Instruments of the Orchestra-BRASS

Okay, welcome to this episode on the brass instruments, the brass family of instruments in the orchestra. Um, we classify the brass by the way they make sound, just like we do all the other families. And brass produce sound by buzzing their lips into a cupshaped mouthpiece. So unlike the woodwinds, they don't just blow air into

the instrument. they actually um have to buzz their lips because if they just blow air then they it just makes a windy sound. It doesn't actually produce much of a tone. Um produces no tone actually. Um so you're going to see him buzz his lips into this mouthpiece and then the sound's going to travel through here.

And then what happens is in modern brass instruments, we'll bring up a picture of the trumpet here so I can illustrate it for you. What happens is in modern trumpets, they have the valve system. And if you want to write this date down, um around the 1830s, uh brass instruments started to implement the valve system on a wide

scale. So before the 1830s, brass were quite limited in the type of notes that they could play. Uh they could play different notes, but these notes were usually far apart. And the only way that they could play like melodic stuff was play in the very upper register. So before the 1830s, if you hear like the

trumpet, you know, playing a solo or something, it's usually um quite high up in the register. Um, however, like if you listen to a Mozart symphony or something, they'll often um just kind of add punches to the uh chords and stuff like that. So, the strings and the woodwinds are going to carry most of the melodic stuff leading

up to the 1830s. After the 1830s though, uh the brass really come into their own and they get to uh play a lot more melodic um and scale-like passages and stuff. All right, so they buzz our lips in this mouth cupshaped mouthpiece. The sounding travels down this pipe and then it goes into the third chamber here. Um,