This blog is dedicated to the sublime instruments called nose flutes and which produce the most divine sound ever. We have chosen to discard all the native models from S. Pacific and Asia, for they need fingering to be played. We'll concentrate on "buccal cavity driven" nose flutes : the well patented and trademarked metal or plastic ones, plus, by a condemnable indulgence, some wooden craft or home-made productions.

Apr 11, 2016

New RON Nose Flutes (Yoshihiro Sawada) !

Mr. Yoshihiro Sawada is a clever man: to motivate me in relaunching noseflute.org blog, he sent me... many nose flutes as gift! Thank you very much, Yoshihiro, I love your nose flutes!

Mr. Sawada appeared on the public nose flute scene in 2012, under the name RON, with cute clay « mask » hanabue [please see this post, this one and that one], but he soon began building wooden flutes [see here] and what he has become the most famous for : cardboard templates [see here and here].



Yoshihiro Sawada recently sent me very generously a series of nose flutes representing his current research and home made production.

As far as I know, he invented the « business card hanabue », and sent me two beautiful samples. Those nose flutes are perfectly working, with a soft « papery sound », yet not ergonomically adapted to hard cartilaged noses. They are as great as they are simple, as beautiful as they are easy to build. That's a great invention, we should all have (and distribute!) business nose flutes!




RON has made a specialty of cardboard hanabue templates, that are declined in many shapes and sizes (more details on RON's blog). Yoshihiro sent me also postal card nose flutes, one of them experimenting with an asymmetric positioning of the airway:

I received also very large paper nose flutes, totally covering your face when played. Those large sized hanabue are oftenly used as masks and cut following the shape of an animal head (cat, rabbit, etc.)



Last but not least, Mr. Sawada sent me two great wooden nose flutes! Very simple in they shape too, they have the particularity of being as flat as possible. They are real « pocket nose flutes ».



The first one is a regular single flute, made of two pieces of dark wood. Every feature has been made as simple as it is possible, whilst keeping a ergonomical and playability purpose in the design:

Here is a short sound sample played on this RON flute by the Nosy Diva herself!:



The second one is a light color double nose flute, as simple and flat as the dark one. The purpose of a double flute is to provide two tessituras on one instrument — a sharp section and a bass one — and thus, to offer a global wider ambitus range to the player skilled enough to switch from one airway to the other!

Here are sound samples of each airway, the sharp and the bass, still by our beloved Nosymusic representative:

The sharp channel:


The bass channel:


To conclude and send my most grateful thank to Yoshihiro Sawada, we made a little video with the Diva and the RON's double nose flute:


3 comments:

  1. Beautiful and original works, all of them!
    Those wooden noseflutes are really as simple as they are beautiful. I was astonished about the good sound and playability of both models. And the double noseflute is a great invention! I cannot help to imagine a double noseflute in a bigger size for two people to play at the same time. Since I am not an inventor I can only hope someone will built one one day ;-)

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  2. Exactly! Waiting...

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