instruments now

Well the ocarinas have mostly settled. I play all my plastics. Both mountain g and c and the black plastic noble. I play hymns mostly, some out of a celtic fake book I have, sometimes with the radio while driving. Stupid me I was on ebay and ended up winning a black noble ceramic on election day, ridiculously cheap. I never thought the bid would hold. I ordered more plastics for Christmas presents (hopefully the wrong people don't read this). If anything the black plastic noble is great for starting and casual use. I also will play and sing from the fake book with uke using the supplied chords. I seriously strongly suggest Uncle Rod's Boot Camp for chord practice sheets. Extremely effective ukulele drills. If someone were to ask me today for a safe conservative ocarina choice for use with performance and ensembling, I would absolutely steer them to buying a pair of poly mountain ocarinas, the 'g' and 'c' versions. Getting them right out of the box in the mail the quality is very high. The upgrade path from the poly doesn't buy much sound wise, mostly looks and a touch on the thumbhole ergonomics. Going over to transverses, well the price starts to jump quite a bit. And here you are dealing with clay which is more a hand process, even the tuning. There's a higher risk of inconsistent production or getting one with a breath curve you don't like. And frankly a 12 hole transverse is almost too hard to get right, its pushing the edge of physics for that type of instrument.