I'm here..

[cboody]

They asked for an intro so...  I'm a life long (and that is getting very long) musician.  I'm paper trained and also play by ear, though not nearly as well as some of my friends.  I've been a performer on recorder and penny whistle, so I don't expect the fingering issues to be problematic (just a bit of stuff at the high end that is different).  I'll be interested to see what folks have to say about this instrument, and interested to see how my learning goes...

[ubizmo]

Hey, I recognize you from C&F! Welcome to this forum!

Speaking as a hack recorder and whistle player myself, the strangest thing for you at first will be getting your right thumb involved in the melody. This feels distinctly odd for a while.

You'll also find that a few fingerings, such as low Eb, throw you off a bit at first. Low Eb uses the Baroque recorder's F fingering. I found it took a few days to lock in the new fingerings.

The biggest difference between the ocarina and those other instruments is also the ocarina's strength: its unstable pitch. Due to the physics of the thing, the pitch of an ocarina varies more with breath pressure than is the case for any of those tubular fipple flutes. This makes extreme note bending possible. The other difference is the ocarina's weakness: less range. But with a bit of finesse you can get down to low A without too much trouble, and up to high F. With some creative octave folding, you can play more than you might at first expect.

Nice to see you here!

Ubizmo

[Cliff]

Welcome to the forum cboody, and thanks for introducing yourself.

From your background... it sounds like you'll be flying with your ocarina soon. What country are you from?

--Cliff

[cboody]

Hi ubizmo.  I've seen your stuff on C&F also.  My instruments have arrived, and so far things are going well.  You're right about the pitch bending.  I have to be careful to finger right and not finger wrong and bend the pitch.

I'm in the US.

You may be interested to know that I ran both of the polycarbonate instruments through"Flutini" (a program that listens to the instrument, multiply samples and produces a graph of pitch accuracy.  Every note of the tunes I played was spot on EXCEPT for C and C# on both instruments (using the assumption of transposing instrument for G MO here).  That's the "third space C" we're talking about...the note fingered with both thumbs only...and the C# a half step away.  Those two notes were quite far off center.  I'm going to look into some "false fingering" and will let the forums know when I find something out.

[JimOfTheCorn]

Thanks for mentioning Flutini, I've been looking for something like that for a few months now.