The Woodwind family gets its name from the instruments, at one point in time they were all made out of wood, from the tiny Piccolo to the oddly shaped Bassoon. But today they are mostly made out of metal, wood, plastic, or some other combination of material. The Woodwind family consists of different many types of instruments, but there are six main types of Woodwind instruments; flute, clarinet, saxophone, oboe, English horn, and bassoon. Almost all of them are played using a reed, and they are all played by blowing in one end and and the sound coming out the other end. Unlike the three or four buttons that brass instruments have, most woodwind instruments have more then four, many many more, the bassoon depending on the model has upwards of 23 buttons. Other woodwinds like the recorders only have eight holes instead of buttons.
Almost all woodwind instruments are played with a reed, but there are a few woodwind instruments that don't. The flute, piccolo, and recorder do not use wooden reeds, the flute and piccolo are played by blowing across a hole in the mouthpiece. The recorder is played by blowing on the end that looks like a whistle, and you can control the pitch of both of them by angling the air stream up or down. Other woodwind instruments like the clarinet and saxophone are played with reeds. Reeds are thin strips of wood that narrow down to a paper thin end, and they can also be made from plastic but the sound quality of the instrument will be affected. Woodwind instruments like the oboe and bassoon are played with whats called a double reed. Double reeds are two reeds that are tied together so that when blown on they vibrate against each other.
I personally played both the alto saxophone and bassoon and i found it more difficult to play the bassoon because it was a double reed instrument. It is more common for double reed instruments to be more difficult to play, because you have to be able to control the pressure on both your top and bottom lip while blowing through the reed.
(The You Tube video shows several different types of woodwinds.)
I recently went to the Midland Center for the Arts, and listened to the Midland Concert band play eight songs each one different from the other. The songs were; The Sinfonians by Clifton Williams, Sequoia by Homer C LaGassey, Variations on a Korean Folk Song by John B Chance, Andrea Chenir by Umberto Giordano, Trauersinfonie by Richard Wagner, Satiric Dances by Norman D Joio, The Seventies by Paul Jennings and Paul Lavender, and The Pathfinder of Panama by John Philip Sousa. My personal favorite was Variations on a Korean Folk Song, because when I was in high school I played that song and had trouble playing all the notes because the notes are moving so fast that I could hardly keep up.
But what surprised me the most about the concert was in the beginning before any of the planned songs were played, about twenty trumpet players walked out on to the stage and started to play. But these were not any ordinary trumpets, these had elongated bells. The bells stretched out so far that each trumpet had a banner hainging from it and each banner was about one foot wide and three feet long. But not only was the bell longer the trumpet was louder, they were so loud that it only took twenty of them to fill the auditorium with sound.
Almost every Brass instrument has a duplicate that's either different looking or different sounding. This gives a wider range of instruments to chose from, like the cornet,it is the same as the trumpet but it looks different and has more mellow sound, but if you were blindfolded while listening to them, you would not be able to tell the difference between the two.
(The YouTube Video shows many odd types of brass and most of them are trumpets.)
