Update on Ocarina (publ. 2025-01-13)

I've continued on my journey with the ocarina, trying to play it for a few minutes every day. This turns out to be more like once every two or three days, due to the busyness at home.

On the positive side, I still like the sound of the ocarina myself, and overall it is an enjoyable instrument to play. Mostly the melodies I've played so far are all from memory. Using the basic notes I can play on the ocarina, I try to find some good starting note and see if I'm able to hit all the rest of the notes in the melody. This includes a few hymns and traditional songs.

I haven't got any complaints from others in the apartment building. Now, I only play for a few minutes, and usually early in the evening. So I wouldn't expect much of a reaction, even if they didn't like the sound.

I still need to find some real sheet music to work with, and maybe some proper instructional book, though I did find one PDF online. Due to my principles on JavaScript, and also not being fond of credit/debit cards, I likely won't order anything online. But I was planning to check with one of the local music stores.

As far as complaints, I think the main thing I don't like about the ocarina, or at least my 12 hole transverse ocarina, is the placement of the hands and fingers is somewhat awkward. In particular, the left hand has to bent at a slightly uncomfortable angle. Furthermore, it is a difficult for me to see whether or not I have a hole completely covered up, which can create confusion sometimes. And it can feel awkward trying to move some of the fingers forward to cover the subholes.

Also, the hole patterns I am supposed to use to play various notes are not always intuitive, geometrically speaking. This has made it difficult to play the accidentals.

It would be interesting to try out other ocarina shapes and too see how that affects the experience.

Copyright

This work © 2025 by Christopher Howard is licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International.

=> CC BY-SA 4.0 Deed