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’Net Junkie Shawn "Speedy" Lopes |
Little-known flute
evokes emotionsI hadn't heard of him. None of the kids I knew had heard of him, much less purchased any of his records. Yet there he was on my television, sandwiched between "Star Trek" and "Gilligan's Island" reruns, being touted as one of the world's premier recording stars. By the time I had learned of Zamfir, master of the pan flute, he had reportedly sold millions of records (and, for a few dollars more, cassettes and 8-tracks, too) worldwide.
Believe it or not, this pan flute thing is serious business and has been for quite some time. Just ask Brad White, best known as half of the venerable Hoku award-winning instrumental duo White Eisenstein. His Web site at pan-flute.com has logged more than 176,000 hits since its inception in 1999 and generates 6,000 unique hits a month.
Each week, White receives emotional e-mails from pan flute devotees and people touched by its unique sound from such disparate locales as Russia, Japan, the Marshall Islands, Finland, Belgium, Venezuela, Taiwan and Germany, to name a few. They speak of how they have come to find inspiration in the pan flute and how, on occasion, it even brings tears to their eyes.
But as recently as a decade ago, pan flute resources on the Internet were hard to come by. "I'd do a search on the Internet, and I'd get zero results," huffs White with disbelief. "Zero! You type in 'pan flute' any which way you could think to type it -- separate, together, with a hyphen -- and zero would come back."
Education, says White, not commerce, was the impetus for pan-flute.com's creation. "In fact, I kept away from the commercial side of it, and a lot of people say I'm foolish to do that," he remarks, "but I really just wanted a site that people could actually learn about the pan flute."
As the Web site's sole creator, White has been sure to include a history of the pan flute, which takes readers from the age of primitive man to Mesopotamia, from the Vikings to ancient Rome to the present. He has also included a generous 10-minute audio sample of his work, downloadable movies and an interactive option that allows you to "play" the pan flute by moving your cursor over each pipe to produce a variety of tones.
"The feedback has been incredible," White says. "It was like I was able to make contact again with an audience, but this time, with people all over the world. I'm looking to forward to hitting 200,000 visitors."
Note: Web sites mentioned in this column were active at time of publication. The Honolulu Star-Bulletin neither endorses nor is responsible for their contents.
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’Net Junkie drops every Monday.
Contact Shawn "Speedy" Lopes at slopes@starbulletin.com.
