Brass

If you think the brass family got its name from being made of brass then your right. But they have not always been made just from brass, it has been known that they have been made from wood, horns, shells, animal hide, and with the rise in technology they have also been made from plastic, nickel, gold, and silver. But no matter what they are made of there still played the same.

Just like the woodwind family brass players use their breath to produce sound, but instead of blowing on a wooden read brass players buzz their own lip on a metal cup shaped mouthpiece of varying sizes. These sizes are determined by the instrument and the players preferences. The trumpets mouthpiece is about as big as a quarter, the trombones mouthpiece is about the width of a golf ball, and the tuba has the biggest mouthpiece of them all, its about 2 inches wide and it feels like its eating your face. The mouthpiece helps amplify the buzzing to create the varying sounds. 

Most all brass instruments have valves that that are connected to the many feet of pipe. These valves control how much pipe is being used to play a note, if there are more valves being pressed there is more pipe that the sound has to go through, this will generally make a lower sound. The only brass instrument to not have valves is the trombone. The trombone, instead of having valves has a slide, it makes different sounds by extending or shorting its slide. this makes it the only instrument to play all the notes with a single action. 

Reading Music

For my blog I picked the topic Musical Instruments. I choose this topic because I loved learning how to play trumpet and I have been playing it sense sixth grade. Then in ninth grade I thought myself how to play the saxophone in a week then bassoon, flugelhorn, and tuba.


There are four main types of musical instruments Brass, Woodwind, Percussion, and Strings. There is a fifth musical instrument type but its not an instrument that you can hold in your hands its your voice. The human voice is capable of  many amazing sounds, from very high pitch to very low. The human voice can even sound like percussion instruments. My favorite example of this is a music video of five friend who have a specific part in their music from the bass to keeping the beat.


I wont be focusing on vocalists much because I have not taken any classes on singing and I personally can not sing so I will mainly be focusing on the four main instrument types Brass, Woodwind, Percussion, and Strings. But before you can play an instrument you need to be able to read the music. All musical instruments including some percussion use musical notes A through G. Some instruments read it differently like bass cleft instruments and treble cleft instruments but they all play A through G and some even play them both at the some time like piano. Once you know A through G the next thing is beats in a measure, most all music you listen to is in whats called 4/4 time. In 4/4 time there are four beats in a measure and each beat is called a quarter note, this is because each quarter add together equals a whole note witch is one measure long. With this very basic knowledge of music you can apply it to almost any instrument.