Few years ago I was traveling through India. While being on a trip around Pune I was visiting some old buddhist caves near Mulshi Lake with some frieds of Mystic Village. At that time I was into experiencing the sound capabilities of this instrument and also experimented with bamboo as an alternative material making flute headjoints.

The sweetness and expressive sound of the Indian Bansuri esp. in the low registers touched me in a way that no other modern concert flute ever did before. And I’m not the only one being impressed by that sound: later (just to do some advertising here) I a had some email conversation with Matti Kähönen from Matit Flutes and he too stated that the sound characteristics of the Indian Bamboo flutes, which might be a result of the fibre structure of the material, actually brought him into experimenting with carbon fibres to build his amazing Matit flutes.

So back to the caves: Their rich reverb brought me to do some recordings with my prototype bamboo headjoint mounted on my 200EUR Thomann flute:
Download audio file (bamboo.mp3)

Now here is some recording of a simular improvisation in the same room using the standart metal headjoint of the flute.
Download audio file (silver.mp3)

The intonation is not where it should be I admit, and actually that’s the point why I stopped investigating in that direction but still I do believe it was just my lack of craftsmanship rather than a fault of the material. So still I’m looking for a flute maker able to perfect my early experimental approches with bamboo headjoints.