Hello and welcome to Passionflute!
My name is Ethan Smith and I’m the flute maker here. You may have been wondering looking around this site why on earth the flutes I make are made from ceramic.
Well if you are interested in finding out how I came to make these instruments, keep reading and find out the story behind Passionflute.
Played With Passion
I am PASSIONATE about flutes. I can’t track exactly when the flame that is my love of these instruments was first lit, but I remember being captured by the control over tone and dynamics that flautists were able to have over their instruments. I loved their sound and the expressive potential but also the sheer diversity. At the time I played ocarina and while I love the tone of those instruments, variance and expression is a weakness of the ocarina, as changing volume also changes your pitch and pushes you out of tune. That, however, is one of the biggest strengths of flutes and I knew I absolutely had to try these beautiful instruments. Good quality Boehm (western concert) flutes are expensive however and I didn’t feel I could ask my single mum to shell out nearly a thousand dollars on one of these instruments, so instead I bought a bamboo flute from china.
Calling this thing a flute, though, is generous as, in reality, it was more of a hollowed out stick with holes drilled into it. It’s tuning was terrible, it was incredibly difficult to play and it’s tone was thinner than the material it was made from!.. And I absolutely loved it.
It may have been one of the most basic cheap and frankly terribly unplayable pieces of bamboo in the world but it was at least my frankly terrible, basic, cheap piece of bamboo!
After persevering with the my glorified stick for some time, I had graduated to playing a Boehm flute when I was present for a performance of Irish music. Here I had my first experience of listening to a conical flute and it was awe striking, like falling in love with the flute all over again. The beautiful mellow sound and exceptional woody tone was exactly what I was after from flute playing! Yet the prohibitively high prices of instruments once again lead me to be unable to afford one.
But the story didn’t end there.
Made with passion
Unable to afford a new conical flute, I instead purchased an antique one in exceptionally poor quality and endeavoured to restore it. As I mentioned, I had also been playing ocarina and had spent some time attempting to make them, and if I could make an ocarina, maybe I could fix a flute! At this point an assessment popped up at my university and I had been planning to use my ocarinas as the subject of a presentation I was giving: but then had a realisation. If ocarinas are made from clay, why not flutes?
I immediately scrapped the ocarina presentation and got to work with attempting to design a flute made from clay.
It took me much longer than anticipated to get to something even halfway decent but when I did I excitedly shared my findings in a presentation that got a lot of interest. People were caught off guard by these ceramic flutes and some, both flautists and non-flute players, were even interested in buying them.
At this point, I had another realisation…
So few people play the flute because it is very inaccessible. Used student flutes cost more than new student guitars and the care required to maintain a metal flute, let alone a wooden flute, very much must put people off. And the constant swabbing and polishing of metal flutes and oiling of wooden flutes creates this hassle that stops experienced players from simply taking out their instruments to enjoy them.
These ceramic flutes could open up a whole new world to so many people!
To beginners interested in dipping their toes in, it could be an affordable start with an instrument that’s actually nice to play and to experienced players, it could be a fun instrument that they don’t have to worry and care about so much-with the added benefit of being pretty and colourful.
Just like how ocarinas were to me as a child.
And so I set out on a mission to design a flute specifically aimed at bringing the passion out of people, the PassionFlute. Inspired by the incredible tone of old conical flutes that captured my attention all those years ago, but informed by modern flute design principles, PassionFlute aims to bring passionate flute playing to more people by breaking down those walls of inaccessible flute playing and allowing more people to have greater access to enjoyable, different and enticing flutes.
That is the purpose of PassionFlute.
Made with Passion. Played with Passion.
