All About Ocarinas

by Howard Fosdick © FolkFluteWorld.com
New and Updated for 2025

Pick Your Shape and Material

Ocarinas come in three main shapes:

• Transverse, also called submarine or sweet potato
• Inline
• Pendant, also called seedpod

They're made of several different materials:

• Ceramic, also known as clay, baked clay, or porcelain
• Plastic
• Wood

This photo shows a few of the possibilities:

To the left are two transverse ocarinas (or "ocs"). The yellow one is plastic, while the white one below it is ceramic.

In the middle, shaped like TV remotes, are two plastic inlines. You play them extended straight out from your mouth, just like a recorder.

To the right are two pendants or seedpods. Both are ceramic. As you can see, their shapes vary. One fun feature of small pendants is that you can wear them around your neck. They typically come with a lanyard (necklace) for wear.

Fun Pendants

Some pendants come in cute shapes, and many folks enjoy collecting them. Check these out: everything from dolphins, dragon eggs, sea turtles, and a tea cup, all the way to acorns, mushrooms, and butterflies. They're all playable musical instruments.

And by the way, you can both drink from and play the teacup!

Pendants are fun to play and many enjoy collecting them. There's much more to know than what we can ilnclude here. For more about the fascinating pendant universe, see my article Learn to Play Pendant Ocarinas.

All the ocs in the above photo play beautifully. But beware! Some eye-catching specimens do not. You can tell whether an oc is playable by inspecting its fingering holes. If all the holes are the same size, it's strictly for your display shelf. Playable ocarinas have differently-sized top holes.

Look closely, and you can see that these pendants are cute, but they're not playable musical instruments:

If you buy online, you really need to know all the in's and out's of "fake flutes." For more about how to detect them, see my article How to Spot Fake Flutes.

Ocarina Basics

Here are some key facts about ocarinas:

Key: You can buy an oc in almost any key. Here are the common sizes and pitches:

The left side of this photo shows three transverse ocarinas. From top to bottom they are an alto C, a tenor, and a bass.

The right side of the photo shows three seedpods. They are a C soprano, an alto C, and a tenor.

A Caution on Terminology

1. The key of the instrument
2. Its lowest note

Range

The big advantage to ocarinas is that they're so easy to learn to play. Plus, they're portable, durable, and inexpensive.

On the downside, they play a limited range of notes. The number of notes they can play is dictated by how many fingering holes they have:

The range includes all sharps and flats. It's enough to play any tune you like, but sometimes you'll have to play a tune in a key your ocarina can handle.

Multi-chamber ocarinas overcome these range limitations. They have either two or three different enclosed chambers, each set to a different pitch range.

You pick the range you want by blowing into one of the different mouthpiece slits, and also moving your fingers to the appropriate set of finger holes. So they can play from two to three full octaves.

These photos show that you can recognize multi-chambered ocs by their multiple rows of fingering holes.

Multi-chambered ocarinas are both harder to play and more expensive, so stick with the common single-chamber oc for your initial purchase. I only mention these advanced ocs here so that you're aware of the possibilities.

Verify The Tuning

The problem is that a few ocs are not in tune with standard concert pitch -- a C major oc might not actually start its scale with an accurate C major.

Other ocs start on an accurate base pitch, but are not in tune with themselves. In other words, some notes don't sound at the proper relative pitches to the base note.

And many ocs are in tune except for one or two notes. The out-of-tune notes are typically the highest or lowest ones, or sometimes the sharps and flats.

How do you know the oc you want to buy is in tune?

One tip is to buy a name brand ocarina from a trusted seller for your first oc. Avoid the home-made oc on Etsy or the cute collectible unless you've verified they're accurately tuned.

My recommendations for your first oc are below.

Listen to Sound Samples & Read Reviews

The best way to ensure you're buying an ocarina you want is to hear how it sounds. Either play it yourself before purchasing, or listen online to sound samples.

• Listen with a keen ear to the highest and lowest notes. Do they sound clearly and are they in tune?
• Studio equipment -- microphones and post-play editing -- can make a big difference in what you hear. Is the audio unfiltered or has it been "cleaned up" by audio-editing software?
• You may not sound as good as the skilled player you listen to

To ask questions before you buy, post queries at The Ocarina Network's website, their Facebook group, and at Reddit's Ocarina Community.

Go With A Trusted Seller and Brand

I always like to know who makes any item I buy, don't you?

Hard to believe, but that's not always easy to figure out with an ocarina! Many of the biggest ocarina sellers -- trusted names like Songbird Ocarina, Thomann Music, STL Ocarina, and Stein Ocarinas -- often don't tell you who makes the ocs they sell. To add to the confusion, they may both import ocs and manufacture their own.

Since sellers don't always label makers, the only way to discover this is to do some googling. By cross-checking websites, you can usually determine an oc's manufacturer.

I've found consistent quality in name brands like Focalink and Night by Noble. OcarinaWind and TNG also produce excellent musical instruments, but avoid their lower-end, lower-priced ceramic offerings.

About lower-priced clay ocarinas... this is where that tuning issue I mentioned sometimes pops up. Inexpensive clay ocs often work fine, but you're taking a chance on quality control. Buy 10 top-rated ceramic ocs from Amazon in the $20 to $40 range, and you'll have a group of good ocarinas. But you might run into one or two that are off-key on a note or two, or have mediocre tonal quality on some notes.

If you're buying your first ocarina, you definitely do not want to face such issues. You'll never know whether it's you or the ocarina that is at fault for some shortcomings. This is why I'd recommend a brand-name plastic oc for your first purchase.

My Recommendations

So what's the bottom line? Is there a specific oc a beginner should buy?

Although any ocarina might work for you, nearly everyone starts with a transverse Alto C. It's a good first purchase because it fingers intuitively, plays the widest range of notes, and plays sheet music written for other C major instruments, such as the soprano recorder. Plus, you can easily find a quality instrument that plays in tune.

For a first Alto C in plastic, the choice is easy. Many in the ocarina community agree that two excellent ocs are the Focalink Bravura and the Night By Noble. Here they are:

These are usually priced in the $30 to $40 range. They can be purchased at Songbird Ocarina, Stein Ocarina, or Amazon. Plastic molding processes ensure you don't face any quality control risks.

Making a recommendation for a ceramic Alto C is more difficult. Many of the ceramic Alto C's in the $20 to $40 range at Amazon boast 4 1/2 reviewer stars. And many of these ocs are excellent.

But you always stand a small chance of getting a poor specimen due to uneven quality control. It's not at all unusual to get a good ocarina -- that voices one or two notes out of key. Or, that has excessively airy high notes. Or muffled low ones.

The way around this issue with ceramic is to jump to a higher price range. For example, in the $80 range I can recommend either Focalink's Pastoral or Rose series ocs. Both offer consistently high quality at a reasonable price:

If you're concerned about the cost of a quality ocarina, be sure to comparison shop. For example, Focalink ocs are made in Taiwan and sold through resellers in the US and EU. You'll find substantial price variations based on availability, shipping costs, and currency conversions.

Learning to Play

Once you've bought your oc, you've got everything you need! All the other resources you need are free:

Summary

While ocarinas are among the easiest instruments to learn to play, it can be challenging to make risk-free purchases online. I hope these tips help.

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