A New Era of Custom Ocarinas: Your Key. Your Scale. Your Ocarina.

What if you could have an ocarina made specifically for you? Not just an ocarina in your favorite color or with a design you love, but an instrument customized around the music you actually want to play. What if you could choose the key, the scale, and the look—or even ask for something completely different from a traditional ocarina?

After more than 20 years of designing and making ocarinas, we're excited to announce something we've been working toward for a long time: we can now build a custom ocarina around the way you want to play. Your key. Your scale. Your color. Your design. Your ocarina.

Since STL Ocarina began in 2004, we've created ocarinas in many different shapes, sizes, materials, colors, and styles. From traditional ceramic instruments to plastic, wood, metal, and our newest 3D-printed designs, we've always looked for new ways to expand what an ocarina can be. But there has always been one fundamental part of the instrument that was much harder to customize: the way it actually plays.

The tuning of an ocarina depends on much more than simply making the instrument larger or smaller. The size, shape, and placement of its tone holes all affect the notes it produces, and changing one part of the instrument can affect another. That has traditionally made creating a truly custom ocarina a difficult and time-consuming process.

New design and manufacturing technology is changing that. Through 3D modeling, 3D printing, extensive testing, and a lot of experimentation, we now have much greater control over individual tone holes and the notes they produce. We can precisely modify an instrument, test it, make adjustments, and continue refining it. That opens up possibilities we've never had before.

One of the first things you can customize is the key. C Major is one of the most common ocarina tunings, and for good reason: it's versatile, familiar, and works beautifully for a huge range of music. But C isn't always what every musician needs.

Maybe you want to play alongside another instrument. Perhaps a particular song works better in another key, or you simply prefer the sound and range of a lower or higher instrument. Our new process allows us to create a custom ocarina in different keys, giving musicians more choices than ever before.

Depending on the model, you can now choose from several different keys. Changing the key isn't simply a matter of putting a different letter on the ocarina; the entire instrument has to work together so that the notes remain properly tuned and the ocarina remains comfortable and enjoyable to play. Being able to make those changes with much greater precision is one of the things that makes this new process so exciting.

This is where things get even more interesting. We can now go beyond changing the key. We can change the scale itself.

Most players are familiar with the Major scale, but music contains countless other scales, each with its own character and musical possibilities. A custom ocarina can now be designed around an entirely different set of notes, changing the experience of playing the instrument in a surprisingly dramatic way.

Want something darker and more emotional? Choose a Minor scale. Want something simple, open, and wonderful for improvisation? Try a Pentatonic scale. Want something more unusual and dramatic? A scale such as Double Harmonic Major can give the instrument an entirely different musical character. The physical instrument may still feel familiar in your hands, but the music that naturally comes from it can 

If you're an experienced ocarina player, you may already be thinking of an obvious question. A standard 12-hole ocarina is chromatic, meaning you can already play sharps and flats. Technically, you can play Major, Minor, Pentatonic, and many other scales on the same instrument. So why would you want a custom ocarina built around one particular scale?

The answer is that being able to play a scale and having an instrument designed around that scale are two very different experiences. When the notes of a particular scale are built directly into the natural fingering progression, the player can interact with the instrument differently. Instead of thinking as much about which notes belong—or don't belong—you can focus more on listening, experimenting, and making music.

The Pentatonic scale is a perfect example. Take the C Major Pentatonic scale: C – D – E – G – A – C. On a standard C Major ocarina, all of those notes are already available, but F and B are also part of the normal fingering progression. If you want to improvise using only the Pentatonic scale, you have to remember to skip those notes.

With a custom ocarina designed specifically around the Pentatonic scale, those unnecessary notes can be removed from the natural progression. Instead of constantly thinking about which notes to avoid, you can move through the instrument more intuitively and concentrate on what you're hearing and creating.

This can make improvisation especially enjoyable. For a beginner, it can make musical experimentation much less intimidating. For an experienced musician, it can encourage melodies and patterns that might not occur as naturally on a conventional instrument. Sometimes changing the instrument changes the way you think about music.

The scale you choose can dramatically change the personality of your custom ocarina. A Major scale can feel bright, open, and familiar, while a Minor scale immediately creates a darker and more emotional atmosphere. A Pentatonic scale can feel spacious and natural, making it particularly enjoyable for free improvisation.

A Double Harmonic Major scale—C, D♭, E, F, G, A♭, B, C when starting on C—creates another completely different sound. Its distinctive intervals are found in musical traditions from several parts of the world and give melodies a dramatic character that immediately sets them apart from the familiar Major and Minor sounds heard throughout much of Western music.

Play the same simple melodic idea on several of these instruments and the feeling can change completely. That's the power of changing the scale at the instrument level. Instead of constantly adapting your playing to the instrument, we can begin adapting the instrument to the music you want to create.

This is the idea we're most excited about. There isn't one "best" custom ocarina, because different musicians want different things from their instruments. A songwriter might want an ocarina in a particular key to fit an original composition, while someone who loves improvisation might want an instrument where the available notes naturally work well together.

Another musician might be interested in exploring a particular musical tradition and want an instrument built around one of its characteristic scales. Someone else might use the ocarina for relaxation or meditation and prefer a simple scale that encourages slow, intuitive playing. And someone may ask us for something we've never considered before.

That last possibility is especially exciting to us. For much of the ocarina's history, musicians have adapted themselves to the instruments available to them. With a custom ocarina, we can begin reversing that relationship. Instead of asking only, "How should I play this instrument?" we can also ask, "How should this instrument be designed for the music I want to play?"

Of course, none of these possibilities matter if the finished instrument doesn't sound good. That's something that's extremely important to us. With all of this new flexibility, we didn't want customization to come at the expense of sound quality.

A different key or scale changes the design of the instrument, but our goal remains the same: the ocarina should have the clear, beautiful sound you expect from an STL Ocarina. Every new configuration requires careful design and testing. Tone-hole size matters, placement matters, airflow matters, and tuning matters. Sometimes changing one small detail means going back and adjusting something else.

The technology gives us new tools and much greater control over the design process, but the final test remains very simple: How does the ocarina play, and how does it sound? A custom ocarina still has to be a great ocarina.

Musical customization is only part of what this new process makes possible. Because these instruments are created using digital design and 3D printing, we can also offer visual choices that would have been extremely difficult with traditional manufacturing.

Depending on the custom ocarina you choose, you may be able to select the key, scale, color, and decorative design. That means two people can start with the same basic ocarina and end up with instruments that look—and play—very differently.

We want your ocarina to feel like your instrument. Not simply an ocarina we designed and put on a shelf, but an instrument created around what you want to play and how you want it to look.

Perhaps the most exciting part of this announcement is that we don't know where it will ultimately lead. Major, Minor, Pentatonic, and Double Harmonic Major are only a few examples of what becomes possible when we can control the tuning of an ocarina more precisely.

There are scales and musical traditions from all over the world that we can explore. There are unusual tunings musicians may want for specific compositions, and there may even be completely new ideas that come directly from the people who play our instruments. The possibilities for the custom ocarina are only beginning to open up.

That's why we see this as more than a new product. It's a new way for us to think about designing ocarinas. For more than 20 years, we've asked ourselves how we can make the ocarina more enjoyable, expressive, and accessible to more people. This technology gives us a whole new way to answer that question.

Now we'd like to turn the question over to you. If you could ask us to build an ocarina especially for you, what would it be? What key would you choose? What scale would you choose? What color would it be? Would you keep the design simple, or would you create something completely different?

We're already exploring new possibilities, and we expect the choices to continue growing. You can explore our 3D-printed ocarinas, or browse our ocarina method books to learn how to play.

And if you have an idea for a custom ocarina that you'd love to see us make, we'd love to hear it. Some of the most interesting possibilities may be ones we haven't imagined yet.

After more than 20 years of making ocarinas, we're entering a new era—one in which the instrument can become more personal than ever before.

Your key. Your scale. Your color. Your design. Your ocarina.