The Brass Instruments

Brass instruments are lip vibrated aerophones.  Players "buzz" their lips together and push air past them.  The tube serves to amplify those resonating vibrations and produce musical tones. 

From a pre-historical perspective, most brass instruments evolved from animal hollowed out animal horns.  No one really knows when people began to fashion these old "instruments."  Once we enter the bronze age, mankind learns to work soft metals like copper, tin, gold, and silver, and they begin to adorn animal horns with them.  Now, Fast forward several hundred years...  Our early bronze age folk are now bona fide metal smiths and craftsmen.  Instrument makers are learning to form fairly simple alloys like brass from base metals; they are learning to fold, mold, and bend these metals into complex shapes, and intricate conical and cylindrical shapes.  Our recorded historical age of brass instruments begins.

Almost all modern brass instruments are derived from one of three early variations of lip vibrated instruments for which there are either museum piece examples or old drawings in European patent offices.  These three early designs are:

1. "Horns" - The horns have a conical bore, a circular shapes, and a funnel type mouthpiece.  Their tone is mellow, almost like velvet.
2. "Trumpets" - The trumpets have a cylindrical bore, bells that face forward, and cup type mouthpieces.  The shallow cup and the long cylinder combine to cause the instruments tone to be bright, almost glaring.
3. "Bugle" - The bugles have a conical bore, bells that face forward, and cup type mouthpieces.  Again, the cone shape of the tube and deep cup mouthpiece tend to mellow out the tone of the instrument.

All brass instruments use some method of changing the length of the tube to vary the pitch of the instrument.  Some of them use valves, either rotary or piston type, to vary the length of the tube.  This is the case with instruments like trumpets, tubas, and French horns.  and tubas.  Another way to change the length of the tube is to just make it longer as with the trombone.  Read on to check out your instrument...