Primitive music 2: Making a DIY elderberry flute 🎵

It took me a bit longer than anticipated, but it is finally completed: A fully primitive, functioning “native american“ style flute. It is made from a particularly nice branch of Elderberry (sambucus) and only using primitive stone and wooden tools. To build such a flute, you need a branch with a bore as wide as possible and a distance between the knots as far as possible. This is also the reason why this project took a bit longer to complete than I expected: I needed to find a suitable branch first. I wanted a flute tuned to C5 (523 Hz). This calls for a sound chamber (the part of the flute below the sound hole) to be about 30 centimeters long. The ratio between sound chamber length and bore width is important: If the bore is too narrow, the flute won’t play the base tone, but instead jump to the first overtone right away. Through several prototypes, I found out that for a flute to play a C5 cleanly, the bore needs to be at least 15 millimeters wide. My last prototype (that you se