Music has been the thread running through my entire life.

I'm a musician, flute maker, teacher, songwriter, and workshop facilitator. I make instruments, I write and perform music, I teach people how to play, and I create experiences that invite people into a deeper relationship with music.

But all of those things are really expressions of the same thing.

Music is how I make sense of the world. It's how I communicate, how I explore, and how I connect with other people.

I've spent more than 25 years teaching music, and over the years I've come to understand that teaching isn't really about putting information into someone's head.

It's about helping someone discover something that is already inside them.

That's a big part of why I make flutes.

The instrument is the invitation. What happens after you pick it up is the journey.

To understand why I make flutes the way I do, it helps to understand how I got here.

Where Music Began For Me

Music started for me as a child, singing in church. But my first formal introduction to music came in seventh grade, when I started playing tuba.

I played for three years, and by ninth grade I had been accepted into the Senior Jazz Quintet. My music teacher, Linda Anderson, told me that at the level I was playing, I could already get a scholarship to just about anywhere in the country.

I never got to find out where that might have led.

My family moved from Colorado to Utah before I played a single note with that ensemble, and I stopped playing in band.

I sometimes wonder where I would be if we had stayed.

Years later, while living in Alaska, a roommate showed me the guitar intro to Dust in the Wind by Kansas.

That was it.

I was hooked.

Within a year I was back in Utah, and music had become an obsession. Some weeks I practiced more than forty hours. I would play until the fingertips on my fretting hand were black and shiny.

I started writing songs about a year after picking up the guitar.

At the same time, I was traveling around the country working as a corporate facilitator, teaching programs like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and Situational Leadership. When I was home, though, I could spend nearly all of my free time playing and writing music.

Eventually, music started finding its way into my work life too.

From Playing Music to Teaching It

I started attending a weekly open mic at Club Suede in Park City. The second time I went, the host couldn't make it. The owner showed me how to operate the soundboard, and I ended up hosting the show.

That became an unexpected doorway into the local music scene.

I started working at the club, playing gigs, meeting musicians, and gradually building a life around live music.

Then, during one of those gigs, a fourth-grade teacher approached me.

She asked if I would teach guitar to a couple of her students.

I had never taught guitar before.

I told her that, but said I was willing to try.

Two students became five.

Five became ten.

Ten became twenty.

As more students came to me, I realized something: if parents were trusting me with their kids and paying me good money to teach them, I needed to really understand what I was talking about.

So I went deep into music theory.

And I loved it.

I still do.

But I quickly discovered a problem.

The way music theory is traditionally taught didn't make much sense to the kids I was teaching.

It was often presented like math class—lots of information, very little immediate musical application. I could see their eyes glaze over when I started explaining theory.

They didn't want to talk about music.

They wanted to make music.

So I started looking for another way.

Finding a Different Way to Teach Music

I began experimenting with visual ways of showing how music works.

One of my first ideas was a map of the chords within a key, showing the relationships between them based on the notes they shared.

The first version was beautiful—but complicated. There was simply too much information.

Then I had an insight.

The seven chords in a key don't all play the same role. The diminished chord in the seventh position is important, but in most popular music it is used sparingly.

So, for the purposes of teaching, I temporarily took it out.

What remained was something much simpler:

three major chords and three minor chords.

Major and minor.

Up and down.

Happy and sad.

Each major chord had a corresponding relative minor—a kind of musical partner sharing many of the same notes and functions.

I arranged the major chords around an upward-facing triangle and the minor chords around a downward-facing triangle, with a circle surrounding them.

The result was a visual map of the relationships between the chords in a key.

And something interesting happened.

The kids got it.

Students who had been learning guitar riffs began experimenting with their own chord progressions. They weren't just learning songs anymore. They were beginning to understand how to make their own.

That idea eventually grew into a larger visual map of the entire Circle of Fifths—something that could even be used as a physical reference while playing.

That experience changed the way I thought about teaching.

I've been exploring that question ever since:

How do we help someone understand music deeply without taking the joy out of making it? 

That approach to teaching continued to grow, and eventually it became something much larger than private lessons.

At the time, I was running my own business as Mark Granger School of Music, teaching out of rented office space above an optometrist in the old Heber City firehouse.

One of my students was a high school student who was struggling in school but was absolutely on fire for guitar. His father wanted to know how I was getting his son's attention when so many other things weren't.

When I showed him the way I was teaching, we started talking about what might happen if we took the idea further.

We partnered and built out a larger music school in Park City called Granger School of Music.

We eventually offered guitar, piano, voice, bass, drums, and DJ lessons, with seven teachers on staff.

For about a year and a half to two years, the school became a significant part of my life. I wasn't just teaching anymore. I was building a place where other teachers could teach, too, using the same larger idea that had been driving my own teaching: help people actually make music, rather than simply learn about it.

A Deeper Path

Around this same time, another part of my life was beginning to change.

I met a Lakota elder named Roland Whitebear at a coffee shop in Heber City. Our meeting was unusual from the beginning. I had a strong feeling that I needed to speak with him, and when I approached him, I said:

“Roland, I need to talk with you about getting right with the Earth.”

He looked at me and said:

“I know. I've been waiting.”

He invited me to sit with him in Inipi, the sweat lodge.

Roland was not pretentious, and he wasn't trying to be someone he wasn't. He had lived through some very difficult things in his own life, found his way through them, and was helping other people find their way as well.

At the time, I was a young father. My son was still an infant, and I was learning what it meant to become a man while also trying to understand my own relationship with the world around me.

For nearly two years, I sat with Roland almost every other week.

He helped me find a deeper connection to what I call Source—to something larger than myself—and that connection eventually gave me the personal strength to make one of the hardest decisions of my life.

I walked away from the music school.

It was the culmination of nearly ten years of my life in music and teaching. From the outside, it looked like I had built the thing I had always dreamed of building. Walking away from it was painful.

But somewhere along the way, I had learned that sometimes the path forward requires letting go of something you worked very hard to create.

I still remember one night in particular.

It was a full moon. We came out of the lodge just as the sun was setting in the West and the moon was rising in the East. Two bald eagles were circling above the property.

I don't pretend to know what any of that meant.

But it felt significant.

Those kinds of experiences became part of my understanding that there is more to life than what we can see, measure, or explain.

When the Flute Found Me

The flute came into my life in a way I never could have planned.

At the time, I had barely played a flute at all. I was an experienced guitarist and songwriter, but the flute was still something new to me.

A loved one surprised me with an early Christmas present: the opportunity to make a bamboo flute with a local flute maker.

We had seen him perform a sound bath with his apprentice, surrounded by dozens of flutes they had made—bamboo, wood, instruments of all different shapes and sizes, even an ocarina made from a mushroom conch.

I never would have thought to make a flute on my own.

But once I started, I was hooked.

My teacher helped me make a large bamboo flute in low A. It was a challenging instrument to begin with. He told me that if I could learn to play that flute, I would be able to play just about any flute.

When we finished it and I put my fingers over the holes for the first time, I had an experience I've never quite been able to explain.

It felt familiar.

I had barely played the instrument, yet something about it felt like I had done it before.

I went home and started making more bamboo flutes. I wanted one in every key.

Then, during one of my visits, my teacher asked:

“Why don't I teach you to make one of these out of wood?”

That first wooden flute didn't seem particularly significant at the time.

But working with my hands to build it put me in a place I have always loved being—a kind of happy place where making something with my hands and making music became the same activity.

For the first time, two things that had been important parts of my life for completely different reasons began to come together.

My lifelong love of music was meeting my love of trees.

I had spent years working with trees as an arborist. Now I was taking wood from a tree and turning it into an instrument that could make music.

That connection felt profound.

There was also a practical reason I became interested in wood.

Bamboo is a wonderful material for making flutes. It's relatively straightforward to work with, but it can also be unpredictable. Bamboo can split when it moves between dramatically different climates.

I learned that firsthand.

I had just finished a small bamboo flute in Portland and brought it with me on a trip to Bend. The change from Portland's humidity to the much drier climate caused the bamboo to split right down the side.

Wood gave me something different.

With wood, I could control much more of the process. I could select the material, shape it, refine it, and finish it. The result was more consistent—not only in how the instrument looked, but in the character and quality of its sound.

And I discovered that I loved the process.

I wasn't just learning to make flutes. I had found a way to bring together the things I had spent my life learning to love.

The Flute Becomes a Craft

After making that first wooden flute with Kyle from a piece of pallet wood, I didn't have much experience working with wood yet. But that flute was really the beginning.

Then something unusual happened.

I was on a tree-care estimate in Hillsboro, Oregon. The client was a woodworker, and he had some overgrown trees hanging over his shop. We talked through the tree work, and eventually our conversation turned to woodworking.

He invited me into his shop to take a look.

He made wooden garden gnomes that his wife painted, and as we talked, he asked me what kind of woodworking I did.

I told him about the flutes.

He looked at me and said,

“I've got something for you.”

He reached into a cabinet and pulled out four pieces of Aromatic Cedar that had already been routed into flute blanks—the four halves needed to make two flutes.

At that point, I had a belt sander and a drill press, but I didn't have the tools to do that part of the process myself.

Yet here was this man, who wasn't a flute maker and had never made a flute, handing me enough material to make one.

He had already done the one thing I couldn't yet do.

I took the pieces home and made one of them into a flute.

Then something very similar happened.

A woman named Lori lived a couple of blocks from me in Portland. During the summer, she held a garage sale almost every weekend.

Lori was a woodworker. She also had terminal cancer and was hoping to make enough money from her sales to retire to Mexico for whatever time she had left.

By then, I had started making flutes and was looking for woodworking tools that would help me take the next step.

I went to one of her garage sales and asked if she had any woodworking tools available. She asked what I was making, so I told her about the flutes and the tools I needed.

She said,

“I don't have any tools right now, but I've got something for you.”

The same words.

I had heard those exact words before.

A few months earlier, a woodworker in Hillsboro had looked at me and said the same thing:

“I've got something for you.”

And now Lori had said it too.

She disappeared into the back of the house and came out carrying an armload of Black Walnut.

She told me that if I made one of those flutes for her, there was a lot more where this came from.

So I did.

I bought a router, and the first wooden flute I made entirely by myself became a gift for Lori.

When I gave it to her, she broke into tears.

She looked at the flute and said,

“It's so beautiful. This will be my heirloom gift to my niece when I pass.”

Then she took me into her backyard.

For thirty years, Lori had been collecting wood—Black Walnut, Oregon Myrtle, and all kinds of other beautiful pieces that she had saved.

And she gave me a generous amount of it.

Some of which has been made into flutes, some I still have.

One of my favorite personal flutes is made from Black Walnut that Lori gave me.

Little by little, I accumulated what I needed to make the flutes myself. A friend loaned me a table saw. I found a band saw at an estate sale. I picked up clamps, hand tools, and all the other little things that slowly turned a collection of tools into a working shop.

I wasn't setting out to build a woodworking shop.

I was simply building whatever I needed to keep making flutes.

Then another unexpected connection appeared.

I was talking with a fellow consulting arborist named Luke after an early morning meeting. He asked what I had been doing outside of work.

I told him about the flutes.

He said,

“I've got to connect you with my buddy Miguel. He makes flutes.”

I asked,

“Are you talking about Miguel Medina?”

He said yes. He had known Miguel for years. Miguel had worked for Luke's father's tree service before eventually leaving tree care to make flutes.

I told Luke,

“Miguel is the guy who taught the guy who taught me to make them.”

We were both surprised.

There was something almost uncanny about it.

About twenty-five years before I would make that same leap, Miguel had left tree care to make flutes.

Luke gave me Miguel's number, and I eventually made the trip to Yacolt, Washington, to meet him at his home and shop.

We became fast friends.

Miguel helped me hone my craft and taught me to pay attention to the little details that can make a big difference in an instrument.

In exchange for his time and expertise, I made flutes that he sold through his website, and we split the profits.

I also spent some time working in his shop, helping him keep up with the holiday rush.

By this point, I was living between two worlds of work. I was becoming more serious about making flutes, while tree care was still the career that supported my life.

Over time, I attended sweat lodges at his place as well. Miguel is an Ojibwe Sun Dance chief, and our relationship became about much more than making flutes.

Meanwhile, tree care was still a major part of my life.

I had gone from knowing almost nothing about arboriculture to becoming a certified arborist, high climber, and consulting arborist. I loved working with trees, solving problems, and being part of a team.

But eventually, the work began to change.

I moved to a different tree care company and found myself in a very different environment. The work no longer felt connected to the things I valued about caring for trees. I was increasingly unhappy, and I could feel myself moving further away from the kind of work environment I wanted to be part of.

At the same time, my flute making was becoming more serious.

I was making better instruments. I was learning more. I had connected with other flute makers, and I could feel that this wasn't just a hobby anymore.

Then circumstances gave me something I desperately needed: breathing room.

For the first time, I had a real opportunity to step away from tree care and see what might happen if I gave flute making my full attention.

It was a leap of faith.

I didn't know exactly where it would lead.

But I knew I wanted to find out.

So I decided to make flutes full-time.

A Place to Land

When I left Utah and moved to Portland, I had also left behind something that had become an important part of my life: the sweat lodge.

My time with Roland had ended when I moved, and for several years in Oregon I found myself missing that part of my life.

Then, while looking for a drum for my daughter's eighth birthday, I walked into Cedar Mountain Drums in Portland.

That was my first time meeting Patrick Pinson.

I bought the drum, but I also found something else there that I hadn't realized I was looking for.

I began attending sweat lodges at Bear Creek, Patrick's 20-acre property north of Carson, Washington.

A mutual friend named Franz was deeply involved in the ceremonial side of the community and was the person who poured the sweat lodge there much of the time. Through that community, the property gradually became familiar to me.

So when I eventually found myself making flutes full-time and, several months later, at the end of a long-term relationship without a clear place to live, it was a place I already knew.

I talked with Patrick about my situation.

Eventually, we drove out to the property together so I could get a feel for the land and the possibility of staying there.

I had been there before, but this time I was looking at it differently.

Patrick was 83 at the time. He had an incredible property and a beautiful shop, but he had told me that he didn't have the time or energy to do much with it.

He looked at me.

He didn't really have to say anything.

It was almost as if he was asking:

“What do you want to do?”

I moved out to the property.

I spent roughly a hundred hours cleaning and organizing the space, and then I started making flutes.

For a while, it felt like all my dreams were coming true.

I was making flutes full-time, living in the Pacific Northwest rainforest, working with my hands, surrounded by trees and water, and learning another craft from someone who had spent decades making drums.

It was a beautiful place to live and work.

I still miss it.

Learning the Drum

Making a drum is a moving meditation.

It is breathwork. It is a series of prayers.

The way Patrick taught me to weave a drum has no knots in its construction. The seven directions of the medicine wheel are woven into the way the drum was made, and the process itself is part of the medicine.

Before we worked with a hide, we would sage and offer a prayer of gratitude and respect for the life of the animal that had given us that material.

Patrick also taught me to be thoughtful about the hide itself—to use as much of it as possible and waste as little as we could.

In the beginning, I would watch him lay the hoops for each drum directly onto the hide. He would carefully score the circumference of each drum, working out how to get the appropriate sizes from the hide while also leaving enough material for the lacing.

Eventually, he had me do it.

We would talk about the practical side of the process, but we also talked about what it meant to do the work in a good way.

Over time, I learned to process hides myself.

Out at Bear Creek, I would prepare the hides and decide what each one would become. Some I turned into drums there. Others I dried and brought back into the city so I could make drums from them later.

But the more I learned, the more I understood that making the drum was only part of the story.

The drum is one of humanity's oldest instruments.

Before there were instruments, there was the human voice. There were probably rocks, sticks, hands, and feet. And somewhere in that ancient relationship between rhythm, sound, and the human body, the drum emerged.

To me, a drum is more than a musical instrument.

It can be a tool for connection, grounding, expression, and ceremony.

There is something deeply familiar about the sound of a drum.

I also use drums and other instruments when I play music in ceremonial settings, including plant medicine ceremonies. For me, music in those settings is about listening, presence, and creating space for whatever needs to happen.

We spend roughly nine months in the womb listening to the heartbeat of our mother.

Before we ever hear music, we hear rhythm.

In the traditions I've been taught, the drum is often understood as the heartbeat of Mother Earth.

And when I make a drum, I try to remember that I'm not simply making an object that produces sound.

I'm making something that carries rhythm, relationship, and intention.

Learning From Other Makers

During the time I was going back and forth between Bear Creek and Cedar Mountain Drums, I had an unusual opportunity to study a lot of flutes.

The shop carried flutes from many different makers—more than sixty instruments from more than a dozen makers at one point.

I spent a lot of time looking at them.

I would pick them up, play them, examine how they were built, and sometimes take the blocks off so I could see what was happening inside.

And I saw an incredible range.

Some of the flutes sounded amazing.

Others were out of tune.

Some were stunning works of art.

Others looked almost like children's toys.

There was a huge range in craftsmanship, construction, materials, and sound.

But Patrick also had a private collection of flutes in addition to what was available in the store.

Some of those were among the finest flutes I had ever encountered.

I had the opportunity to play and closely inspect many exceptional instruments, without having to rush through the experience or worry about someone waiting for me to put the instrument down.

That was an extraordinary education.

I could spend as much time as I wanted listening to an instrument, feeling how it responded, examining how it was constructed, and trying to understand what made it work. Something became clear to me.

The very best flutes had several things in common.

Some of those things were techniques I had already learned from my teachers. Others were completely different approaches to construction that I had never considered.

I began paying close attention to those differences.

I wasn't looking for one person's way of making a flute.

I was learning to recognize what made a great flute great.

That experience became an important part of developing my own approach to flute making.

I took what I had learned from my teachers, combined it with what I was discovering through studying other makers, and began experimenting with ways to make the instrument better.

Every flute I make teaches me something.

And I think that's one of the things I love most about making them: there is always another detail to understand, another piece of wood to learn from, and another way to listen more closely to the instrument.

Developing My Own Approach

As I studied the finest flutes I could find, I began to understand just how many variables are involved in making an instrument work well.

The flue, block, splitting edge, sound hole, bore, chamber, and the geometry connecting all of those pieces don't exist independently. They interact.

A small change in one part can affect the response, tone, volume, tuning, or character of the entire instrument.

The more I learned, the more I realized that flute making wasn't simply a matter of following a set of measurements.

It was a process of understanding relationships.

I began experimenting, listening carefully, and developing my own approach to those relationships.

Some of what I've learned over the years is simply part of my craft. Some of it is difficult to put into words. And some of it is proprietary to the way I make my instruments.

But the underlying principle is simple:

Every decision affects the whole instrument.

That's one reason every flute I make is an individual instrument rather than something produced from a rigid formula.

What I Want the Flute to Become

When I make a flute, my intention goes beyond simply creating the finest instrument I can.

Of course, I care deeply about the instrument itself. I want the tuning to be right, the craftsmanship to be exceptional, the finish to feel beautiful in your hands, and the architecture carefully considered so that it looks, feels, and plays at the highest level I can achieve.

But that's only part of what I'm making.

I want the flute to become a vehicle for self-discovery.

To me, this isn't just an instrument.

It's a companion in personal development.

Music has been my own vehicle for exploring who I am, understanding what I feel, and connecting with something deeper than myself. After a lifetime as a musician, teacher, and flute maker, I've come to see the instrument as more than an object that produces sound.

It can become part of your own journey toward greater presence, awareness, and connection.

That's something I think about when I'm making every flute.

I want you to notice that it was made by hand.

Not manufactured.

Not stamped out.

Made.

Every flute is made to the very best of my ability, and each one carries the subtle evidence of the hands that made it.

There may be tiny variations. There may be imperfections.

I don't try to hide that.

Because every piece of wood is different, every instrument becomes its own thing. No two flutes are exactly alike.

I want you to notice the care that went into yours—the quality of the craftsmanship, the feel of the wood, the finish, the tuning, and the way all of those elements come together.

Every flute is one of a kind.

My goal is simple:

To make the highest quality instrument I can—and then put that instrument into your hands and see where it takes you.

Finding Your Own Voice

When someone takes one of my flutes home, I don't want them to simply learn how to play it.

I want them to find their own voice through it.

My role is to support that discovery—not only from a musical standpoint, but by creating a place where emotions can be expressed, felt, and released.

Sometimes music gives us a way to express something we don't have words for.

And sometimes those are the things that most need to be expressed.

One of the most beautiful things I see is what happens when someone begins to enter a state of flow with the flute.

They stop thinking about whether they're playing the “right” notes.

They stop trying to perform.

They're simply breathing, listening, responding, and making music.

I've had people brought to tears by the beauty of their own playing—surprised that those sounds were coming from them.

I've had people laugh and tell me,

“You make me sound so good.”

But that's really the point.

I'm not making them sound good. I'm helping them discover what they can already do.

When I accompany someone with another flute, guitar, or drum, I can create a musical backdrop that gives them room to shine.

Finding melodies becomes easier. Finding songs becomes more accessible. They can stop worrying about what they're supposed to play and begin responding to what they're hearing and feeling.

And when they experience that state for themselves, something important happens.

They now know what it feels like.

They have a map.

They know where they can go when they pick up the flute again on their own.

That's what I hope this instrument can become in someone's life—not simply something they play, but a way back to themselves.

Where the Journey Continues

Looking back, I can see that none of these parts of my life were really separate.

Music led me to teaching.

Teaching led me deeper into understanding how people learn and discover themselves.

My relationship with trees led me to working with wood.

The flute brought music and trees together.

My spiritual path taught me to listen differently—to myself, to other people, and to the world around me.

And all of those experiences continue to shape the way I make instruments today.

I still make flutes.

I still teach.

I still write and perform music.

I still make drums and share what I've learned with people who want to explore these instruments for themselves.

I'm still learning, too.

That's probably the part I value most.

I don't think any of us ever really arrive. We keep discovering, listening, creating, letting go, and becoming.

That's what music has given me throughout my life.

And that's what I hope to share with others.

The flute is the invitation.

The music is the journey.

What happens next is up to you.

And if one of my flutes becomes part of your journey, then our paths have crossed in exactly the way I hoped they would.

-Mark