Primitive music 1: Making an elderberry whistle (survival whistle) 🎵
Channel: Make It Primitive
Date: 2020-02-09

Welcome to my "primitive maker cave", where I make a simple whistle from a branch of elderberry wood, using only stone tools and wooden sticks. My next project will be making a real flute with primitive tools. Stay until the end of the video for a sneak peek!

Most of the whistles I have made before only worked when you hold the end hole closed. The one shown here also makes a sound when open. This has probably to do with the shape of the slit that leads the air to the sound hole edge: It should have a bit of a "ramp", so the air is directed at edge and will alternate between flowing over and under it. Getting this right takes a bit of fiddling and luck.

Elderberry is a very common plant where I live, easily recognizable even in the winter, and very useful whenever you need anything tube-shaped. Cut yourself one of the branches that grow straight up, remove the pith that fills its inside, and you've got yourself a nice piece of pipe. Branches that grow from low to the ground tend to have rather small inner diameters, the ones with a wider bore usually branch off further up. If you can, try to use a dead piece of wood (as I did here, hence the decorative spots on the wood), then you don't even have to cut anything off a living plant.

Elderberry wood shrinks a lot when drying out. If you want to build a whistle that keeps working for more than a day, I recommend removing the pith and bark (they do an amazing job at keeping the moisture in the wood) and letting the stick dry out for a couple of days. The wood for the plug also needs to be dry, otherwise it may move or fall out of the pipe once it dries and shrinks.

The stone tools I used are flint ("hornstein") and mudstone, but anything remotely sharp will do. The plug is beechwood in my case, but you can use any type of wood you find.

Please excuse the occasional exposure fluctuations; I have since figured out how to prevent them.

#primitivemusic #primitivesurvival