Description

Eastern Red Cedar With Turquoise Painted Detail Shown

Size 1″ X 21″

Our Siyotanka (Lakota for flute or whistle) is inspired by a Lakota made flute from the 1870’s that’s now in the Smithsonian Museum. It is a Bb minor pentatonic style tuning. It has a very easy reach, measuring 4-1/2 inches, top to bottom finger hole. Our Siyotanka is available with turquoise painted highlights and black bird beak, natural cedar wood with a painted black beak and several other colors. We have tooled this flute to appear as if it were made with an antique drawknife, leaving all of those impressions in the wood. It also has an old style sound, slightly more airy than our concert flutes. We use a superior one-piece construction method on our Siyotanka. This gives you a more solid flute without delamination concerns, which some two-piece flutes face. Drilling is also very accurate, in as much as I can bore down the center of the flute, +/- .002 inch, or 1/2 the thickness of a dollar bill. Drilling also makes for a prettier flute, without the glue lines. Our flutes have a six-hole, extended range tuning. This is sometimes called a Mode 1-Mode 4 tuning. They have a total of 15 notes, covering an octave plus a minor third. They also cover a 12 tone chromatic octave within the 15 note scale. This is the standard tuning used by most flute makers. A finger chart is included with your new flute, showing how to achieve each of the 15 notes.

Our flutes have a hand-rubbed finish, that includes four hand sandings (inside and out) and a final steel-wool rub.  This process takes over 4 weeks.  You’ll feel and see the difference our finishing makes.