The Forest Flute

In the summer of 2022 I went back to my home country of the Netherlands. While staying in my parent’s camping house, I felt tons of inspiration to do something musical, but as I didn’t have access to any of my gear I couldn’t do much. I did, however, find a little handmade flute in one of the cupboards. After inspecting it and trying to play it, I noticed it was usable, if a little bit pitchy…

As I’d taken to doing long jogs in the forest every other day, I thought to myself how nice it would be to attempt to record the flute in the Dutch national forest, De Veluwe. Though the samples had to be cleaned up a lot with Izotope RX, I did manage to capture birdsong in the samples as well, which gives the flute a mystical sound. Besides this, I also had to pitch correct the flute due to my lack of steady breath and the fact that this flute was likely made by a hobbyist.

While playing it, I noticed that the sound echoed/reverberated off of the trees in a very pleasant way. Though I couldn’t quite capture this with just my phone as the recording device, I managed to emulate the sound by recording the flute in 3 different locations. I then panned the different samples Left, Center, and Right to give a wide sound, like it is all around you in the forest. After this, I used Decent Sampler effects to get the “treeverb effect” by combining Reverb with a tad of Delay. I’ve set up the instrument to automatically have this factored in, but you can turn it off if you want to.

I hope you can get some good use out of The Forest Flute!