Ceramic Instruments
Ocarinas, whistles, flutes and drums. Four instruments that look like four different projects and are really one idea repeated: a sealed pocket of air with a hole in it. Get the pocket right and the thing sings. Get it wrong by a millimeter and you have made a very handsome paperweight. Here is the whole job, from the first pinch pot to the finger hole you widen after the glaze firing.
Ocarinas, whistles, flutes and drums are one idea repeated: a sealed pocket of air with a hole in it. Here is the short version. The rule that makes all four work, the whistle to build first, and the four things that kill an instrument after it leaves your hands.
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Videos come out as a labelled box with the title and channel to search for, since paper does not play them.
Every one of these is a sealed pocket of air
A whistle, an ocarina, a flute and an udu are the same object with different holes in it. You build a hollow form, you seal it completely, and then you decide how the air gets disturbed. Blow a flat ribbon of air at a sharp edge and you have a wind instrument. Slap a hole in the side and you have a drum.
Which means the two things that decide whether your piece works are settled long before you get to the interesting part. The chamber has to be genuinely airtight, so score and slip every join and then check it. And the walls have to be an even thickness, around a quarter inch, because a thick patch deadens the tone and a thin patch cracks in the kiln.
The one sentence that separates ocarinas from flutes
On an ocarina the pitch depends on how much hole is open in total, so you can put the finger holes wherever your fingers land. On a flute the pitch depends on where the hole is along the tube. That is the entire difference, and it decides how you tune each one.
Build the whistle first, in seven steps
Not because it is a lesser instrument, but because it is the ocarina, the flute and the water whistle in miniature. Once you can cut a voicing that sounds, everything else on this page is decoration. Two hours, half a pound of clay.
- 1
Pinch two small bowls
Half a pound total. Walls a quarter inch, as even as you can get them. Two shallow bowls that will meet rim to rim.
- 2
Score, slip and seal them into a hollow ball
Trap the air inside. Roll it gently between your palms until the seam disappears. It should feel like a slightly squashy egg.
- 3
Add a solid block for the mouthpiece
About an inch wide and an inch and a half long, squared off rather than round. Score and slip it onto the ball. Solid, not hollow, because you are about to cut a channel through it.
- 4
Push a flat stick straight through to cut the windway
A popsicle stick with the tip sanded to a bevel. Straight in, level, aimed at the wall of the chamber. Leave it in place.
- 5
Cut a square window down onto the stick
Just past where the mouthpiece meets the body. Cut all four sides cleanly and lift the plug of clay out. You should be able to see the stick at the bottom of the hole.
- 6
Bevel the far edge of the window
The edge furthest from your mouth. Cut it back at roughly 45 degrees so it comes to a sharp, straight line sitting level with the top of the windway. This edge is the instrument. Everything else is a box.
- 7
Pull the stick, blow out the crumbs, and test it wet
It should sound now. If it does not, the fault is almost always the bevel: too blunt, too high or too low. Adjust it while the clay is still soft, because this is the last easy chance you get.
Then add finger holes, and only then
Get a clear note first. Four holes is plenty to start. Drill them small, test, widen. You can always make a hole bigger and you cannot make it smaller.
One build and one drum, and that is enough
Read the seven steps, watch these two, then put the phone face down and get your hands wet.
Neither of these is ours, and neither is the only right way to do it. If a method feels wrong after a fair try, switch to the other one.
A drum in five lines, and four ways to lose the sound
If you want a drum, make an udu
- Build a closed round body. Throw it as two bowls and join them, or coil it.
- Add a neck on top with an opening you can cover with your palm.
- Cut one round hole in the side, roughly palm sized. That is the bass port.
- Even walls, gentle curves, no flat spots. Flat spots eat the resonance.
- No skin, no hardware, no tuning. The shape is the sound.
Four ways to lose the sound after the wheel
- Glaze in the voicing. One drop in the windway or on the bevel is permanent. Leave that whole area bare.
- Fast drying. Mouthpieces and beaks dry before the body and crack at the join. Loose plastic for the first few days.
- A blocked window. Check for crumbs at leather hard, after bisque, and again after the glaze firing.
- Tuning too late. Firing raises the pitch. Tune wet, accept the shift, keep the intervals.
We bisque to cone 05 and glaze fire to cone 5½. Bisque firings are free and glaze firings are 5 cents per cubic inch with a $4.80 minimum, so a pocket ocarina costs the minimum and a big udu does not.
Why fired clay makes a good instrument
Sound is a pocket of air being pushed around at a regular speed. An instrument is a container that decides how fast. Wood does this, metal does this, and fired clay does it unusually well, for two reasons that have nothing to do with tradition.
It is stiff. A vitrified stoneware wall barely flexes, so almost none of the energy you put in gets absorbed by the container. It stays in the air where you want it. This is why an instrument fired to cone 5½ sounds brighter and carries further than the same shape left at bisque. Bisqueware is porous and soft and it swallows the sound.
It can be made airtight. Every instrument on this page depends on air only being able to leave through the holes you chose. Clay lets you build a completely closed volume and then cut exactly the openings you want, at exactly the size you want, which is a much harder trick in almost any other material.
The flip side, and we may as well say it now: clay is brittle, it shrinks about an eighth on its way to cone 5½, and a fired instrument that hits a concrete floor is finished. You are building something delicate on purpose, and that is part of the deal.
What the shrinkage actually does to your instrument
The whole thing gets smaller, so the enclosed volume shrinks and the pitch goes up, usually by a semitone or two. What generally survives is the relationship between the notes, because every hole shrinks by the same proportion. So an instrument tuned to itself while wet tends to come out of the kiln still tuned to itself, just in a different key.
Read it and watch it, in that order
There are ten videos further down and we think they are worth your time. We also think watching them on their own is a slightly worse way to learn this than reading first and watching second, and it is worth thirty seconds explaining why, because it changes what you do with the page.
Watching somebody competent do something is genuinely useful for one thing above all others: seeing what it is supposed to look like at speed. How fast the stick goes in. How little clay comes out of the window. How gently the maker blows. None of that survives being written down. But video is also very good at making you feel like you have learned something when what you have really done is watch someone else succeed. It goes past at their pace, not yours, and the moment it ends the order of the steps starts leaking out of your head.
Reading is slower and worse at showing you a motion, and better at two things. You control the pace, so you stop where you are confused instead of where the edit cuts. And a list of steps is something you can glance back at with clay on your hands, which is exactly the situation you will be in. That is also why there is a print button at the top of this page, and why we wrote the cheat sheet near the bottom.
So: read the steps, watch the video once at normal speed, then work with the steps beside you and the video paused.
The four families, and which to start with
They share a build. They differ in what decides the pitch, which is the thing that catches people out when they move from one to the next.
| Instrument | What it is | What sets the pitch | Difficulty |
|---|---|---|---|
| Whistle | What it isA sealed chamber with a windway and one note. | What sets the pitchThe size of the chamber. You do not really tune it, you accept it. | DifficultyStart here. An afternoon. |
| Ocarina | What it isA whistle with finger holes. A vessel flute. | What sets the pitchThe total open hole area. Position barely matters. | DifficultyThe natural second project. |
| Flute | What it isA tube, blown across a hole or through a windway. | What sets the pitchThe distance from the mouth to the first open hole. | DifficultyHardest to tune, easiest to build. |
| Drum | What it isA sealed vessel you strike, with or without a skin. | What sets the pitchEnclosed volume and hole size. A skin adds tension. | DifficultyEasy shape, unforgiving about evenness. |
Our honest recommendation
Make a plain one note whistle before you make anything else, even if a whistle is not what you came here for. The voicing is the only genuinely difficult part of a wind instrument, and a whistle is the cheapest possible way to fail at it four times in one sitting. People who start with a ten hole ocarina usually spend a week discovering the same thing at much greater expense.
The voicing, which is the only hard part
Whistle, ocarina, duct flute and pennywhistle all share this assembly. If you understand these six parts you can build any of them, and every fault on this page traces back to one of them.
- 1 The mouthpiece opening. Where your lips go. It wants to be a flattened slot rather than a round hole, because the air has to arrive at the edge as a flat ribbon.
- 2 The windway. A straight, flat, level channel. Cut it with a beveled flat stick pushed straight in. Any twist or dip in this channel and the ribbon of air misses.
- 3 The window. A clean rectangular hole cut down onto the stick. Square corners, no ragged edges, and completely clear of crumbs.
- 4 The splitting edge, or labium. The far edge of the window, beveled to a sharp straight line that sits level with the roof of the windway. This is the instrument. When something does not sound, this is what is wrong.
- 5 The chamber. The sealed volume the air vibrates in. Bigger means lower. Even wall thickness means a cleaner tone.
- 6 The finger holes. Cut last, after it already sounds. Small first, then widened. On a vessel like this one, it is the combined open area that sets the note.
What is actually happening at that edge
The ribbon of air leaving the windway hits the sharp edge and cannot decide which side to go, so it flips above and below it, hundreds of times a second. That flapping is what shakes the air in the chamber. It explains every rule here: the ribbon has to be flat, it has to be aimed at the edge rather than over or under it, and the edge has to be sharp. A rounded edge gives the air an easy answer and you get a breathy hiss instead of a note.
Your first whistle, in nine steps
Half a pound of clay, a needle tool, a beveled popsicle stick and about two hours. Do this once before you attempt anything with finger holes in it.
- 1
Wedge properly, then pinch two shallow bowls
Air bubbles in a hollow form are a real problem rather than a theoretical one, because you are about to seal the whole thing. Pinch both halves to a quarter inch and keep checking by feel between finger and thumb.
- 2
Join them into a sealed ball
Score both rims properly, slip them, press and weld the seam closed from the outside. The trapped air will make the ball feel firm, which is useful: it holds its own shape while you work on it.
- 3
Roll it round, then flatten one side
Roll between your palms until you cannot find the seam. Then press one side gently on the table so the whistle sits still and the mouthpiece has somewhere flat to line up with.
- 4
Make and attach a solid mouthpiece block
Roughly an inch wide, an inch and a half long and three quarters of an inch thick, with squared sides and a slight taper. Score, slip and weld it on so there is no gap at the join. A gap here leaks air and nothing will sound.
- 5
Push the flat stick in to cut the windway
Sand a bevel on the end of a popsicle stick first. Push it in straight and level, aimed at the chamber wall, until the tip is just past where the block meets the body. Leave the stick in place. It is now holding the roof of your windway up.
- 6
Cut the window down onto the stick
A square opening, maybe three eighths of an inch across, just past the join. Cut all four sides with a needle tool and lift the plug out cleanly. If the window is too close to the mouthpiece the chamber wall blocks the opening, which is the second most common way to build a silent whistle.
- 7
Bevel the far edge into a splitting edge
Cut the far wall of the window back at about 45 degrees so the sharp line sits exactly level with the top surface of the stick. Sharp, straight and smooth. Take your time here, because this is the whole instrument.
- 8
Pull the stick, clear it, blow gently
Slide the stick straight out. Blow the crumbs out of the windway and pick any out of the window with a needle. Then blow softly. Soft, not hard: overblowing a wet whistle makes it hiss even when it is built correctly.
- 9
Adjust while it is still soft
No sound at all means the ribbon is missing the edge. Try lowering the splitting edge very slightly, or clearing the windway again. Breathy but not clear means the edge is blunt. Re-cut it. This is the ten minutes that decides everything, and it only exists while the clay is wet.
Make three, not one
Voicing is a feel, and a feel takes repetitions. Three whistles in one sitting teaches more than three whistles in three weeks, because you can still remember what you did differently. Our pinch pot page covers getting the walls even, and the score and slip page covers making the seam actually airtight, which matters more here than on almost anything else you will build.
Ocarinas: a whistle that changed its mind
An ocarina is a vessel flute. The body is a whistle you already know how to make. Everything new is in the holes.
The strange and useful fact about a vessel flute is that the position of the finger holes barely matters. In a tube, sound travels down a length and the first open hole ends that length, so an inch either way changes the note. In a closed vessel there is no length, only a volume with openings in it, and the pitch responds to the total open area. Two small holes on opposite sides of the body do roughly the same thing as one hole twice the size.
Which means you get to design for your hands instead of for the maths. Put the holes where your fingers naturally rest. Make them different sizes on purpose, because a larger hole raises the pitch more than a small one, and a spread of sizes is what gives you a usable scale.
Body first, holes later
Build the chamber, cut the voicing, and get a clean single note before you make one finger hole. A silent ocarina with eight holes in it is very hard to diagnose. A silent whistle is easy.
Four holes is a real instrument
Four holes gets you a full scale if you place the sizes well, and it is far easier to tune than ten. Add a thumb hole on the underside if you want more range. Ambition here is expensive.
Drill small, then open up
Start every hole smaller than you think. Widening a hole takes ten seconds. Shrinking one means patching with clay, which changes the wall thickness and rarely sounds the same afterwards.
Bevel the inside edge of every finger hole
A hole cut straight through leaves a sharp internal lip that adds turbulence and fuzz. A cheap countersink bit from a hardware store, twisted by hand at leather hard, cuts a clean bevel on both sides. It is a two second job per hole and it audibly cleans up the tone.
How to tune something that is about to shrink
You are tuning a moving target, and the trick is knowing which part of it moves.
What firing does
The piece shrinks roughly an eighth on its way to cone 5½, so the chamber gets smaller and the pitch goes up, typically a semitone or two. The wall also vitrifies and stops absorbing energy, so the tone gets brighter and louder at the same time.
What tends to survive is the intervals. Every hole and the whole volume shrink by the same proportion, so the relationships between your notes come through mostly intact. The instrument arrives in a different key, still in tune with itself.
What to actually do
Put a free chromatic tuner app on your phone and keep it next to the wheel. Tune at leather hard, when the clay still cuts cleanly but holds an edge. Work one hole at a time: play it, read the note, widen a fraction, play it again.
Then stop chasing perfection. A handmade ocarina that lands somewhere between two keys is completely normal and will still play a tune. Chasing exact concert pitch on a wet piece is the fastest way to widen a hole past the point of return.
The two windows you still have after the kiln
After bisque, a rat tail file or a small diamond bit will still open a finger hole slightly, and that is the cheapest correction available. After the glaze firing you can still take a whisper off a hole with a diamond bit and water, carefully, but that is the end of it. Nothing at any stage will undo glaze that has run into a windway.
Four videos on the wind instruments
A full ocarina build, the troubleshooting episode that goes with it, a straightforward whistle from a classroom, and the water whistle, which is the most fun anybody has with a voicing.
None of these are ours. We have picked them because they show the hands and the tool angles clearly, which is the part that does not survive being written down.
Flutes, and why they are harder to tune
Easier to build than an ocarina and considerably fussier to get in tune, for one reason: in a tube, position is everything.
Build the tube by wrapping a soft slab around a wooden dowel, or by extruding one. Either way you want an even wall and a straight bore, and you want to slide it off the dowel before it stiffens. Cap one end. Then you choose your mouth.
A transverse flute is blown across a hole near the closed end, like a concert flute. It is far simpler to make, because there is no windway and no bevel at all, and considerably harder to play, because you have to form the air ribbon with your own lips. A duct flute uses the same voicing as your whistle, built into the end of the tube, so it plays itself the moment you blow. Easy to play, harder to make.
Either way the finger holes obey the tube rule: the note is set by the distance from the mouth hole to the first open hole. Move a hole a quarter inch and you have moved the note. Enlarge a hole and you raise its note slightly, which is your fine adjustment. This is why flute makers work from hole placement charts based on percentages of the tube length, and why we would not start here.
The mistake almost everybody makes on a first clay flute
Building it too long. A long tube is a low note, a low note needs a wide bore to speak properly, and a wide clay bore with thin walls warps in the kiln. Something in the region of eight to twelve inches with a bore around three quarters of an inch is a much friendlier first attempt.
The first time it makes a noise you will laugh out loud
We are being serious. There is a specific and slightly ridiculous joy in blowing into a lump of wet mud you shaped forty minutes ago and having a clear musical note come out of it. Grown adults giggle. It is the closest thing this craft has to a magic trick, because you can see every part of it and it still feels like it should not work.
It is also the moment the learning actually starts. Up to that point you are following steps. After it, you have a reference sound in your head, and every adjustment you make from then on is measured against something real instead of against a diagram.
The udu, which is the drum to make out of clay
A closed clay vessel with a neck on top and a hole in the side, played with the hands. No skin, no hardware, no tuning. It is the one drum where the pottery is the instrument.
The sound everybody wants from an udu is the deep swooping bass note, and it comes from the side hole. Slap your palm down over it and you compress the air inside; lift it and the note bends. The neck at the top is the second voice, and tapping the body gives you the higher clicks and tones. Three sound sources on one pot.
You can throw it as two bowls joined rim to rim, throw it in sections, coil it, or slump halves over a form and join them. Our enclosed forms page and the throwing in sections page both cover the joining, and the coil building page covers doing it without the wheel. A hemispherical slab mold is a fast way to get two matching halves if you want the shortcut.
- 1
Build a closed, round body
Aim for something between a grapefruit and a basketball. Round matters: flat spots and corners kill resonance, because the sound stops travelling smoothly around the inside.
- 2
Keep the wall even, and slightly thicker than you would for a bowl
Around three eighths of an inch. A thin patch rings differently from the rest of the pot and you will hear it as a dead spot. Even matters more than thin.
- 3
Add the neck
A short throat on top, opening wide enough that your palm can cover it and lift off cleanly. Three to four inches across is a reasonable target on a mid sized drum.
- 4
Cut the bass port in the side at leather hard
One round hole, low on the belly, sized so your palm covers it completely with room to spare. Cut it cleanly with a hole cutter and smooth the edge, since this is the surface your hand hits several thousand times.
- 5
Test the voice before it dries
Slap it. You will hear the bass note even in raw clay. If it sounds tight and choked, the side hole is too small. Widen it a little at a time. Too big and the bass disappears entirely, and there is no going back from that.
- 6
Burnish or leave it bare, then fire it
A burnished, unglazed exterior feels better under the hands than a glassy one and does not change the sound much either way. What does change the sound is vitrification, so fire it to cone 5½ and it will speak more clearly than it did at bisque.
Drums with a skin, and what you are signing up for
Doumbeks, darbukas and ceramic djembes are beautiful, and the clay part is the easy half.
On a skinned drum, the pot is a resonator and the skin is the instrument. That reverses the job. Everything that makes an udu sing is about the vessel, and almost everything that makes a doumbek sing is about how the hide is mounted and how tight it is. So we want to be straight with you about where the work is.
What you make in clay: a goblet, wide at the head, narrowing to a waist, flaring out at the foot. Thrown, usually in one piece, sometimes in two and joined. The bearing edge, which is the rim the skin stretches over, is the part that has to be right: perfectly round, perfectly level, and rounded over smooth so it does not cut the hide. An oval rim cannot be tensioned evenly and a sharp rim slices the skin the first time you tune it up.
What you have to source yourself: the hide, the adhesive or the lacing hardware, and either a hoop or a clamping method. None of that is pottery supply. Goat skin is the usual choice, it arrives dry and stiff, it has to be soaked, stretched wet and dried under tension, and it responds to humidity forever afterwards. Mounting a head well is a separate craft with its own learning curve, and your first one will probably be a lesson rather than a drum.
We are not talking you out of it. We are saying that if you want to be playing something within a month, make an udu. If you want the doumbek, budget for the second attempt from the start.
One thing to design in early
Add a small clay lug at the balance point while the pot is still soft, so a shoulder strap has somewhere to go. It is trivial to add now and impossible to add later, and every player who has carried a strapless ceramic drum has thought about it.
Four videos on the drums
Two halves of one thrown udu, the same drum built without a wheel, and a full skinned build from throwing through to gluing the head.
None of these are ours. If you only watch one, watch the joining video, because an out of round udu is the failure that shows up latest and costs the most.
The week where most instruments quietly die
You finished it, it sounded, you put it on a shelf, and it came back cracked at the mouthpiece. Here is why that happens and how to stop it.
Thin bits dry first
A mouthpiece, a beak, a tail or a spout has far more surface area for its mass than the body does, so it dries and shrinks days ahead of the chamber it is stuck to. The join is where those two rates meet, and the join is where it cracks. Loose plastic over the whole piece for the first two or three days evens that out.
Sealed does not mean airtight forever
A whistle has a windway, a window and finger holes, so the trapped air has plenty of ways out and it is safe to fire. What is not safe is a fully closed test form with no opening at all. If you have built a sealed hollow object with no hole anywhere, put one in before it dries.
Check the voicing twice more
Once at leather hard and once at bone dry, blow through it and look into the window. Dust and crumbs move around as clay dries, and a windway that was clear on Tuesday can be blocked by Friday. A soft brush and a puff of air fixes it in seconds.
Drums have the opposite problem
A large closed udu holds a lot of moisture in a thick wall, and the neck is the only opening. Give it a week or two, keep it off a heat vent and out of direct sun, and turn it over halfway through so the base dries at the same rate as the top. Rushing it is how you get an S crack in a drum, which is a genuinely sad way to lose a fortnight.
The one rule that is not negotiable
Nothing wet ever goes near the windway, the window, the splitting edge or the finger holes.
A drop of glaze in a windway melts into a smooth blob that changes the shape of the channel, and once it has vitrified there is no tool that will get it out. The same drop on a splitting edge rounds it off and turns a clear note into a hiss. It is the single most common way a finished, tuned, perfectly good instrument arrives dead out of the glaze firing, and it is completely avoidable.
So: leave the whole mouthpiece and voicing area bare. Bare fired stoneware is pleasant to hold against your lips and it looks deliberate. If you want colour there, use an underglaze and stop it well short of the opening, since underglaze does not melt and move the way glaze does. Carving and sgraffito are both good answers on an instrument for exactly this reason.
Our firings, and what they do to your piece
Bisque goes to cone 05 and glaze goes to cone 5½, which means we hold at temperature for twelve minutes at the end. That top firing is what vitrifies the body and makes the instrument brighter and louder than it was at bisque. It is also what shrinks it and lifts the pitch.
Bisque firings are free. Glaze firings are 5 cents per cubic inch of the box the piece fits inside, with a $4.80 minimum. A pocket ocarina is comfortably under the minimum, so it costs $4.80. A nine inch wide, ten inch tall udu works out around $40, so it is worth knowing that before you wedge fifteen pounds.
If you do want to glaze it
Glaze the outside of the body only and keep it off the whole voicing end. Do not glaze the inside of a wind instrument at all: you cannot control where it pools, and a puddle inside the chamber changes the volume and therefore the pitch.
On a drum, glaze is a texture decision rather than a sound one. Many players prefer a burnished or bare exterior because it grips better under a wet hand. If you do glaze an udu, keep it off the rim of the bass port, where your palm lands.
Label it as an instrument on the shelf
An ocarina looks a lot like a small sculpture with holes in it, and a windway is not obvious to somebody who did not build it. A note on the tag saying it is an instrument and the openings must stay clear is a cheap insurance policy on a lot of work.
It does not sound right. What now?
Pick the symptom. Almost every one of these traces back to the six parts in the diagram above.
No sound at all, just the noise of air
The ribbon of air is missing the splitting edge, and there are only three ways that happens. The windway is blocked, which is by far the most likely: pull a thin card or the original stick through it and blow it out. The edge is not level with the roof of the windway, so the air passes over or under it: shave the edge down a hair at a time and test after every pass. Or the chamber wall is covering the window, which happens when the window is cut too close to the body. That one is only fixable while wet, by moving the window forward.
Breathy and fuzzy, with a note somewhere underneath
The splitting edge is blunt or ragged. It needs to be a straight, sharp line, and the difference between fuzzy and clear is a fraction of a millimeter. Re-cut it at about 45 degrees with a clean blade, then smooth the surfaces without rounding the edge itself. Also check the windway is a genuinely flat rectangle: a channel that has slumped into a rounded tube spreads the air out and you get hiss.
It sounded when it was wet and stopped as it dried
Almost always debris. Clay dust and crumbs shift as a piece dries and they end up in the windway or sitting on the edge. Brush it, blow it out, and look through the window at a light. Second possibility: the mouthpiece shrank at a different rate from the body and pulled the geometry very slightly out of line. That one is a build lesson rather than a repair, and the fix next time is slower, more even drying.
It came out of the glaze firing silent
Look into the windway and at the splitting edge with a bright light. If there is anything glassy in there, that is glaze, and it is permanent. There is no fix and no shame in it, because everybody does it once. If the voicing is clean, then check for a hairline crack in the chamber, which lets air escape and kills the note just as effectively. Hold it up to a light and look, or seal the holes with your fingers and blow gently to find the leak.
It plays, but the notes are wrong
If it is uniformly higher than you expected, that is just firing shrinkage and it is normal. Check whether the intervals are still right by playing a scale: if the tune is recognisable, your instrument is fine and it is simply in a different key. If individual notes are off, widen the holes that are flat, a whisper at a time with a small diamond bit. Nothing widens a hole back down again, so stop early and test constantly.
It cracked where the mouthpiece meets the body
Two causes, and they are both about that join. Either it was not scored and slipped thoroughly enough to be a single piece of clay, or the thin mouthpiece dried faster than the fat body and tore itself off. The fix for both is at build time: weld the join properly from the outside rather than just pressing the parts together, and cover the whole piece loosely for the first few days. A crack through a voicing cannot be repaired after bisque.
The drum thuds instead of booming
Usually the side hole is too small, so the air cannot move fast enough to make the bass note. Widen it gradually and keep testing, remembering that too big kills the bass permanently. If the hole is right, look at the walls: an uneven wall gives you a dead zone, and a flat spot or a sharp corner in the profile stops the sound moving cleanly around the inside. And if it is still at bisque, fire it to cone 5½ before you judge it, because a porous body absorbs a surprising amount of what you are listening for.
The cheat sheet
Everything above, compressed to the lines you would want on a bench. Copy it to your phone or use the print button at the top of the page.
- Wedge properly. Hollow forms punish bubbles.
- Walls a quarter inch, and even.
- Score, slip and weld every seam. Airtight or nothing.
- Mouthpiece block is solid, squared, and welded on.
- Windway: flat stick, straight in, level.
- Window: square, clean, cut down onto the stick.
- Edge beveled 45 degrees, sharp, level with the windway roof.
- Get one clear note before you cut a single finger hole.
- Make three. Voicing is a feel.
- Ocarina: total open area sets the pitch. Position is free.
- Flute: distance to the first open hole sets the pitch.
- Four holes is a real instrument. Ten is a project.
- Drill small, test, widen. Never the other way.
- Bevel the inside of every finger hole.
- Tune at leather hard with a phone tuner.
- Firing raises the pitch and keeps the intervals.
- Udu: palm sized side hole, widened slowly.
- Loose plastic for the first two or three days.
- No heat vents, no direct sun, no drafts.
- Clear the windway at leather hard and again at bone dry.
- Never glaze the windway, window, edge or finger holes.
- Underglaze near the mouth, glaze only on the body.
- Bisque cone 05, glaze cone 5½.
- A diamond bit is your last adjustment after firing.
- Tag it as an instrument so nobody plugs the holes.
The ones we actually get asked
Do I need to be able to play an instrument to make one?
No, and most people who make these cannot. You need to be able to hear whether a note is clear or fuzzy, which is a much lower bar than playing. A free tuner app on your phone will read the pitch for you and tell you whether two holes are a whole step apart, so the musical knowledge is genuinely optional.
Which clay body should I use?
A smooth mid range stoneware is the easiest to work with, because you are cutting fine edges and grog gets in the way of a clean bevel. Anything with a lot of grit in it will fight you at the splitting edge. Porcelain makes a genuinely bright instrument and is less forgiving about everything else. Ask an instructor which of our clay bodies suits the size you have in mind.
How long does a whistle take?
About two hours of hands on time for a first one, and a good deal of that is the last ten minutes spent adjusting the edge. An ocarina with finger holes is that plus a session at leather hard for the holes and the tuning. A drum is a longer build and a much longer dry.
Will it explode in the kiln because it is hollow?
Not if it has openings, and every finished instrument does. A whistle has a windway and a window, an ocarina has finger holes, an udu has a neck and a side hole. The thing to watch for is a solid or fully sealed form with no opening anywhere, which is a genuine risk. If you have built a closed test blob, put a hole in it before it dries.
Can I make one on the wheel instead of by hand?
Yes. A chamber thrown off the hump and closed at the top makes an excellent ocarina body, and it is a fast way to get several matching ones. Drums are usually thrown. The voicing itself is always hand work, whichever way the body was made.
What does it cost to fire?
Bisque is free. Glaze firing is 5 cents per cubic inch, measured as the box the piece fits inside, with a $4.80 minimum. Small instruments hit the minimum, so a pocket ocarina is $4.80. A nine inch by nine inch by ten inch udu is around $40. The FAQs page has a calculator if you want to put your own measurements in.
Can I put a real skin on a drum I make here?
You can absolutely throw the shell here. The hide, the adhesive and the hoop or lacing hardware are not pottery supplies, so you would be sourcing those yourself and doing the mounting elsewhere. It is a real and rewarding project, just be clear with yourself that it is two crafts rather than one.
Why does my ocarina sound different from the one I copied?
Chamber volume and wall thickness, almost every time. A slightly bigger chamber is a lower instrument, and a thicker wall is a duller one. Neither is wrong. Handmade vessel flutes are all a bit individual, which is the reason to make one rather than buy one.
How should I store a finished instrument?
Somewhere it cannot be knocked, and for a drum, on a wall hook rather than a floor. Fired clay is stiff, which is why it sounds good, and stiff means brittle. Keep the openings clear of dust, and if a whistle goes quiet after months in a drawer, blow through it before you assume anything is broken.
The pages that pair with this one
Your first one will probably not make a sound
That is not a discouraging thing to say, it is the most useful thing on this page. Almost nobody voices a whistle correctly on the first attempt, and the people who end up making good instruments are simply the ones who were not surprised by that and cut a second one the same afternoon.
Everything here is small. A bevel a hair too blunt. An edge sitting a hair too low. A crumb in a channel you cannot see into. None of it is talent and none of it is a secret, and all of it is recoverable while the clay is still soft, which is why we keep saying to test it wet and test it often.
So take half a pound of clay, seal it into a ball, stick a block on the front and cut a window in it. Worst case you have spent an afternoon and learned what a splitting edge should feel like. Best case you blow into a lump of mud and it sings, and you will not stop grinning for about ten minutes.
Everything here is small: a bevel a hair too blunt, an edge sitting a hair too low, a crumb in a channel you cannot see into. All of it is fixable while the clay is soft. Take half a pound, seal it into a ball, put a block on the front and cut a window in it.
There is a much longer version of this page with ten videos, a cross section of the voicing, a full section on drums and a fault finder. The toggle at the top switches to it.