Do you customize your flutes ?

Makers and craftsmen sell nose flutes according to the design they opted for, generally a « functional design » in relation with the possibilities of the material they use, whichever it is, wood, plastic, clay ... Very few makers decorate their work (Roi Bitton, Hiroaki Sasaki, Hanako...). So, many customers/players feel the need to personalize their instrument. Noseflute.org has looked on the internet for those customized nose flutes, and found many.

The Nosy Diva Birdy Kuck, to whom we asked to send pictures of her personalized flutes, proposed us to write a little text to present the topic. We thank her a lot. Here it is :

One of the major tasks a nose flutist is confronted with is the optical aspect of playing and performing the nose flute. Most people tell about associating Hanibal Lecter with the view of the poor instrumentalist. Let alone that fact – even without knowing or having seen The Silent Lambs you cannot help looking stupid or worse with the nose flute. If anybody brings proof of the contrary I will gladly change my mind but that seems very unlikely to me.

If you can deal with looking stupid – which you have with that instrument – you may still want to give it an individual character or use it for certain opportunities. Noseflute.org has a little gallery of  works done by nose flutists all over the world.

Note: the tragic aspect of those little art works is that no matter how beautiful they are they still look stupid in your face ;-) for example look at the angel-winged christmas dream. Wear it and you look like a mix of Fürst Bismarck and Kaiser Friedrich. But we nose fluters certainly go beyond all stupidities to the level of pure art...

Please note also that for the unique Schubert Modell with the whiskers of Franz Schubert, the musical cat, no harm was done to the animal. Just a lot of patience needed collecting the lost ones over the years. A special thanks to Dietling Preiss for the work on that model.

The Nosy Diva Birdy Kuck

The Nosy Diva's customized nose flutes

The Angel-winged Christmas Dream :

The Schubert Modell (made by Dietling Preiss) :

The Golden Bocarina^™ (made by UkeHeidi) :

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UkeHeidi's own « Stupid Schwann » :

And the many pictures found on the net :

On Hiroshi Tachibana's blog, two decorated Bocarinas^™ :

On Kusabuenoi's blog, two other Bocarinas^™ :

Other decorated hanabue on the same blog :

A Humanatone found on Brain-note :

Another highly decorated Humanatone on Darkapril blog :

And here Miss Yoshie (from the band Ankh Aqua) with her Humanatone :

A painted wooden flute on Nakano's website :

And this cute kitten from Rockinn blog :

We want to add this very funny little nest for nose flute, found on Kozakurapon's blog :

Noseflute.org will gladly receive evidences of the creativity of the nose fluting world and is looking forward to your works!