Hi, I'm Robert

Irish traditional music and Italian Ocarina

I play Irish traditional music on Italian type ocarinas, using an instrument of my own design.

I first discovered the ocarina in 2007 through the playing of David Eric Ramos on YouTube, being immediately captivated by the distinctive sound of the instrument. The next few years I would listen to David and others, but did not consider learning to play myself, having no background in music.

That changed in 2011 when I was working in web programming and wanted something to do that did not involve computers. I bought my first ocarina and started learning to play in the evenings after work.

Rather than playing video game music as many ocarina players do today, I started adapting Irish traditional music to the instrument, focusing on authenticity and basing my playing style on tin whistle technique. The interest in Irish music may have been inspired by my gran who would often play folk dance music to me in the car when I was a child.

Ocarina Making - Pure Ocarinas

I am the owner and maker behind Pure Ocarinas, and have been making ceramic ocarinas professionally since late 2011. My focus has been to develop instruments that can keep up with the technical demands of Irish traditional music, and I mainly make instruments in keys that fit this style.

I have also made many innovations in the ergonomic design of transverse ocarinas, and documenting a standard playing technique through my books The Art of Ocarina Making, and Serious Ocarina Player (see below).

Books

I am the author of two books, Serious Ocarina Player and The Art of Ocarina Making:

Serious Ocarina Player

Serious Ocarina Player is a 'bottom up' ocarina method book, and quite different from typical instrument methods. It gradually introduces how the ocarina and music practice work from first principles.

Exercises were kept to an absolute minimum, because the focus of the book is to give the learner the knowledge to craft their own exercises and develop learning approaches to fit their own goals.

The book came about due to customers asking me the same questions repeatedly, and I started writing articles to answer them. The second edition stands at 500 A4 pages, and is surely among the most detailed resources created for this instrument.

Yet it was never intended to be as big as it became. I approached the ocarina from the then-widespread idea that the instrument is 'easy', and yet as I researched, more facets appeared and the book kept getting larger.

Click here to read the book online.

The Art of Ocarina Making

The Art of Ocarina Making details the process of making ocarinas, and covers the physical process, and the reasons behind why design choices are made. Ocarinas are surprisingly versatile instruments, and can vary a lot in their volume and timbre.

The book was originally published in 2011, and was based on notes that I'd made while experimenting and learning to make ocarinas myself. It was subsequently updated to add more information on ergonomics and the process of tuning.

Click here to buy the book.

Workshops and private ocarina tuition

I've taught introductory ocarina workshops at festivals around the UK, including Sidmouth folk festival and Chippenham folk festival. I've also taught a workshop at Budrio Ocarina festival on sympathetically adapting the playing style of Irish traditional music to ocarinas.

Where time allows, I teach a small number of private students via Zoom, and my teaching focuses on the development of strong fundamental technique and early learner independence.

Click here for more information.

How I learned to make things

I have been making things with my hands since I was about 5 or 6. When I was young my dad often made model ships, and also did things like car maintenance and DIY projects. He would invite me to watch what he was doing, and I started to help as I got older.

I first started making model boats with assistance from my dad, before moving to making model aircraft and other things.

My gran often took care of me after school, and her house had a room full of Fishertechnik models that had been made by my grandad, as well as another room full of ZX spectrum computers. I enjoyed playing with these when I went to visit.

I enjoy Victorian technology and used to be obsessed with stationary steam engines, enjoying watching all of the exposed moving parts. I often stayed with my gran over the school summer holidays, and one summer there was a model maker exhibiting at the Derby Silk Mill industrial museum.

Gran took me there many times to see and talk to the model maker, and eventually he invited me behind the table to operate the engines for people. He also taught me how they work.

Some time later, my dad got me a lathe and I learned to use it by myself by reading books like 'The Amateur's Lathe' and others that someone donated to me. Using this knowledge I made a Stuart 10V from castings, then made the engine shown below to my own design using bar stock.

I gradually moved away from metalwork and spent a number of years between when I was about 16 and 20 learning 3D computer modeling and graphics in Blender, how to program in several languages, and learning to use the Linux operating system.

The image below is a 3D rendering (digital artwork) I made in Blender around 2008:

Today I have a general familiarity with woodwork and metalwork by hand, and can handle most 'DIY' type projects without difficulty. Unfortunately I have not had the time to work on these kinds of things recently due to my work with the ocarina.

I can pick up other hand skills easily, and most recently I've been slowly learning the basics of how to sew clothing.

Social dancing

I enjoy social dancing, particularly Contra, Ceilidh, and Balfolk. Contra and Ceilidh are both quite simple, being essentially 'walking to the music', and the fun comes from interactions with other dancers and movement patterns within the group as a whole. For example, a typical contra dance:

The simplicity of the base of these dances enables improvisation such as twirling flourishes . Some people expand on this by incorporating aspects of swing dance, and / or more complex stepping.

Balfolk dance broadly refers to an amalgamation of traditional dances from France and continental Europe. It includes some group dances like the Chapelloise and Gavotte de l'aven, and many couple dances like Bourree, Waltz, Mazurka and Schottische.

My interest in these kinds of dance may also originate from my gran, who did many forms of folk dancing including Playford and longsword dance. She often talked about it with me when I was a child.

Agender skirts in contra dance

I've written / collaborated on a number of articles on the phenomenon of agender skirt wearing within the contra dance community:

My views on neurodiversity

Not all people's brains work in the same way, just like there is diversity in animal species, and this is called Neurodiversity. I do not consider such differences 'disorders' in the sense of a biological 'malfunction', they simply exist.

Humans are biologically evolved animals who's innate nature and behavior were created through natural selection, what individuals can reproduce? To me it makes perfect sense that different neurotypes will exist, because in the real world there are many different ways of being successful, the world is not the same everywhere, and biology is good at exploiting that.

That being neurodivergant can be disabling today is a symptom of society. There are many different ways of doing things, but society at large forces everything to be done in a very limited set of ways, and completely rejects everything else. Thus if someone can not function in that way, they are deemed 'broken'.

However context matters a lot, and it is very easy to find examples of people who were struggling, now absolutely thriving due to a change in environment and elimination of arbitrary rules.

I have shared more thoughts in the following articles:

Programming

Pure Ocarinas website

The website for my business was written from scratch and is mostly server rendered with sparse use of JavaScript for a number of interactive teaching aids. It was written to be fast, using plain code with little abstraction, and features:

A fully custom shopping cart with no user registration.
Content versioning allowing content to be edited and published later.
Content formatting using a custom markup language with an real AST based parser.

BVersion

https://github.com/robehickman/BVersion

BVersion is a simple, centralized version control system for managing binary image and video files. It has features including atomic commits, partial checkouts, and minimal metadata overhead.

The design of the tool largely follows that of Subversion, but minimizes client storage overhead by only ever storing a single copy of each file. Server data storage is in the form of a directed graph similar to git. Client server authentication uses libsodium, and data can be encrypted in transit using TLS.

Writing my two books entailed working with a lot of images and I wrote this tool to help track changes to them. I created BVersion after attempting to use pre-existing solutions for years, and nothing worked reliably, or provided the features I needed. Particularly, a system where commits are made manually was essential.

Articles related to programming

Pets

I've been keeping chinchillas since I got my first one when I was 14, an adorable and very tame Beige (I think) female that I called Chilly. She was so tame that she would sit on your shoulder like a parrot as you walked around.

She died in 2019 of old age. I then adopted 'Babs', an elderly and very large female chin from the RSPCA in Bristol, and had her for a few years until she also passed from old age.

I now have another Beige chinchilla, this one male, called Wiggle. When I was a teenager I also kept tropical fish for a number of years.