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The Art Of Ocarina Making Robert Hickman 9781105736452 Books

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The ocarina is a flute of hauntingly pure sound and great technical simplicity, easy to make and easy to play. Let this book guide your ocarina journey with plain English descriptions and over 300 detailed images. By introducing the underlying principles from the start, you will learn why as well as how. Allowing you to avoid common mistakes and achieve better results. Learn the process from start to finish * The basics of clay work * Making your first playing ocarina * Working by hand and with aligned plaster molds * A detailed explanation of voicing operation * The technicalities of tuning ocarinas * Working with breath curves and the chamber tonic * Methods for tuning 10, 11, 12 and 4 hole ocarinas * Obtaining a desired tonal quality * Tuning ocarinas to concert pitch * Finishing, firing and glazing your ocarinas * Improving the tuning of cross-fingered accidentals * Problem areas to avoid in your own ocarinas * Fingering charts for all common ocarina styles

The Art Of Ocarina Making Robert Hickman 9781105736452 Books

The diagrams and collection of resources are invaluable for the newbie ocarina maker... but oh...my.....god...... ..... Typos, typos everywhere, soooo many typos. They consume most every page and are very distracting... If you are going to go through all the trouble of writing a book, proof read the dang thing, seriously... Do it right or don't do it at all....

Product details Paperback 216 pages Publisher lulu.com (May 13, 2012) Language English ISBN-10 1105736458

Tags : The Art Of Ocarina Making [Robert Hickman] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The ocarina is a flute of hauntingly pure sound and great technical simplicity, easy to make and easy to play. Let this book guide your ocarina journey with plain English descriptions and over 300 detailed images. By introducing the underlying principles from the start,Robert Hickman,The Art Of Ocarina Making,lulu.com,1105736458,ULUL-bkld2012AUG-59017,Crafts & Hobbies General,Handicrafts, Arts & Crafts,Handicrafts, decorative arts & crafts
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The Art Of Ocarina Making Robert Hickman 9781105736452 Books Reviews

Lots of information on making clay ocarinas, having some knowledge of clay working would be helpful but it presents a good overview.
This book does exactly as it claims it teaches a complete newbie how to make an ocarina out of clay. Now, it is true that there are several ocarina communities online (The Ocarina Network and Little Geese, for example) where one might also learn the steps by searching around and asking people. There are also Youtube videos of various people making ocarinas. The value of this book, I think, is that it puts everything you need to get fairly good at this in one place and it is well-organized, so you don't have to waste time looking for missing pieces or waiting for answers. It clearly explains all the tools that are needed, has good diagrams and photographs, explains what problems might come up and how to fix them, and gives you different options for what you might do. It definitely helps that the author has actually made a lot of ocarinas, and periodically points out common pitfalls. As someone who's almost never worked with clay before, I found the book's explanations of the tools and techniques, as well as the behaviours of clay, most helpful. I'm sure that if I didn't have this book, I would have wasted a lot of time simply being frustrated.

The book details two of the most common methods of making ocarinas "form and cut" (in which you make a form, then cut it in half and hollow it out, before pasting the two parts together again) and "press mold" (in which you make a hollow mold out of plaster). The first gives more freedom to make different shapes, but can take longer if you're making a lot of instruments and makes it harder to get consistent results. The second has some constraints on form and initially takes longer to set up, but makes it faster to make consistent instruments afterwards.

As for the kinds of ocarinas, the book focuses on the most common types being sold right now the John Taylor/English pendant (with 4-6 holes) and 10-12 hole Sweet Potato single-chamber models (the 10-hole Inline is also described). Even if you've never owned one of those, you'll get a good idea of how they work and how to make them (it seems that 11- and 12-hole ocarinas are basically the 10-hole plus one or two "sub-holes"). Although, it is never explained why the 10-hole ocarina fingering charts differ from the 11- and 12-hole ocarinas after the "G" note. The author makes it sound like they're the same, but the fingering charts show they are not. (while I'm on this topic, I'll note that the high "E" fingering for the 11-hole transverse shown on p.207 seems to be for the low E instead; it should instead look similar to the fingering on p.205)

The book doesn't cover double or triple-chambered models, nor harmony ocarinas. I would say, though, that this isn't a fault; those are much more difficult to make, and there is quite a lot to master just in learning to make the more common, simpler models well. Nor, for that matter, does it mention the various complex and weird South American ocarinas shown in "From Mud to Music". It only sets out to cover the more common models, but I think it does that very well.

One potential weakness (for certain readers) is that when it describes how and why an ocarina sounds at a particular pitch or timbre, there are no mathematical equations. This is not surprising since exact calculations are not very useful when one is working with clay, but there is one place where I think it would have helped. On p.146-7, in describing how to tune 4-hole ocarinas, Hickman writes "just remember that the 4 hole system is an approximation and consequently the notes played using cross fingerings will be somewhat off. You need to adjust the holes to get the best average tuning over the entire range of the instrument". I think it would have been helpful here to mention that there's actually a way to predict what effect changing the hole sizes will have on different pitches. An ocarina is mostly a Helmholtz resonator, formulas for which can be found in Daniel R. Rachel's "The Science and Applications of Acoustics" (p. 145-8, equations 7,56, 7.57, 7.66 & fig. 7.6 - I found a PDF of the book online). Its pitch is proportional to the square root of A/(L'V), where A=area of all holes (including the sound hole that's always open), V=internal volume and L'=effective length of holes aka. wall thickness at the hole (the effective length is longer than the ACTUAL length by radius of the hole's area times 1.5-1.7 in classic Helmholtz resonators, though I'm not sure the same applies for ocarinas). What this effectively means is that if you want to make your ocarina play up an octave... an octave is 2 times your first pitch, so you need the number under the square root to be "4". So what do we get with the 4-hole English pendant ocarinas? Let's say our sound hole (which is always open) = 1, and we make 4 holes sized roughly 1.25, 1.0, 0.5, 0.25. If we open just the smallest hole, that's 1+0.25 = 1.25. The square root of that is 1.12, aka. a frequency of 9/8 up from our lowest note (known in music theory as the "major second" interval). If we open the second-smallest hole, 1+0.5 = 1.5; the square root of that is close to 5/4 (the "major third" interval). If we open both small holes, 1+0.25+0.5 = 1.75; the square root of that is 1.32, close to 4/3, the "perfect fourth". If we open up just the ocarina's second-biggest hole ("1"), 1+1=2, so we get the square root of two, the evil-sounding tritone. If we also add the smallest hole, 1+1+0.25=2.25, the square root of that is 3/2, the "perfect fifth"! And so on. If we open all holes, 1+1+1.25+0.5+0.25 = 4, the square root of which is 2, so that gives us an octave. If we then close the 0.5 hole, 1+1+1.25+0.25 = 3.5, the square root of which is very close to 15/8, the "major seventh" interval. The 0.5 hole only lowered our pitch by a semitone (~16/15) at the top of the ocarina's range, but at the bottom of the range, it changed the pitch by a much bigger interval, a major third (~5/4).

I think that explaining how this worked would have helped readers understand how to control the process, and maybe develop alternate ways to tune ocarinas. Daniel P. Peden and Charles Hind, for example, have developed different tuning systems from those mentioned in the book. Of course, the above calculations (with their "just intonation" ratios) assume a pretty flat breath curve, and wouldn't work for a steep one (Hickman has a very helpful explanation of breath curves on p.115-120).

The most noticeable flaw of this book (in my eyes) has nothing to do with its actual content, but is simply that the copy-editing is sloppy. There is an average of several grammatical mistakes per page, and hundreds in the book as a whole the author frequently misses commas, uses commas instead of semi-colons, and writes "ocarinas" instead of "ocarina's", among other things. There are also a fair number of spelling mistakes. For example, here is a partial list I compiled.
p.8, line 20 "it it" > "it is"
p.22, line 3 "outher" > "other"
p.22, line 5 "larn" > "learn"
p.22, line 5 "howeaver" > "however"
p.22, line 6 "fustration" > "frustration"
p.40, line 4 & p. 69 line 6 "workbord" > "workboard"
p.50, last line "compleated" > "completed"
p.64, line 4 "grove" > "groove"
p.68, line 7 "comfatable" > "comfortable"
p.72, line 6 "sauce" > "source"
p.72, line 21 "joins" > "joints"
p.73, line 12 & p.78, line 21 "parameter" > "perimeter"
p.92, line 16 "defuse" > "diffuse"
p.93, line 3 "plain > "plane"
p.93, line 13 & p.125, line 4 "pendent" > "pendant"
p.95, line 1 & p.97, 4th line from bottom "there" > "their"
p.95, line 4 "coveted" > "covered"
p.99, line 3 "course" > "coarse"
p.101, line 2 "form" > "from"
p.107, 4th line from bottom "thought" > "throughout"
p.136, line 8 "award" > "awkward"

Although it almost never impacts the intelligibility of the book, it looks kind of messy. If the author should ever want to fix the grammar and spelling in a later edition, I made a list of all of the errors as I was reading it, and would be happy to help.
I picked up this book from a few months ago (sorry-been lax in reviewing). I'm shocked that no one has submitted 5 star reviews, or any review for that matter, yet, but this book really is top-notch. Yes $35 is a big hit, but, except for Mud to Music, there is no resource remotely like it. It shows very specific instructions and is worth every penny. Highest recommendations. If you haven't ordered Mud to Music yet, do yourself a favor-include with this one on your next order.
Lot`s of information on making clay ocarinas, having some knowledge of clay working would be helpful but it presents a good overview.
I've read through the book many times now - this is an excellent source of information. I hope they soon offer it for the kindle. The author's method of teaching is very good - this is the right book to learn with.
Thank you robert for showing people hpw to create music from mud. I was having trouble with the timbre of my ocarinas. This book explains everything about hole placment, and voicing. I hope that your company does well. Hey everybody. If you want a great 11 hole ocarina check out robert hickmans products. Great book.
The diagrams and collection of resources are invaluable for the newbie ocarina maker... but oh...my.....god...... ..... Typos, typos everywhere, soooo many typos. They consume most every page and are very distracting... If you are going to go through all the trouble of writing a book, proof read the dang thing, seriously... Do it right or don't do it at all....