“To make a mediocre ocarina is really quite simple,” Karl Ahrens remarks, “But to make a superb ocarina, I can’t tell you the time I’ve spent prototyping.” As a child, Karl watched his father, a plant physiologist, perform experiments with careful controls, note-taking, and well-constructed hypotheses.
Karl applied that scientific method while prototyping for his ideal ocarina. He has spent years testing designs, taking notes, and isolating variables. “You have your hypothesis,” Karl explains. “You keep notes, you go with the best, and you keep moving closer and closer to what you’re looking for.”
Beginnings of an Ocarina Maker
Karl Ahrens’ more than decade-long quest for the ideal ocarina began with a chance meeting on the sidewalks of Boston. “I stopped to talk to this Honduran street vender,” Karl recalls. “He had his blanket out on the sidewalk with all these clay flutes on display. I had just stopped to talk, but I was instantly smitten with the idea of a pocket sized flute.” Karl purchased one of the colorful ocarinas for a couple bucks but was disappointed to find it essentially unplayable.
Even though the toy flute was incapable of producing a proper scale, the idea of a portable instrument kept nagging at Karl’s mind. He was nostalgic for the music he’d played growing up, but as a busy adult, he’d never found the time to drag out his saxophone and get back to playing it. A simple instrument that could be played on a hike, while waiting in the car, and any time he had two minutes to spare struck him as a refreshing solution.
Karl began searching for quality ocarinas. “Eventually, I found some pretty good ones,” he remembers. “But the more instruments I tried, the more I started dreaming of making my own, because I wasn’t finding exactly what I wanted."
Karl Ahrens’ Dream of a Better Ocarina
Karl was never quite satisfied with any of the instruments he tried. “People have different opinions about ocarinas,” he comments. “Some prefer these soft, gentle blowing ocarinas that require very little breath pressure. I wanted an exciting instrument I could play with a lot more passion. I wanted to be expressive, and I felt limited by instruments that required me to blow with this dove-like tone. To be fair, you could have ten different musicians who would want ten different things from an instrument.”
Karl began prioritizing the qualities he wanted most in an ocarina. “Many ocarinas I found didn’t have a wide enough tonal range for the songs I wanted to play,” he remembers. “Some didn’t have a fingering pattern that flowed easily enough to promote virtuoso playing. And some of the nicest ocarinas I had were just too quiet, too subdued."
"They didn’t respond well to energetic, passionate playing. When I tried to join in with other musicians, those ocarinas couldn’t project enough for me to participate in a satisfying way. I wanted a little bit more range, a better fingering pattern, and more sound. I also definitely wanted instruments that were pretty unbreakable. That was part of the magic of a take-along flute. Clay ocarinas, which a lot of people love, were not attractive to me because you have to be so careful with them.”
Making an Ocarina
When it became clear the ocarina Karl sought was not to be found, he took on the enormous task of creating his own. “With most instruments,” he says, “it’s a fairly established science. In this case, though, there were people making ocarinas like they made them in the 19th century, or even people making ocarinas like they did thousands of years ago. But I couldn’t find ocarinas that matched my view of a superb ocarina. That’s why so much experimentation had to go into this.”
To make an ocarina with an extended range and good strong volume proved a challenge. “I’m thankful I didn’t have a clue how hard it would be,” Karl admits, “because I probably would not have started."
In the beginning, he was underfunded. His brother-in-law donated a drill press to the cause, but Karl had volumes to learn about machinist’s tools and methods. Additionally, Karl had to immerse himself in research concerning physics and acoustics to gain direction for his experiments with various materials, production methods, and designs.
Despite the difficulties, it’s clear Karl enjoys the puzzle. “I do love the investigation,” he confides. “When I have time, I just really love the experimentation and testing of different variables.
I have literally hundreds of prototypes that have gone into some of our present designs,” Karl remarks, “as well as dozens of prototypes that have to do with several products we haven’t brought to the market yet. For example, we have a design for a two-octave ocarina that is really something special. There are ocarinas that will play with this range, but they’re much more difficult to play than our design. Our design plays as easily as our present ocarinas but also has that extended range.”
Clearly, Karl Ahrens is not an ocarina maker who will rest on his current accomplishments. His patient approach to craftsmanship is a continuing process whose goal is to improve on an exceptional instrument by experimenting to make every aspect incrementally better each time he revisits it.
Readers may be interested to check out a review of Karl’s ocarinas as well as a history and introduction to the pocket-sized instrument that sparked his interest for so many years.
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