Aulos: how to

[AncientEchoes]

Hello folk,

I found the forum after many days searching a way to make my own aulos, the ancient greek flute (or oboe )
I'm just a musician, sound designer, composer and not the best one to make instruments.
Reading books I didn't find what I was looking for and while I'm still waiting for an answer from aulos makers, after many days I haven't been able to make my own one.
Internet offers some pages about reed's making but I'd like to know if someone would be able to give me and to anyone who wants to make an ancient instrument, the right way to make it, since it looks easy to build but it's not.
Sorry for my english which is not the best and hope someone love the auloi like I do.

[brianholton]

Hi

I believe you need to find someone in Sardinia who makes or plays the launeddas, which I think is the closest surviving relative of the aulos.

Here are some YouTube clips: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=launeddas

Wikipedia has links to some good sites: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launeddas

That page links to Barnaby Brown's site http://triplepipe.net He's a Scottish piper who plays launeddas and explores its possibilities for the music of late antiquity in the north .

I hope this helps

b

[AncientEchoes]

Hello Brian, thanks.

The launeddas has been my first thought since I live in Italy.
I tried to contact one of the biggest launeddas makers weeks ago (via emails, facebook... ) but for some reasons he didn't reply to me, not yet.
So I went to the beach looking for a good river cane,I picked some of them, maybe too thin, maybe not, and started to try making this aulos. Easy to make some holes but hard to understand how to make the little tongue into the reed

[Tunborough]

As I understand it, the aulos was probably a double-reed instrument, like an oboe. Easiest solution is to buy a ready-made oboe reed from your local music store. If you want to make your own, here's a pretty thorough explanation: http://www.oboeinsight.com/instruction/ ... -part-one/. You'll be starting from a piece of arundo donax cane, which may or may not be readily available.

Uilleann pipe chanters are also double-reeds, you can find lots of reed making advice over at the Uilleann Pipe Forum. Lorenzo has just reported his efforts to make a spruce chanter reed. You can even make one from plastic, with help from David Daye: http://www.daye1.com/bagpage/plasblad.html

The photo you posted looks more like a bagpipe drone reed, which is a single-reed affair. Lorenzo's other recent posts provide a wealth of information on making these from a variety of materials, starting with forsythia, with instructions on how to make one yourself.

[AncientEchoes]

That's it. I'm going to buy the oboe reed and I'll try with this, basically once I put the reed into the arundo cane with the holes in the right place, the sound should be there. I'll have time to prepare one reed by myself in the launeddas style.
Thank you so much folk and I hope to post a video soon, because from what I've seen surfing internet, many guys would make an instrument like this. Now I just need some arundo canes, since the first ones I got are not arundo but phragmites australis.

[Yuri]

Oboe reeds (and, for that matter any other orchestral instrument reed) are highly specific to the instrument they are designed for. An oboe has a sharply conical bore, starting with just a few mm across, and culminating in a large bell. The auloi had invariably cylindrical bores, ranging from some 5-6 at the narrowest to soma 12 or so mm diameters. An oboe reed won't do anything in a bore like that. The best bet is a Turkish or Armenian duduk reed, but it's practically certain that the originals were rather smaller. However, in the West these two instruments are the only ones that use a cylindrical bore with a double reed. All other cylindrical bore instruments run on single reeds, like the launeddas. (In the East there are a few more related instruments, like the Japanese hichiriki, and there are a few in China as well.)

[Steve Bliven]

.... in the West these two instruments are the only ones that use a cylindrical bore with a double reed. All other cylindrical bore instruments run on single reeds....

Not sure what you were intending to say, but there are any number of bagpipe chanters with cylindrical bores and double reeds, ranging from most practice chanters for highland pipes, to Scottish and Northumbrian small pipes, etc.

Best wishes.

Steve

[Peter Duggan]

Not sure what you were intending to say, but there are any number of bagpipe chanters with cylindrical bores and double reeds, ranging from most practice chanters for highland pipes, to Scottish and Northumbrian small pipes, etc.

Since Yuri actually makes pipes, I'm guessing the only ones where you play the reed with your lips, as opposed to those with capped reeds!

[Steve Bliven]

Could well be, I just wasn't sure and didn't want anyone (else) to misread what he said.

Best wishes.

Steve

[Yuri]

Peter is perfectly right. I do indeed make pipes myself with cylindrical bore and double reeds... I do mean the un-bag variety. In any case, 10mm cylindrical bore (on average) is something that hasn't been done in Europe for a long time indeed , using double reeds. That really is what I meant. The 4mm smallpipe bore is a different category altogether.