Instrument Families: Brass, Woodwind, Percussion, Strings

Last week was the last Sound Beginnings class of the semester, which meant I had the joy of hosting a very special Instrument Petting Zoo day.  Even ambitious parents who want to take their 2-4 year old to the orchestra know that toddlers aren't likely to sit through an orchestral concert. So, unless the child has someone playing an instrument at home, this class is a special chance to hear the sounds of real instruments up close and personal.

And, for the first time ever, all four of my own children happened to be home on a school break, which meant they played piano, ukulele, violin, trombone, saxophone, french horn and trumpet samples for my class. Although the variety of instruments around the world is huge, there are four categories/families of instruments found in the orchestra. Each family creates sound in a similar way. This interactive online orchestra lets you hear each family play its sound- just click on the section you'd like to sample.

Brass Instruments

It's pretty clear to see why the brass instruments naturally go together: they're all made of metal.

Trombone, tuba, sousaphone, trumpet, and french horn are a few brass instruments. 

But that's not the main reason these instruments are a family. I like to point out to my students that these instruments all make sound in a similar way. Yes, you put air into the instruments (aerophones), but not just by huffing and blowing. Brass instruments require the player to buzz the lips.  The embouchure (the way in which a player applies the mouth) is a mouth with tight corners and loose lips in the center, creating a buzz that can be adjusted higher or lower in pitch. I invite all my students to experiment with buzzing, like with this short video to get the feel.

Adjusting the buzz/embouchure creates an overtone series.  A bugle, the simplest brass instrument, has no valves or slides.  So, different notes are produced by adjusting the embouchure and the notes are limited to the overtone series.

Other brass instruments have a few valves or a slide added, allowing the musician to play all notes of the chromatic scale. And what about the saxophone? It's made of brass for sure, but I never put it in the brass family because it is not a 'buzzed' instrument. Nowadays there are even brass instruments made of plastic. A pBone or pTrumpet is lightweight, durable, and kid-friendly (that means it doesn't get dents) but it is STILL a brass instrument with no brass to be found.

Because the embouchure is adjustable, much like the vocal cords, students need to have a good ear to know if they are hitting the correct pitch. Complete musicianship programs like Let's Play Music help develop the ear and prepare a student for success with brass.  Here's a fabulous trumpet solo with some close-ups of the finger action to inspire youngsters who love brass:


 
Woodwinds

The woodwinds are clearly also aerophones (require air to play), but they present a lot of variety in look and sound. Bassoon, saxophone, piccolo, oboe, flute, and clarinet are a few woodwinds.

The name of this family leads everyone to wonder, "Are all of the woodwinds actually made of wood?"

The answer is that, yes, long ago all of these instruments were actually made of wood.  Over time, some of these instruments have been replaced with metal or plastic. And then, around 1840, the saxophone was invented and considered part of this family because (as you now know) it just didn't belong in the brass family. 

All sounds are created from vibrations.  While brass instruments rely on the player's lip buzz to create the vibration, woodwinds generate vibration when air travels across a thin piece of wood, the reed, which vibrates. The clarinet and saxophone have one reed, the oboe and bassoon have two reeds, and the flute and recorder have no reeds (the air vibrates along the length of the tube).

This 7-minute video by House of Sound explains to kids how sound waves are set up in various woodwinds. You might enjoy watching their other videos, too.
 

Strings

Strings are chordophones (make sound by vibrating strings).  Violin, viola, cello, bass, harp, and guitar are a few instruments from this family. The strings are made of nylon, steel, or gut, and the bodies of the instruments are hollow inside to allow the vibrations to resonate. 

Strings are played most often by drawing a bow across the strings. The bow handle is made of wood and the strings are horsehair! Musicians can also pluck the strings with their fingers or tap the strings with the wooden side of the bow.

The Piano Guys love finding ways to get interesting sounds from a cello in unconventional ways. In this video, the deep bass drum sound is a bump on the body of the cello with a little help from some effects. The shaker sound was created by Steve rubbing rosin on his bow. The record scratch is Steve scratching a quarter on the strings. Check out all of Piano Guys videos and our Piano Guys interview, too.
 

Percussion

Percussion instruments are idiophones (makes sound when hit), or membranophones (makes a sound through the vibration of a stretched skin). Others make sounds when shaken or scraped. The worldwide list of percussion instruments is huge, but includes bongos, bass drum, snare drum, xylophone, cymbals, tambourine, maracas, gong, chimes, celesta, and piano.

Did you catch that I added piano to the percussion family? It's true that the piano has vibrating strings inside, so could possibly be considered a string instrument. This amazing brief animation shows the hammer action of the piano keys. When you press each key, a hammer taps the string and sets it to vibrating. When you release the key, a soft pad comes into place to stop the vibration. Because the instrument is played primarily by striking with varying levels of force, I think it fits best into the percussion family.

Piano falls into a sub-group of pitched (tuned) percussion instruments. Other instruments that can be tuned to play notes include ones with lots of notes like glockenspiel, marimba and bells, or ones with only a few notes, like timpani.

There are thousands of percussion instruments, and you have some with you right now! Hand-clapping and finger-snapping are percussion instruments, too. A child's percussive body is the best first instrument to master, so we encourage lots of patting, tapping, and dancing as a foundational skill for learning to play all of the other instruments you've read about in this post. I took my kids to see STOMP LIVE and we loved how they made percussive music from found everyday objects. Check out this video that takes hand-clapping and foot-stomping to an amazing level:
  

Timbre

So there it is. Now you know about the four families of music, grouped together based on how they make sounds. Now, if you had four families of people from different places, each family would speak with its own accent. 

In music, we have timbre (pronounced tamber). Timbre is the character or quality of musical sound. If you play the same tune on a banjo and on a guitar (like in the tune dueling banjos) you'd easily be able to tell the instruments apart because each has a different timbre.

Timbre is often referred to as tone color, an analogy that makes good sense. If each instrument has its own color, and instruments from the same family have similar colors, the composer can paint even more colors/sounds by layering and blending the colors. Or he can paint two contrasting colors/sounds right next to each other, to make them boldly stand out. To make a trumpet melody really stand out, the strings (not other brass) could be chosen to play the harmony.

Tone color/ timbre plays a very important role when the music is written to evoke specific feelings or represent specific ideas or events, so composers carefully select instruments to paint you that picture. 

A fun finale for today's post is to listen to the story Peter and the Wolf by Sergei Prokofiev and notice how carefully each instrument was chosen to represent the characters in the story. The cat is a clarinet, grandpa is a bassoon, the duck is an oboe, the bird is a flute, and the wolf is a french horn. Have fun!

 

-Gina Weibel, M.S.
Let's Play Music Teacher 

Start With Piano! How Piano Study Prepares You

Does Billy dream of becoming an electric guitar player? Start with Piano!
Is Sally planning to be a violin maestro? Start with Piano!
Is Gretchen longing to jam on a trombone? Start with Piano!

No matter where your child is heading on his musical path, we know what STEP ONE is;  Developing a musical foundation of ear-training, note-reading, and piano-playing for 3 short years is the BEST way to launch on the right foot.
 

Advantages of Keyboard Learning

Want to play clarinet, or trumpet, or sousaphone? Yes, the keyboard is still the ideal first musical instrument.  Spend three years with us and you'll be a star in your orchestra/ marching band/ punk rock club.
   
First, every key on the keyboard relates directly to one note written on the staff. Go up the staff, go up the keyboard.  Step by step and skip by skip, the piano is a miraculous visual and tactile way to make sense of music notation. The keyboard’s arrangement promotes staff reading! Contrast this to a violin or a trumpet: step-wise notes are produced with random fingerings and positions. Ack! 

Learn to Read: the Right Tool
When a child is learning this all-new thing called reading music, let's take away the crazy tricky stuff, please.  The piano is the phonics storybook of the music world: so very logical and easy to deciper.  Extract the sesquipedalian and arcane circumlocution so a novice can decode your verbiage! You would not want that last sentence showing up in a kindergarten reading assignment, right? You would not give a dusty tome to a child, you'd give him a phonics book.

The saving grace for a LPM graduate when the time does come to learn a new and tricky instrument is that she already knows how to read music, and she already knows how it should sound.  Many LPM graduates can truly read the music: look at the notes and hear the melody in their mind. Check out our post to learn more about how we teach reading.  So next, hitting the note with the trumpet is pretty easy-peasy! She becomes the star of her concert band in no time! The foundational LPM years were SO worth it!

Contrast her experience with the student who can't discern any logic for how dots scattered on a paper correlate with fingering and instrument AND simultaneously does not have an inner ear helping him know if he hit the right tone! So tricky!

Part Of the Whole

The second reason the keyboard is a fantastic teaching tool is it gives the player the distinct ability to create all three elements of music – melody, harmony and rhythm – at the same time. 

Most songs we play in class have a melody played by the right hand, chords (harmonies) played by the left hand, and of course they can each use different rhythms.  Often the left hand provides a steady rhythm for us while the right hand plays something interesting.

When your child plays in the orchestra or band, she'll be playing only one part of the big picture (and for most band instruments, only one note at a time).  If she plays flute, clarinet, or alto saxaphone, she'll probably play melody frequently.  If she plays french horn or baritone, more time will be spent harmonizing. Grasping what makes up the whole before narrowing down into the part is foundational for musicians.  A student who hasn't had practice listening to music and analyzing it for the parts might be frustrated to play a harmonizing part. A pianist learns to piece together all parts.

Multi-sensory Learning

Finally, the keyboard connects a child’s sense of touch and sight to the ear and mind, much like Solfeggio connects the voice to ear and mind and hands.  The student can see and feel the relationship of the melodic patterns he has internalized in Year One as he plays them on a keyboard.  A tactile feel of a step, skip, or leap further internalizes these relationships in the mind and ear.  

When a child sings a SFMRD and sees the notes going down on his staff in baby steps and simultaneously feels his fingers moving downward step by step, musical connections are made – not only in understanding the staff, but in understanding how music works.

The World is Your Oyster
This is a phrase I sometimes use with my students.  It means: You are in a position to take advantage of the opportunities life has to offer!  It's like the whole world is nothing but potential for creating pearls (or awesome experiences).  You've had a great whole-musician training, so NOW you are all set to excel in all kinds of music. Get out there and EXPLORE to find out where your passion may lie.

Here are some ways to expose your child to different instruments and musical venues:


* Take your child to the local symphony (many have special children's concerts and probably play some pieces you know from LPM!) Teacher Emy LeFevre in Chubbuck, ID (studio link) says: Our Idaho state civic symphony has a kid's Halloween concert and instrument "petting zoo". Kids love to try them out.

*If the symphony price tag or time commitment is prohibitive, take your child to the concert band, orchestra concerts, or musicals at your local high school.  If a particular instrument has a solo, quietly point it out to your child and help him identify the instruments.

* Watch parades and football games with a special eye on the band!  I refer to our sporting events as "Band Games."  I tell my son, "I really loved tonight's band game! You played so well!" It's no secret who I'm cheering for out there.  Help your child notice the different instruments as they perform.

* Visit music studios that form and coach youth bands (rock, jazz, Beatles cover, etc.)  Attend the student concerts so your child can see youngsters playing in small groups (and being awesome).  One such nationwide chain is School of Rock, but many independent local music businesses offer lessons in every instrument and help you form up a group! Call up any of these places and say "my child is considering lessons with you in the future, but we wan to check out your student performances/recitals first...when will they be?"

* Don't forget about PIANO! It's very motivational to listen to someone slightly older play something amazing. Kids get the idea "I could be doing that soon, too!"  In your area, google "piano teacher association" to find out if a local group is having contests and competitions- they can be exciting to watch.  Otherwise ask your potential future piano teacher if you can come to the next recital to hear the students perform.

* LPM Teacher Katie Anderson (Anthem, AZ studio link) suggests: Find family-friendly performances in your area. I took my kids to see a cute family of fiddlers performing group and my kids haven't stopped talking about it since.  And I got a ton of practice mileage off that show. Now they are entering a fiddling contest of their own! 

* LPM Teacher Megan Dougherty  in Westminster, CO (studio link) says: This summer we watched a few operas online through the Metropolitan Opera website (the kid friendly ones). I was expecting the kids to be bored but they LOVED them? I believe their puppet shows trained them to enjoy classical music!

* Don't forget singing! LPM Teacher Sarah McKay in Marietta, OH (studio link) says: For several years I have sung in the community choir hosted by the local college; my children would always have a chance to hear our performance. This year the college staged a children's choir and my daughter decided to audition- and she made it!

If you're ready to help your child get the best possible start, find a Let's Play Music teacher near you now!


-Gina Weibel, M.S.
Let's Play Music Teacher