cleaning it out not too shabby for something I just broke off but a lot of you might think yourself well how are you gonna determine where the fingerings go that's something part of the reason I wanted to come out and make this video for you guys is because and cows thank you I wanted to show you that even if you don't have a measuring tape or anything of the sort you can still make flutes with without any kind of measurements of course the ideal thing would be to have a flute this size that is an example of a flute we can make this size and hold it beside it and then as you hold the two of them beside one another you know you can measure and line it up and dot your i's and cross your T's or you know second really good option is to have for example a copy of my book which has all the schematics in the back of it for different diameters and what to do with this and what to do with that that kind of thing a lot of people have asked me to make a video talking about knuckle spacings and finger sizes and all this kind of stuff and the reason I have avoided it for so long is because I don't want to perpetuate a stereotype a lot of people believe that all Native Americans live in a teepee or all of them have a big feather muscled headdress or that we all put our hands up and say how most of my videos you'll see me put my hand up but I'm not I'm not perpetuating a stereotype by any means and the little finger lengths and knuckle joints and spacings between the flute-like then that doesn't always work that's an idea that probably most indigenous peoples and of course most people's have used for something I myself back in the day when I would go out and cut river cane to make one or two flutes like we did in the old days I would grab the piece of cane right here at my wrist and measure it between my wrist and my elbow and that was big enough to make the kinds of flutes that I made at the time unfortunately that information of my wrist and elbow measurement that I use leaked out and a lot of people take it as how everybody makes flutes and it's not anything like that that was only at that time in my life was a convenient today I can usually see just about where the holes need to be placed on the flute to make it play and I always think back to what my granddad said and even before we started to make this video I was thinking to myself you know I've got to tell them that you can place the fingerings just about anywhere it's a matter of learning to tune it and tuning it the way you need it to be tuned that's what it takes to make it sound good so we're gonna go ahead and follow that pattern and see what can come up with it this technique of drilling holes may not be a safe one especially if you keep your finger right underneath your knife there that's a bad idea by the way a lot of times when my face is off-camera like this I look at my camera person and see if what I'm saying is funny enough because I can always tell sometimes y'all can tell when the camera moves if it's funny enough so this is gonna be my first fingering when I made the video of making a flute in the park with my pocket knife I don't know if it's got as many views as some of my other videos but I did one other thing that really helped out a lot and that is I sharpen the twig and turned it into a tool this is not uncommon not unheard of it's the reason you don't find a lot of historical tools laying around because some of them just fell to the wayside of time so I think that looks good there the one thing about these fingerings that when you're making them with the pocket knife instead of with an actual tool is that they're always going to be some fiber inside of it and the larger you make the hole or the closer the hole is to one of the true widths of your blade the more likely you are to crack the flute doing it like this if you put too much pressure on it and not enough round and round like I'm doing here you'll tend to to pry it open and you don't want to do that that's a bad thing to do if you're trying to make a flute it looks like some of our favorite mosquito friends have come out to business this one's making a little bit of a sound there when I twist it not making a cracking sound just kind of a thump thump thump which means I probably don't need to twist it too much more I have to make me a little stick tool here in just a second to help clean those up don't look too shabby coming along okay so I've just about finished cleaning the holes out a little bit and enlarged them just a little bit not too bad with my knife it's a little kind of archaic looking looks like maybe a third grader did it but well third grader my time I guess I'd be about tenth grader today kids aren't allowed to have knives in morning let's see I'm going to make me a reamer for these holes to make sure that they are a little cleaner looking than what they currently are because right now I'm not real super thrilled about how clean they're they're looking there but if you notice learning a little kind of a reamer through there it helped clean up some of the fibers you can see this stick here may not be the best but it is working just cleaning this area off a little bit to try to make sure the air escapes properly and produces a good sounding tone back to what I was saying about the size of the fingerings and their placement everything those of you who haven't seen one of my videos on making a four-hole whistle when my granddad Cherokee grandfather taught me how to make that he said just to place the fingerings wherever you want to and I think that that was really good advice at the time it's something I needed to hear and at that time I was still one of those people oh my god where do you put the fingerings I'm gonna be lost I don't know you know I've come so far all right I've heard people say that too in our youtube comments they say well you know I've already done this but I don't know where the place of fingerings these days I'm making wooden flutes I prefer to put the fingerings in it before I make the flute so but with this it's already Hollow which is another comment I've had lately and I had to help somebody figure out River cane is a species of bamboo it's um indigenous to the Americas and it grows hollow just like that and wherever there is a link there is a solid partition inside of it and that link is going to help us the reason I placed it right here is because we're gonna make our sound hole area around this and that's gonna help us out a lot so that's actually our next step we'll make sure these fingerings look pretty good okay so the next part is gonna be making these sound hole and the air supply hole and those kind of things are something that take a little level of precision but as long as I follow this same path the way that I did when I made the flute in the park I think I'll turn out with something pretty good I really don't want to cut myself again as a woodworker you can imagine I have got scars all over my hands cut off one big it's that one they stitched it back on pretty good see I'm just kind of doing this number here and now because of the growth of the limb and the way that it's shaped I'm going to turn it this way and try to peel up some of that let's see I did the other way I might would have a little bit of problem getting over that link but going this direction it's not so bad how about that stopped right there like I wanted it to as you may guess that doesn't always happen bud nice flat what is it all you people call it that don't make flutes is that a sack sometimes using phrases like that makes me uncomfortable okay I think that's not really too bad now two things that I have to do is I have to make an air-supply hole somewhere in this general vicinity without cracking the flute preferably and then I also have to make a sound hole likewise preferably without cracking the flute and by the looks of it I'm going to need to use one of my fancy hole Riemann tools here in just a second to clean this up a little bit because it's not very pretty here's an interesting bug if you want to take a look at him this guy here is very neat to me in South and Central America they call it a kissing bug here we just call it a masked hunter it's in the same family of stink bugs and in South America one of those bites you in your sleep they usually defecate on you and then if you scratch that into your bloodstream we'll you might have some problems you would definitely have to go to the hospital immediately and hope that that hospital has a cure for it up here they have the same ability they just don't defecate on us after they bite us and it's pretty handy from what I understand that little bug that masked hunter is the one that lays its eggs inside of our beds and call we call them bedbugs they're little egg stays now in a state that they just like to keep warm and bite you and if I if I'm understanding right the young don't carry the deadly bacteria that dissolves your heart that the old do but the old eventually have a bacteria of their gelatinous they're in there get that makes makes them dissolve your heart after they bite you you have a little bit of time I'm not sure how long quickly checking out stuff like that on Wikipedia or some kind of agency website that knows about what kissing bugs are or the masked hunter is definitely worth a look see so we're getting really close here we've got what looks like a reasonable air supply home but it's not putting out in the air yet so we get to do that still and then we have a sound hole which does have the ability looks like to meet the inside of the the flute there let me grab my stick here [Music] so let's see here we have some air coming out of it that's a positive thing we need to kind of shape this one here a little bit I prefer to have my sound holes kind of square and the reason I prefer that is because a nice flat edge vibrates in a certain kind of way consistently and that kind of thing is something you want to happen when you're making a flute can you make a round sound hole yes I've made videos making flutes with round sound holes and they sound just fine but like I say consistency wise I stick with this looks like I've got some fiber in there too that I'm gonna have to clean out with some kind of cleaning rod here in just a minute you know if mosquitoes would only go up in there and fly around and clean this stuff out for me to be great instead of biting me I don't know if y'all can hear the sound of those frogs there in the background but that's the kind of thing I grew up with where I was a child I lived off in the swamps and I got to hear that kind of thing every night it seemed strange to me that that sound really freaks some people out I personally know people who had bought property and left it because it had frogs on it making that noise and this just pushed me to sleep I mean I loved it it's very relaxing reminds me of my childhood makes me comfortable and if I get hungry I'll go out and catch me a couple of them it's testing the cameraperson here by the way ok so let's set this down and clean this rod a little bit so that we can use it to ream out the hole maybe in a little bit more of a square way if we can okay this looks like it was a piece of oak or some type of hardwood maybe it was a gum a lot of gum trees out here where I'm at right now but things like oak and gum are quite rigid and that's handy if you're making that shape a certain way okay like the whole just a little bit bigger or make my tool just a little bit smaller here in the southeast of the United States River cane isn't plentiful like it once was but just like it is all over the world bamboo is everywhere everybody's neighbor it's in your yard if it's in your neighbor's yard chances are it's in your yard you just haven't seen it yet bamboo is a very invasive plant most of species that I've run into anyway and likewise it can grow just about everywhere it's a rhizome type of plant which means a little root and if that carries the whole species of plant with it you can cut up some of that rhizome and bury it somewhere and make more bamboo I'm gonna blow this out here real quick look I see one little piece and clean up some there we go I think this pretty good you don't to restrict your airflow with anything so I kind of as best I could with my pocket knife here chiseled this down in order to to make a little sharp edge if I could just try to clean it up a little bit so I'm gonna try to blow that out though as well go ahead and clean this while I'm at it I'm pretty sure I've mentioned several times if you make a round sound hole you should make a round air supply hole likewise if you make square air supply or square sound holes you need to make a square air supply hole it's helpful it's not required a flute will still make a sound but so that the air doesn't change its angle or direction or having an unusual turbulence it's best if the holes are roughly the same width and in the case of these guys here I think we're working with about 3/16 of an inch wide you know just guessing it's not really super important remember what granddad said put them over so let's see if we can blow this out a little bit maybe get some of this fiber to come out little piece so let's try my tool here real quick and after that there we go that's a lot nicer nice and square anyway in just a minute I might have to make the cleaning rod kind of something over here I knew there was a reason I set in this area there's all my tools laying around me here so I'm gonna set this guy down for a minute and see if I can't blow some of that out it doesn't slow down the air travel we're okay you can see some of that pit inside of there the fiber of the river came that form to the way here's something that looks like a clean oh yeah that's the difference I think it might would play here I think that there's quite a bit of it [Music] if we can get some of this this in cleaning you know but it looks like all of the fiber came out as well there we go so the last little part here is the part that most people at least hopefully I would like to say anyway used to have problems making but today I've got so many videos on YouTube on the subject that I hope that you guys don't have any difficulty learning how to do this this is the track area of the flute and it's not that difficult to make it's just a matter of taking your time and scraping it down how you want it to be now I like to use tools to do this these days as you'll see in some of our other videos we've got all kinds of burning rods that I make we sell some of them actually for flute making you guys will learn how to make Clips we have all kinds of burning tools to do this with we have different kinds of drills that we use for the process and everything it's just a matter of getting the right tool to do it and knowing how to use that tool so I cut myself again I always say that don't want to cut myself again it seems like I cut myself quite a bit it's not that I'm not skilled at what it is I'm doing I just try to push that little extra edge you know see also it's a good idea to learn kind of control your tolls if you're making something that requires a sharp tool like this one you'll learn how to control that kind of stuff so that you don't get hurt in the process that's part of the reason we use some of the tools we do today I guess we haven't got Burton a couple of days in the shop right the brain tools are very clean cleaning out this kind of area here there's a big mosquito caught you go by something else and I think that's not too bad let's scrape it just a little bit here so you wanna feel like okay scrape it one more time in the opposite direction the other edge there I've seen some of this fiber blow in there I better try to get it out okay that should produce a sound I would think it would anyway it's a little piece in here - like there's never an ending point to this you can keep on saying I've just got one more thing to do let's see this block probably had a scratch up the edge a little bit so it's nice and straight like I did on the mouthpiece of the flute because we would want to have a clean edge there for the sound of cameto now this is a piece of the inside of the river cane whereas this is the outside this inside piece being concave may help us some but I don't know yet we might want it flat so let's see if it's too Airy sounding what have you [Music] I'm just gonna take some of this stuff here out so that it's a little flatter of course there is another way to do this and that is I could have split it a little differently I could split it closer to the outside of the cane instead of the inside of it but knowing that there was gonna be a little trough in there I wanted to test it and see if it would help us in because sometimes that little trough will make your flute quite a bit louder in the case of using just a pocketknife here no peace River cane cut me right here you can tell it wasn't my knife because I'm holding a knife by the back of the edge here anyway so let's see getting close occupational hazard - if you didn't use a knife to carve something chances are that something is pretty firm and you need to consider that it might cut you stop bleeding pretty good okay I think that's pretty good I know it's a little area but I am making this with a pocket knife now I have to admit I did she I cut this piece of leather earlier thinking hey I'm gonna go out in the woods and make a flute there's no cows for me to skin out there and tan their hide I don't have time to braid some tree bark and a piece of rope my wife wasn't gonna let me use my shoelaces I'm just kidding it was her idea I said no not my shoelaces okay let's see if this does anything like we hoped it would so all the notes are a little bit on the high side there I think I need or excuse me the bottom note is on the high side and more fingerings are a little bit on the low end so I'm gonna hollow them out for another second and see if that helps anything what this sounds like here [Music] it still sounds like the bottom notes a little sharp and the fingerings a little flat so to make the fingerings less flat and to come in to tone with the bottom note I'm gonna make them just a little bit larger in diameter this is going to allow more air to escape from each one of the fingerings and the more air that escapes the higher the note was below this and then I might find me another stick and real amount just for a split second so that way they are a little bit more round and larger opening in diameter there than what they were I think that's probably gonna be it there let's see get me a stick here then I could use my other stick was a little bit on the used up side this one here is a little bit soft which might not be as good but let's see which is easier to clean these holes just a little bit so we can yeah that helped a little bit just get some of those fibers out of there keep thinking to myself if I just had my this with me or if I just had one of those with me let's say that's not too bad I'm gonna blow it out [Music] that's not too shabby for something made with just a pocketknife and a couple of pieces of material laying around I just wanted to show you guys that this is the easiest thing in the world to do to make a musical instrument it's also Native American flute is one of the easiest instruments in the world to play and I think you know that definitely goes without saying I used to tell people that by the time the second week of somebody having a Native American flute rolls around they have already decided to cut an album and I'm reminded of this all the time it's an instrument that gives you a great deal of confidence and satisfaction and certainly is a wonderful wonderful tool and friend to have around with you at all times so I know you guys will be able to make a flute on your own you haven't done it yet you probably will very soon if not someday and someday soon I hope but thank you guys very much again for watching our youtube channel here bluebear flutes of course you can find us on our website blueberry flutes calm as I mentioned earlier in our Facebook Instagram Twitter and whatever else there is in the world we're all around please let us know what you think about this in the comments and subscribe to us if you will you might be surprised what kind of videos we come up with next so anyway this is a fine example of in my opinion a Native American flute made you know out in the world and the environment here with just very limited resources and I think that if I can do it with this probably you can do it with just about anything but like I said thank you guys very much again remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel find us on our website and subscribe to us there there's actually a subscribe button down at the bottom you get updates and coupons and all kinds of stuff that we try to help out with and join the blueberry flutes family you guys take care thanks so much again Charlie Montreux to yellow signing out until next time [Music] thank you guys very much for watching our videos we appreciate you greatly and we wouldn't do this if it went through you watch it I would like to ask you if you get a chance please subscribe to our YouTube channel because it helps to keep everything going smooth here plus you'll get the newest videos that we have ready for you to see when they come out so that's kind of a nice little thing there I would like to remind you if you have wanted to make Native American flutes or really any kind of musical instruments especially flues that our book here the art of Native American flute making by Charlie and Jesse mantra triela is really a great way to keep up with it and it's got everything from schematics inside for different fingerings where to place the holes it's in metric as well as in the US and English standard as we call it Stephen gets a little trip tricks and tips on how to get the air channel to sound right which is something that the Native American flute world is one of the probably considered to be one of the most difficult things to do but if it's that or you just want learn how to make something really unique and interesting there's a lot of that in there too that a lot more but anyway I thank you guys again for watching our videos if you would subscribe to us join the Blue Bear flutes family and we appreciate you very much I'll take care of it