How My Flutes Are Made

I strive to make better flutes all the time. I often explore possibilities that break the "traditional" rules — not to be different, but to try to find ways to make better flutes. I have immense respect for the traditional ways, but I don't want to feel restricted by what was historically done.

The traditional way to make a Native American style flute is to carve two planks — half the bore in each — and glue them together. I've chosen instead to use a single piece of timber and drill the bore straight into it.

I do this for three reasons: it eliminates the glue join running the length of the flute, giving cleaner aesthetics; it's one less thing to fail in the future; and I believe it makes for a sweeter-sounding instrument.

It isn't easy to drill a deep, straight bore head-on into the grain of a hardwood. It's not an easier way to make flutes — but I feel it's worth the extra effort.

I mainly use Australian timbers: Tasmanian Blackwood, Mackay Cedar, Queensland Maple, Red Cedar, Swamp Mahogany, Jarrah, Grey Ironbark, Forest Red Gum, and Silky Oak. I also use specialty timbers from further afield — Walnut, Birch, New Guinea Rosewood, and Ancient Kauri from New Zealand — and I'm always open to trying other timbers when good quality stock becomes available. Experimenting with different woods is one of the real joys of having my own workshop and working on things that genuinely interest me.

Most of my flutes are in the keys of middle F#, G, and A — the most popular keys, and for good reason. F# is often regarded as "the standard key" for Native American flutes, but G and A are just as common: compact and easy to carry, easy to play, and with a sweet sound sitting right in the middle of the range.

I also experiment at the extremes. At the low end, I make occasional flutes down to Low F# — big, haunting, beautiful-sounding instruments, but genuinely large and harder for most people to play. Good timber in large enough pieces is also harder to come by, so I don't make many of these.

At the high end, I go up as far as a High D. These very small, high-pitched flutes are, surprisingly, harder to make than their larger siblings — the dimensions of the true sound hole, windway, and note hole placement become extremely sensitive at that scale.

I sometimes use subtle paua shell and mother-of-pearl inlays, along with carved totemic forms representing the wildlife, the forces of nature, and the landscape around me on Canaipa — a special place where land, river, sea, islands, beaches, and sky all meet. There's no shortage of inspiration here.

Some of my totems represent philosophical ideas that matter to me. Because the carvings are totemic rather than literal, they're open to interpretation — and I think that's wonderful. We can all look at the same carving and see something different: one person sees a breaking wave, another a river, another a snake.

I finish my flutes with a high-quality water-based polyurethane. It's not traditional, but it gives real protection against sudden humidity changes, breath condensation, and everyday wear — while leaving a beautiful smooth finish that highlights the timber's colour and grain. With proper care, they'll still look great decades from now.

Tuning a flute like this is a complex business, with a surprising number of variables at play: ambient temperature, timber temperature, altitude, humidity, wall thickness, hole placement and shape, flute length, the interaction between different note holes, the exact position of the block, and breath pressure.

What makes tuning especially tricky on this style of flute is that notes can be "bent" — inflected higher or lower — over a fairly wide range. That's part of what gives the Native American flute its distinctive, almost voice-like expressiveness. But it also makes it harder to pin down exactly what a note is "tuned to."

I tune my flutes at an ambient temperature of 24°C, which serves as my reference point. I aim for each note to hit true pitch at a moderate, consistent breath level — softer breath bends a note lower, harder breath bends it higher. What matters most is that every note is tuned relative to the others, so the whole scale plays true from top to bottom on the same breath pressure, with no compensating needed note to note.

A fun fact: if you have a flute tuned to standard A440 at 24°C and play it at around 12–14°C with no change in breath pressure, you'll land almost exactly on the "healing pitch" of A432 (the difference works out to about 31.8 cents). Take that for what it's worth.

The reference note here is A4. The generally agreed concert pitch standard is A4 = 440 Hz — not because there's anything inherently right or wrong about that number, but because musicians need a shared reference so different instruments can play together in tune. Different tunings have been used throughout history.

Tuning to A432 simply means anchoring A4 to 432 Hz instead, which makes the whole piece sound very slightly lower than standard pitch. Most listeners wouldn't pick the difference in isolation, though a highly trained musician's ear likely would.

So which is "better"? For a solo instrument, the practical difference is minimal. Many sound healing practitioners believe A432 has a more natural resonance and carries genuine healing properties — that's their area of expertise, not mine, and I take their word for it. What I can promise is that I do my utmost to tune every instrument accurately and give it responsive, expressive voicing, whichever standard it is tuned to.