Fue!

    For a lot of kumi daiko groups, fue are a way to add melody to the rhythm and increase the depth and appeal of their performance. Though I never play during performance (then I wouldn't get to drum! I've begun to get more fond of the idea of playing fue with the group, however. Maybe just one song . . .) I have played and made fue for years. Don't misunderstand. I'm hardly an expert. More so just an avid enthusiast. I thought it might be interesting to put some of my fue exploits here along with the drums.

   I tend to make flutes in batches. Since I buy my bamboo in ten foot lengths it's just not convenient to to leave them in one piece (difficult to store). I measure the inside diameter of one end of the bamboo stick with a caliper, making sure I'm not measuring at a node where the inside diameter narrows, then using this as a bore size, I measure the length of a flute plus the additional length of the head and add another few inches for errors in calculation, mark it and cut it off . Next I measure the inside diameter of the remaining long piece and complete the whole process again until I have cut the whole ten feet into flute longish segments. That will be a 'batch' of flutes.
   You may be asking yourself  "what's the length of flute?" That's determined by multiplying the diameter of the bore by 23. The length of the head just has to be enough for you put the stopper in the flute. Past that it's only a matter of personal taste. You can make it longer or shorter, whatever's comfortable. Then, as I said, add some at the bottom to allow for errors. Here's a diagram to help clarify.

   I do all my measuring in metric. It makes the math a whole lot easier.
   Once I have all the lengths cut I use a steel rod to knock out the intra-nodes. (that's just a fancy way of saying the interior walls that prevent bamboo from just being a tube). Once they're knocked out I grind them down to smooth out the bore of the flute. I start out with nothing more than a threaded rod I picked up at the hardware store, then I move on to 60 grit sand paper affixed to a dowel or rod. I spend a fair amount of time with the coarse sand paper to make sure the bore doesn't get narrow where the nodes are.
    Now that I have a bamboo tube with a fairly straight sided bore, I shave the nodes off the outside. I just take my trusty block plane (the one I use for drum bodies) and carefully shave down the nodes until the outside of the tube is fairly smooth. You have to be careful because bamboo splits in long splinters along the grain, and if you dig too deeply with the plane it can tear big chunks out of the body of your flute. When the nodes are evened out I sand out the tool marks with that same 60 grit sand paper.  I end up with a pile of proto-flutes that look something like this.