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Are Mountain Ocarinas^® serious musical instruments? Despite the relative ease of learning to play them, they are indeed serious musical instruments, capable of great expressiveness and beauty. After that trip to Boston, I began a determined search that eventually yielded a few very fine ocarinas (though many of the models I found would best be classified as toys). Yet, even the good ones were not quite the instrument I dreamed of. They needed a little more range, the fingering on most was not suitable for technically challenging music, and often they lacked either sufficient resonance or clarity of tone. Besides all that, some were just too fragile to have in my pocket when wrestling on the ground with my boys!

My earliest attempts at making ocarinas produced instruments that were little better than that first one I had purchased. It was only after long periods of painstaking prototyping, research, testing of hypotheses, and notebooks full of scrawled observations that I gradually determined the design factors and production methods needed to consistently achieve the quality I sought. These efforts have resulted in ocarinas with the tonal range and quality, ease of fingering, volume, and expressiveness worthy of public performance and serious dedication. Each one is meticulously constructed to exacting specifications — to a thousandth of an inch for some of the vital tolerances. Furthermore, the wood used in my ocarinas is specially processed for hardness and stability, making the instruments exceptionally tough, durable, and resistant to extremes in temperature and humidity.