The North Country Workshop
What the museum holds of doubleocarina.com, the Alaskan workshop that learned to make harmony ocarinas from Alan Albright, and on what terms.
A note from the museum
This page records what the museum holds of a website that is no longer online, and what it may do with it. It is not by the people who made it, and nothing from the site is republished here.
The museum’s account of the workshop, with a chronology, is at The North Country Workshop.
The North Country Workshop sold wooden harmony ocarinas from doubleocarina.com — soprano, alto and tenor, each with two chambers, made in Alaska, which is what “North Country” means.
What the site held
A direct-sale shop with an order page for each size, a photo page, customer comments, a news page, a guest book and a links page.
The instruments, in their own description: wooden, two-chambered, played “on one side, or the other or together, playing melody and harmony.” Four holes per side — three on top and one thumb hole — and a range of an octave each. The hardwood varied with what was available, and each buyer was told which wood theirs was.
| tuning | price | |
|---|---|---|
| Double Soprano | the tenor’s keys, an octave higher | $135 |
| Double Alto | about G on the high voice, D on the low | $150 |
| Double Tenor | C on the high voice, G on the low | $180 |
A method book. Introductory Book for The Double Ocarina by The North Country Workshop, 29 pages, $7.00 — “a collection of suggestions, practice exercises and simple tunes.” Whether a copy survives anywhere is not known.
They also sold Tingstad and Rumbel CDs, and — the museum records this without comment — “Bear Tracks and Perimeter alarms for safer camps.”
What the museum holds
187 files, 2.3 MB.
| 45 | pages |
| 18 | photographs and illustrations |
| 68 | small images that are page furniture rather than pictures — buttons, rules, spacers |
Saved from the Internet Archive in September 2026, from captures of the workshop’s site taken between April 2002 and September 2022. The files captured in 2024 are not theirs: by then the domain was serving gambling spam, and the capture date is what separates it from their work.
What the museum holds back, and why
Their names are in the copy and not on this site. The workshop’s own pages name them, but a maker who has not been asked is not named here on the museum’s initiative. The story below can be told without it, and is.
The guest book is not published either. It carries the names of customers who signed a visitors’ book on a shop website twenty years ago and had no reason to expect a museum.
Rights, and what is published
Nothing from the site is published. The people who ran the workshop have not been asked.
Alan Albright’s half of the story is a different matter. He has given the museum permission to use his material, so what he did — the blessing, the tutoring, the week in Alaska — may be told from his own account. What the workshop did is theirs to release.
If this is your work, please write to theocarinamuseum@gmail.com.