Why I Started Playing the Ocarina

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Is math boring? Put on some epic music and you’ll be sailing across the sea of numbers, conquering the seven seas and defeating the geometry Cthulhu!

I’ve always enjoyed music like "He’s a Pirate" from Pirates of the Caribbean or "Hedwig’s Theme" from Harry Potter. Basically, I really love music from movies and TV series. There’s something about them that gives me such a nice feeling. The ones I’m talking about are of course the epic adventure kind of music. Now I’m not gonna go into a lot of detail, but when I listen to "epic" music, I can enjoy almost anything.

The start of my music journey

This is the reason I started playing the flute, 2 years ago. 2016 was the year I started picking up all sorts of hobbies: drawing, playing the flute and programming. I’m not quite sure why this was the year that that all happened… but I recall feeling jealous about my brother’s hobby, so that might have been one of the reasons. Nonetheless, I really wanted to play the flute. I wanted to play an instrument that could often be heard in the music I usually listened to (and still listen to), so I decided for either violin or flute. As you already know, I never started playing the violin… it was mostly because I was afraid that it would be too expensive, but whoops, the flute wasn’t much cheaper.

So there I was, playing the flute every day for a long time. I tried to play all of the different scores I’d listened to and loved, but to be expected, I failed pretty miserably at most of them. Still, I tried my best and enjoyed every moment of it.

Unexpected turn

Though, early 2017 something happened. I played ever so slightly less every day and some days I just didn’t feel like picking it up at all. This was a point in my life where a combination of increased homework and my will to get better grades took more time away to do other things. In my spare time, I would mostly be programming games or hang out with friends. This led to me forgetting the flute for a while---only picking it up now and then. It also took some time for me to assemble, disassemble and clean it every time and I didn’t like that process. I didn’t play much for a long time, so eventually I decided to quit.

The void

Ever since I quit I always felt kind of empty in a way. Every time I listened to a song that I had played on the flute, I would miss it even more. So I thought I had to pick up an instrument again and I decided it would be a wind instrument, since at this point I was kind of attached to that kind of instrument.
I did some research on different wind instruments. I was looking for an inexpensive, fairly easy to learn and a good sounding instrument. What I found and immediately fell in love with was the ocarina. It was so perfect! Cheap, good sound, fairly easy and no annoying assembly, disassembly or cleaning.

What is an ocarina?

For you who don’t know what an ocarina is, I assume you haven’t played The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. It’s a wind instrument where you cover the holes with your fingers to play different notes. Below is a picture of a 12-hole alto C ocarina. There are many kinds of ocarinas with different sizes and amount of holes. They all have different sounds, some can play a lot higher notes and some lower.

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Almost there!

It was only a week until my birthday, so naturally I wished for an ocarina. Oh, I felt so happy when I got it. I felt like that tiny void in me had been sealed.

Ever since my b-day, I’ve played and practiced the instrument and I’m looking into upgrading to an AC Double Ocarina soon. The double ocarina has a bigger range of tones, because it has two chambers (and more holes) while the one I have now only has one chamber.

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I thought I’d also let you listen to a clip of me playing from the first day of playing. The first thing I decided to try play was a snippet of was the Tetris theme because it had no difficult high notes or anything. As you can hear below, I think I did pretty ok for only just having started playing the instrument. So if you ever want to play a pretty easy and fun wind instrument, I’d recommend the ocarina.