Michael Howard has made enough flutes to stock more than 2,250 orchestras, maybe more.

And he’s just getting started.

The Bainbridge-based bamboo flute artisan, the craftsman behind Kolbe Bamboo Flutes, has handmade more than 9,000 of the nature-inspired instruments for musicians and collectors in nearly every country around the globe. Each one comes from choice pieces of bamboo he personally selects — much of which he grows himself.

From a modest cottage workshop near his home, Howard makes three basic types of flutes in both light and dark wood — C, Bb and B alto flutes, F and G major soprano flutes and B, Eb and E major flutes. A simpler flute can go from rough wood to practically finished in one day, he said, and the more complicated designs take a week or two to complete.

“What I make is precision-tuned three octave flutes that can be used by the solo player [or] that can be used in front of an orchestra,” Howard said. “The structure of the bamboo is incredibly important.

“It has a very distinctive sound,” he explained. “It’s somewhat mystical. There’s something about bamboo, because I’ve been doing it for so long, that resonates with me in a certain way and I really do think that it’s the material. Even between species of bamboo, you get completely different sounds. But a good bamboo flute in the hands of an insanely skilled player can [sound like] a silver flute.”

Though a lifelong musician, Howard said his younger self could not have guessed that his life’s prime passion would turn out to be bamboo flutes.

“Flutes were like, ‘No way,’” he laughed. “Flutes were either for sissies or the crazy ’70s flute players with all the hair. It just didn’t fit anywhere for me.

“I was in punk bands,” he added. “I was into rock music and skateboarding and punk and goth.”

Born in Seattle, and a lifetime resident of the Pacific Northwest, Howard would, years later, combine his love of music and nature — he also works as a landscaper and landscape designer — into this ultimate creative endeavor. He spent nearly a decade learning all that he could about the history and styles of bamboo flutes and improving his own playing ability before founding his business in 2004.

“It’s the perfect amalgamation of everything in a lot of ways,” Howard said. “As a kid, I loved to lie in the dry grass — it was one of my favorite things on a warm day — and listen to the sound of wind coming through the grass, and that’s very much the same feeling I get from bamboo.

“When I really introspect on the philosophy behind this and I look at it, it’s so many pieces of my life that have converged into this art form.”

Raw material, of course, is important, and Howard prefers Phyllostachys Vivax, a beautiful timber bamboo with nice straight stalks.

“Because I’ve worked with this material for so long — it may sound like crazy town — but I can walk out into a bamboo grove, look at a piece of bamboo and I can hear it in my head,” Howard said. “Just by its structure and by feeling it, I know what its tone will be.”

Howard said that the resurgence of interest in pared-down world and tribal-inspired musical styles as of late is perhaps a cultural reaction to today’s world of quickly advancing technology, virtual and digitally-generated instruments and heavily synthesized pop tunes.

“I do think there is an eternal need, whether we know it or not, in us to balance our lives out,” he said. “This type of music, this type of tone, it brings out something deep in us and it awakens feelings and emotions and empathies.

“I think there is definitely a need there as we kind of move into new uncharted realms as far as technology and virtual worlds.”

As he works — preferably early in the morning, he said, when the day is still quiet and the light is changing — Howard said he especially likes to reflect on the myriad of performances and the countless audiences his work will see, a fantasy made all the more real by the photos, videos and recordings he has been sent from around the world by his musician clients.

“It’s so fun to hear what other people do with these flutes and that is, for me, the most intoxicating element of what I do,” he said. “It is really exhilarating to get it out there and see what people can do with it.

“The long tones that I’m into — I really prefer meditative long tones — affect people in a very deep way,” Howard added. “It resonates with their soul and seems to unlock emotions and that’s the element that I’m really drawn to, not just as another form of music. Primal tone speaks to something very old in our evolution and gets inside you and that’s what attracted me initially to the sounds of the bamboo flutes; it was very primal and got inside me and left such a deep impression on my psyche.”

Visit www.kolbebambooflutes.com to learn more about bamboo flutes. Howard can be reached at 360-860-0512 or through kolbebambooflutes@gmail.com.