The brass family is one the four groups of musical instruments. There are many instruments in the brass family and those each have their own “sub groups”. Characteristics that make a brass instrument a brass instrument include- it is made of brass, it uses slides to tune, it changes pitch based on the positions of slides or keys (valves), and does not use a reed to produce its sound. Some instruments in the brass family include the trumpet, trombone, baritone, and tuba.

    First i will talk about the trumpet group. Instruments in this section of the brass family are what some call the “high brass” section because they are more suited to play high notes and are played in treble clef (????). Trumpets usually have three valves that are used to change the pitch of the note that is played. Each note has a combination of keys that is used to achieve that pitch. Since there are only three valves, some notes are played the same, such as E and A, which are both played by pushing down the first and second valves. Another thing that affects the pitch and if the note is sharp or flat is embouchure, which is the way you place your lips on the mouthpiece. And that’s all for the “high brass” section.

    Next up is the low brass instruments. These include the trombone, tenor trombone, bass trombone, tenor bass trombone, valved trombone, baritone, euphonium, tuba, and sousaphone. First let’s talk about trombones. Trombones are not played using valves (except for the valved trombone of course). Instead they use a slide moved to different positions to change their pitch. Similarly to trumpets there are only seven slide positions to use play notes, so some are played the same. But, on trombones there are alternate positions and notes that are played the same are not played at the exact same place on the slide. Now on to the others. Baritones, euphoniums, tubas, and sousaphones (marching band tubas) are all played using valves though the type of baritone, euphonium, etc. determines if they have three or four. They are all played in bass clef (????), including the trombone, except for the treble clef baritone, which is just for trumpet players that couldn’t make it with the trumpet. And that’s pretty much it for the low brass.

As you can see the brass family is a very large group of instruments and I only named a few of them. There are many more brass instruments out there to learn about. I hope you enjoyed learning about these few though.