saz-syrnai (traditional Kazakh instrument)

robinboyd

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My wife has this thing where she collects wind instruments or whistles from places she has been. She spent some time in Kazakhstan about a decade ago and came back with what looks like an ocarina but is in fact a "saz-syrnai," which is a traditional Kazakh instrument. Does anyone have any experience with them?

The only resource we have found is this youtube video:



By watching the video, we were able to work out a general principle behind fingering and worked out the following notes - Bb, C, D, Eb, E, F, and G. I think I can work out how to play an A as well, but we were tired and went to bed before we got there. Now I know that that's a Bb major scale, except for that damn natural E, which I can't work out the logic behind. Does Kazakh music use some weird scale or something?

The other thing is that the finger placement that results in a Bb on ours seems to play an A in the Youtube video, is that guy's instrument playing in A?

Anyway, any help would be appreciated.
 
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Interesting. That's a new one, even for me. I'd say the E is just the flatted 5th, not a part of the base scale.
 
You can see why it had us a bit stumped. We started out by googling "how to play the ocarina" and worked out pretty quickly that what we were holding was not an ocarina. I think I might tune one of my ukes to Bb tuning and see if we can play a duet with it.
 
I'd say it effectively is an ocarina, just with an unusual scale. I've seen ocarinas advertised in pentatonic minor, natural minor, major, "oriental" and others.
 
Well, I suppose it is in the ocarina class of instruments, but it was a bit tricky trying to work out the fingering of specific notes when it doesn't match any of the instruments that are usually called ocarinas.
 
I just sat down with my wife to try it again and the same fingerings yielded totally different notes this time. This is ridiculous.
 
You can change the pitch with your breathing. So if you have tuner and are trying to match a pitch to a fingering, you need to get your breath just right. Which would be hard if you don't know what the pitch is supposed to be.
I suggest that you look up the fingering for a 6 hole ocarina and see if you can adjust your breath to get the pitches shown.
One of the great things about using a wind instrument for teaching is that you can adjust the pitch while you are playing with your breath, great for ear training.

Hi Bill,

I can tell you that the fingering is very different from a standard 6-hole ocarina. That was the first thing we tried.
 
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