Band Members play a wide range of instruments both brass and woodwind.
The term “brass instrument” defines the way the sound is made and not by whether the instrument is actually made of brass. Thus brass instruments can be made of wood, like the alphorn, the cornett, the serpent and the didgeridoo, while some woodwind instruments are made of brass, like the saxophone.
All woodwinds produce sound by splitting the air blown into them on a sharp edge, such as a reed or a fipple. Despite the name, a woodwind may be made of any material, not just wood.
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Tuba
The tuba is the largest and lowest-pitched musical instrument in the brass family. As with all brass instruments, the sound is produced by lip vibration – a buzz – into a mouthpiece. It first appeared in the mid-19th century, making it one of the newer instruments in the modern orchestra and concert band. It is the principal bass instrument in concert bands, brass bands and military bands.
Prussian Patent No. 19 was granted to Wilhelm Friedrich Wieprecht and Johann Gottfried Moritz on 12 September 1835 for a “bass tuba”. The original Wieprecht and Moritz instrument used five valves of the Berlinerpumpen type that was the forerunner of the modern piston valve. The first tenor tuba was invented in 1838 by Moritz’s son Carl Wilhelm Moritz.
Tubas were mostly used by French composers, especially Hector Berlioz, who famously used the ophicleide (a forerunner of the Tuba) in his compositions Symphonie fantastique and Benvenuto Cellini. These pieces are now normally performed on the tuba.
Euphonium
The euphonium derives its name from the Ancient Greek word – euphōnos, meaning “well-sounding” or “sweet-voiced”. The euphonium is a tenor- and baritone-voiced valved brass instrument employed chiefly in brass or military bands and wind orchestras and is a member of the large family of valved bugles, along with the tuba and flugelhorn, characterised by a wide conical bore, and thus has many relatives among the low brass. The euphonium can trace its origins partly to the ophicleide, an all-metal, conical bore keyed brass instrument developed from the serpent in 1817 by French instrument maker Jean Hilaire Asté.
Euphoniums commonly have three top-action piston valves, played with the first three fingers of the right hand, plus a fourth valve, generally found midway down the right side of the instrument and played with the left index or middle finger.
Bass Clarinet
Most modern bass clarinets are straight-bodied, with a small upturned silver-colored metal bell and curved metal neck. The bass clarinet is fairly heavy and is supported either with a neck strap or an adjustable peg attached to its body. While Adolphe Sax imitated its upturned metal bell in his design of the larger saxophones, the two instruments are fundamentally different. The bass clarinet has been regularly used in scoring for orchestra and concert band since the mid-19th century, becoming more common during the middle and latter part of the 20th century. A bass clarinet is not always called for in orchestra music, but is almost always called for in concert band music
Saxophones
The saxophone (often referred to colloquially as the sax) is a type of single-reed woodwind instrument with a conical body, usually made of brass. As with all single-reed instruments, sound is produced when a reed on a mouthpiece vibrates to produce a sound wave inside the instrument’s body. The pitch is controlled by opening and closing holes in the body to change the effective length of the tube. The holes are closed by leather pads attached to keys operated by the player.
The saxophone was invented by the Belgian instrument maker Adolphe Sax in the early 1840s and was patented on 28 June 1846.
The saxophone uses a single-reed mouthpiece similar to that of the clarinet. Each size of saxophone (alto, tenor, etc.) uses a different size of reed and mouthpiece. Most saxophonists use reeds made from Arundo donax cane, but since the middle of the twentieth century some have been made of fibreglass or other composite materials. Saxophone reeds are proportioned slightly differently from clarinet reeds, being wider for the same length. Commercial reeds vary in hardness and design, and single-reed players try different reeds to find those that suit their mouthpiece, embouchure, and playing style
Baritone Horn
The baritone horn, like the trombone and euphonium, is a nine-foot brass tube. Valves are most often piston-style. It is predominantly of conical bore, like the euphonium, but has a narrower bore than the euphonium. The smaller bore renders its attack more distinct than the rounder attack of the euphonium, and also provides it with a brighter sound than the dark-sounding euphonium.
The baritone horn was derived from the baritone saxhorn, a lower voice in the family of instruments developed by Adolphe Sax, who is also known for creating the saxophone family. There were a collection of difference brass instruments that developed from this, such as the flugelhorn and alto/tenor horn, both similarly conically shaped instruments.
In the UK, the baritone horn is part of the standardised instrumentation of brass bands. In concert band music, there is often a part marked baritone, but these parts are most commonly intended for, and played on, the euphonium. A baritone horn can also play music written for a trombone due to similarities in timbre and range
Tenor Horn
The tenor horn is a valved brass instrument (in E♭) which has a predominantly conical bore like that of the euphonium and flugelhorn. It uses a deep funnel – or cup-shaped mouthpiece which produces a mellow, rounded tone that is often used as a middle voice, supporting the melodies of the trumpets, cornets, or flugelhorns, and fills the gap above the lower tenor and bass instruments (the trombone, baritone horn, euphonium, and tuba). Its valves are typically, although not exclusively, piston valves. The instrument known today as the tenor horn was developed in the 1840s by the Belgian instrument maker Adolphe Sax.
Trombone
The trombone is a musical instrument in the brass family. As with all brass instruments, sound is produced when the player’s lips vibrate inside a mouthpiece, causing the air column inside the instrument to vibrate. Nearly all trombones use a telescoping slide mechanism to alter the pitch instead of the valves used by other brass instruments
The trombone has a predominantly cylindrical bore like the trumpet, in contrast to the more conical brass instruments like the cornet, the flugelhorn, the baritone, and the euphonium. The word trombone derives from Italian ‘tromba’ (trumpet) and ‘one’ (a suffix meaning ‘large’), so the name means ‘large trumpet’. During the Renaissance, the equivalent English term was ‘sackbut’. The word first appears in court records in 1495. The sackbut was used extensively across Europe, declining in most places by the mid to late 17th century. When the sackbut returned to common use in England in the 18th century, Italian music was so influential that the instrument became known by its Italian name, ‘trombone’.
Trumpet
The trumpet is a brass instrument commonly used in classical and jazz ensembles. The trumpet group ranges from the piccolo trumpet—with the highest register in the brass family—to the bass trumpet, pitched one octave below the standard B♭ or C trumpet.
Trumpet-like instruments have historically been used as signaling devices in battle or hunting, with examples dating back to the 2nd Millenium BC. They began to be used as musical instruments only in the late 14th or early 15th century. Trumpets are used in art music styles, appearing in orchestras, concert bands, chamber music groups, and jazz ensembles. They are also common in popular music and are generally included in school bands. Sound is produced by vibrating the lips in a mouthpiece, which starts a standing wave in the air column of the instrument. Since the late 15th century, trumpets have primarily been constructed of brass tubing, usually bent twice into a rounded rectangular shape.
There are many distinct types of trumpet. The most common is a transposing instrument pitched in B♭ with a tubing length of about 1.48 m (4 ft 10 in). The cornet is similar to the trumpet but has a conical bore (the trumpet has a cylindrical bore) and its tubing is generally wound differently. Early trumpets did not provide means to change the length of tubing, whereas modern instruments generally have three (or sometimes four) valves in order to change their pitch. Most trumpets have valves of the piston type, while some have the rotary type. The use of rotary-valved trumpets is more common in orchestral settings (especially in German and German-style orchestras) although this practice varies by country.