How the Ocarina Works

How the modern ocarina works is first you have to blow into the mouth piece, then the when you blow though the mouthpiece(which is also known as the fipple mouthpiece)the air is split between the chamber and labium to make the sound. then by closing/opening the wholes on the instrument, you make the different pitches.        

 

Final Test!!

  For me this was the hardest but yet the most fun part of the of this project. This part was picking a piece of music that I wanted to play on the ocarina and play it.
  The piece that I played was called Be Thou My Vision. I picked it not because it was easy or hard, it was because it sounded beautiful on this instrument.
  There was couple problems that I had with this project. One of them was that the last 3 videos had no music, so i could play it with all the different tempos i wanted. but here I had to follow him and the tempo that he followed. The second issue is tuning. With the ocarina you need a lot of breath support and when you let the support go so does the tone, so i had to make sure I was always sitting up straight and tonnes of support. Another problem was  because I'm a saxophone/piano player I can aurally here the music, but with the ocarina because it's such a new instrument for me I had to figure out where to put my fingers, which chamber to blow through, and how much air pressure I had to use to make the ocarina to work. Lastly and the most difficult was the octave jump. with saxophone the octave jumps you use the octave key, but with ocarina you use different chambers. So for ocarina you really don't use a steady embrasure for it, your embrasure is always moving.        
       
   

 

Pieces That I Played

    Lost Woods                                                                                                          

                                                          Zelda's Lullaby                              

      Gerudo Valley

How I Learned

How I learned the Ocarina was a lot of fun. The first thing I did because I'm a saxophone major was that I tried to play it like a saxophone. It work a little but some notes weren't coming out properly so I grab a fingering chart and boy was it different. Before I played anything I started with a regular C Major scale then I started with repertoire.

Saxophone Fingering 

Ocarina Fingering 

     

Examples of Pendent/Harmony Double Ocarina

Here are some examples of the Pendent and the Harmony Double Ocarina.

Pendent

Harmony Double

Examples of Transverse/Inline

Here is some examples of Transverse and Inline Ocarinas

Transverse

Inline

Different Types of Ocarina's

Inline 

Harmony Double 

Transverse

Pendent

Electronic

When I was searching for my ocarina I didn't know that there was so many modern ocarina's. The ones that I found were the Pendent, Traverse/Multi Chamber(Sweet Potato), Inline, Electronic, and also the Harmony Double.    

Buying My Ocarina

   When I was searching for an ocarina I went to a couple websites they were as follows: Songbird Ocarina, Stl Ocarina, and lastly was Hind Musical Instruments.
https://hindocarina.com/ http://www.stlocarina.com/ https://www.songbirdocarina.com/
   The one site that caught my eye and that I bought from was STL Ocarina because I didn't want a wood ocarina because I didn't want my ocarina to crack and STL had a wider selection then Songbird Ocarina.
   The Ocarina that I got from STL Ocarina was a triple octave ocarina this ocarina is made out of clay and has 22 playable notes(A4-G7).

 Purple Clay Triple Ocarina

      I would recommend this site to anyone. The reasons why I would recommend this site is because I got my ocarina fast (it only took a week to come in), and when I ask a question about the ocarina in a email they answered it right away.