Identifying playable ocarinas
Identifying playable ocarinas is not as straightforward as for instruments like the recorder or the flute. In common language, 'ocarina' is used as a catch-all term for anything that makes sound with a hollow chamber. It can refer to serious musical instruments just as much as untuned novelty whistles.
While classifiers exist for these different types, many mainstream outlets don't know what they are selling, and you will see all of these listed blindly under the term 'ocarina'. This article outlines what you are going to encounter, how to evaluate the quality of potential ocarinas, and identify ones that suit your needs.
if you're reading this because you are struggling to play an ocarina you have, don't blame yourself, there is a good chance the instrument, not you, is to blame.
Ergonomics
Ergonomics is one of the most important things to consider when identifying playable ocarinas. To be ergonomic means that an ocarina has been designed to support the needs of the player, and to be comfortable to hold.
Unfortunately, many ocarinas on the market were designed prioritising visuals over playability. Ergonomics is also not a 'one size fits all' thing, as everyone is different. What is ergonomic for you will not be for everyone.
There are many factors that affect the ergonomics of ocarinas, which are discussed in detail in The ergonomics of transverse ocarinas, but to summarise:
Body shape and support points
The physical shape of an ocarina matters because it is important to find one that feels comfortable to hold. Ocarinas are not rigidly standardised, and ones from different makers have varying hole placement. Some will work better for you than others.
Against popular belief, the shape of an ocarina does matter, as it affects how the instrument feels to hold and balances in your hands. A good quality transverse ocarina will be shaped such that it feels secure when held. It should never feel like you may drop the instrument.
Playable ocarinas are designed with areas besides the leftmost and rightmost finger hole where you can rest your fingers while playing higher notes. They are visually obvious, as in the previous diagram, and fingers can rest there without feeling unstable or sliding off the end of the instrument.
By comparison, ocarinas where the finger holes are butted right up against the ends of the body, and ones which are very rounded in shape will be a lot more difficult to play.
Weight and balance
At a minimum, any transverse ocarina should be able to balance between your right thumb and pinky finger when held parallel to the ground. A slight tendency to roll towards the mouthpiece is OK, but rolling away from you indicates a bad instrument.
If an ocarina has any large visual features, imagine holding the instrument and consider how that feature will impact the balance of the ocarina in your hands. You really don't want dead weight opposite the mouthpiece, as this will cause the ocarina to roll away from you.
The breath curve and tuning accuracy
In a well-made ocarina, as you play higher notes, the breath curve (your blowing pressure) should increase smoothly. It should not be required to abruptly increase or decrease pressure between adjacent notes to play in tune.
It is possible to get a rough idea how well an ocarina is tuned by looking at the sizes of the finger holes. Especially, any ocarina with all holes the same size has not been tuned, and is a bad instrument.
A playable ocarina should look roughly like this. The intervals of the scale can be seen in the sizes of the finger holes, with whole steps correlating to a larger hole and intervals of a half step (semitone) to a smaller one. It is easy to recognise this pattern with a bit of experience.
Beyond this, evaluating tuning accuracy requires playing the ocarina, and checking how adjacent notes are tuned in relation to each other. How to do so is discussed in How to measure an ocarina's breath curve.
Breath curves vary a great deal between ocarinas: they can be relatively flat, or ramp up exponentially towards the high end. However, any variance should be regular. Large irregular changes between close notes indicate a poorly made ocarina.
The sizes of the finger holes indicates the required blowing pressure, with larger holes indicating a higher pressure instrument. See ocarina playing characteristics and timbre.
Surface finish
The impact of surface finish on playability is substantial, but not obvious. Very smooth and shiny finishes are troublesome, as any moisture on your fingers will cause your skin to cling. It makes sliding movements difficult to do smoothly.
This is not a problem with plain finish ocarinas, as the earthenware absorbs finger moisture. It is also far less of a problem with rougher finishes like matte glazes and shellac. See How to identify ergonomic ocarinas.
If you're looking at getting a sculptural ocarina, another important factor is to ensure that visual features have been kept clear of finger holes. Evaluating this requires awareness of good playing technique, and is why I would recommend learning to play an ocarina without visual features first.
Evaluating how an ocarina plays
How an ocarina plays is another strong indicator of the quality of the instrument, such as general sound quality and response time, how long it takes the instrument to start and stop sounding.
To check these:
- Play through the entire range of the ocarina, making sure to use the right pressure to play in tune. The instrument should sound clean, with a balanced timbre between the lowest and highest notes. Poor quality ocarinas will have unstable and airy high notes.
- Vary your blowing pressure. For each note in the scale, vary your blowing pressure from zero, to the point that the ocarina screeches. Better quality instruments will overblow above the named pitch of any fingered note at least a semitone without screeching.
- Rapidly tongue notes. The ocarina should speak almost immediately after the air starts flowing. Response time should be pretty even over the whole range, and should not screech, especially on the high notes.
- Play different scales. For example, the scale of the instrument's key (such as C), as well as a musically distant key (like C sharp). Notice how the notes are tuned in relation to each other. There should not be large pressure errors between adjacent notes.
- Play large leaps between low and high notes. Observe how higher notes respond relative to lower notes, and how the sounding volume balances over the range. Are the high notes much louder, or only a little?
The 'timbre' or tone colour of ocarinas can vary quite a lot between makers. It ranges from very pure to complex and 'reedy'. But as a general rule, a good quality ocarina should sound fairly consistent over the whole range.
An ocarina which sounds especially harsh or airy indicates either that it is being blown too hard or its voicing and windway are badly designed. Sound examples have been provided below.
The relative size of the ocarina's sound hole can somewhat indicate the sound quality of an ocarina without needing to play it. If the sound hole is too large in relation to the chamber volume, the ocarina is going to have airy high notes.
It is worth noting though that the sizes of ocarina sound holes do vary:
- 10 hole ocarinas usually have a larger sound hole than a 12 hole ocarina, where both ocarinas have the same key and pitch range.
- Ocarinas that are designed to be louder also have larger sound holes and need more air to play.
- The visual size of the sound hole changes with the thickness of the chamber wall. An ocarina that is very thick makes the sound hole look proportionally smaller.
The expected size of the sound hole of a 12 hole alto C ocarina is between about 7 and 9 mm in diameter. A 10 hole alto C could have a sound hole in the range of 8 to 10 mm.
If an ocarina is sold as 'needing an acute bend', it is a bad ocarina. The acute bend is a technique where a player looks down and shades an ocarina's sound hole against their chest. It appears to improve the sound quality of the high notes, but as far as I can tell, it is an illusion resulting from sound bouncing off the player's chest into their ears.
This technique is often used as an excuse for poor quality 12 hole ocarinas, and any well-made ocarina will sound cleanly through its whole range without it.
Evaluating the quality of multichambered ocarinas
The same points raised apply equally to evaluating the quality of multichambered ocarinas, for example:
- Feel how the instrument balances in your hands, and ensure that it provides support points. See The ergonomics of transverse ocarinas for more.
- Ensure that tone production is clean over the range of all chambers, and that the timbre is balanced between them.
- Measure the breath curve of each chamber individually, ensure that each chamber has a sensible breath curve with no large arbitrary pressure changes required.
Also, check for pressure differences between the high end of each chamber, and the low end of the next one. This is called the chamber break. In a well-made multichamber ocarina, the two chambers should play in tune at approximately the same pressure.
On multichambers that were tuned to allow harmonies to be played between chambers, you may find that the pressure curve of the second chamber starts at a slightly lower pressure than the high end of the first. As long as it's not excessive, it isn't a problem.
On the whole, you will experience less objective quality issues with multichambered ocarinas than single chambers, as most of them are made as serious musical instruments.
