Making ocarinas for me is a kind of meditation, my standards are very high, each iteration of the making in a repetitive formalized technique of hand building is a challenge, pushing at the limits of fippled clay instruments in a consistent way to make the tonal dynamic totally compliant to the breath and embouchure yet playing consistent pitches and intervals capable of accurately reproducing a collection of my favorite world melodies using simple tablature arrangements with accompanying sound files published on the internet.

The purpose being to introduce music in it's broadest sense to the widest possible audience with affordable easily learnable simple but subtle quality instruments.

Naturally the hope is that a large worldwide cachment of famous and obscure melodies in easy to learn ocarina tablature form will spread goodwill among the nations of the earth, [ but suspect that at heart the wish to influence societies and communities globally with mine and my friends' personal choices of "Desert Island Discs" {a BBC program wherein celebrities of all ranks are invited to choose 6 pieces of music to be marooned on a Desert Island with}.

So, a delinquent old boy that never owned a "ghetto blaster" found a proxy cultural imperialist ploy.] ( curly brackets within parentheses are okay -trust me; - easier than Henry James ).

The secondary purpose being to teach teachers to teach others successful and simple satisfying methods [ using the simplest of tools in school or home ] of making ceramic ocarinas with both personal teaching to groups and by publishing digital craft videos.

I also teach how to make and use the few professional hand building tools and advanced ocarina making: my teaching course is short and intensive 1-5 days wherein the student learns in depth and the practice and development is up to the individual.

I very rarely use any form of mold and having individually hand formed and assembled some 44,000 [tiny to huge, various forms and combinations] individual instruments since 1966 I understand them and am able to develop in them incomparably superior voices to the products of those using any mass production methods.

Being a sculptor and scholar of ancient ocarinas it is important that they have simple but elegant shapes with a smooth attractively tactile finish impossible using methods such as glazing [which also vitrify the clay and destroy tonal quality].

My current outdoor firings are mostly short and intense to 1010 C [1850 F] using the minimum wood smoke with a special steel saggar taking 3 - 5 hours depending on the weather, then cool naturally for 12-15 hours before the saggar is removed : the finished ocarinas are cleaned to show a deep consistent warm carbon black.

I was originally inspired to take up ocarina making through my friend John Taylor whom I originally met when we were both teenage students. John is still my good friend and guru, he is the thinking person's "Mr. Natural", makes his own clothes and shoes, hats, wooden spectacle frames and an an incredible collection of instruments of all kinds, a total vegan who can play the organ pedal parts of classical pieces with the toes of his left foot [ on the harpsichord he built himself] makes and plays the veena the Ney, Shakuhatchi Oud or Koto and is addicted to trekking for weeks across country in various parts of the world. I could go on and on , you have to know him.

Both John and to a lesser extent myself, have made original contributions to the development of the ocarina and both have examples of our work in the ocarina museum in Budrio Italy -the birthplace of the Ocarina as a Pythagorean [common Western] scaled instrument. We continue to exchange ideas and share exposure with exhibitions and teaching and via the internet with "Wind Jewel Music" "Ocarina Originators" and "Ocarina Masters".

The original Western mode European ocarinas were made by a totally dedicated artist craftsman Guiseppe Donati of Budrioand we believe that the standards of the craft he inspired are maintained and developed in our own work .

To make ocarinas by hand is to focus attention on rythymic and precise techniques which can be a continuous meditative experience which our teaching programmes seek to share.

Our main course is to make ocarinas availiable as a beautiful inexpensive precise instrument -together with complete translations in many languages to facilitate multiculturalism and easy learning of a wide range of World music we are publishing on the internet.