Instruments of Orchestra

Do you know that musical instruments are categorized into different family according to the characteristic of each instrument? In an orchestra performance, the position of instrument is fixed. You cannot simply change the sequence of position as this is one of the rules that an orchestra team needs to follow tightly. In this post, we are going to go through all the 3 types of instruments’ families.

Brass Family

Brass family is those musical instruments that are made of brass. It is able to produce a louder sound as compared to any other instruments. Unlike woodwind family, you will need to vibrate your lips at the mouthpiece. Likewise, the sound will be amplified at the ends of brass instrument, which is like a bell shape. Different pitch and sound are played by pressing different values which will open and close at the different parts of the instruments. Examples of brass instruments are trumpet, trombone, tube and so forth.

Woodwind Family

From the name itself, we can predict that the instruments are somehow related to wood and wind. However, woodwind instruments are made of wood, metal, plastic or some other alloys in these modern days. Air is needed to blow in the woodwind instruments and fingers are used to open and close the holes in order to change its pitch. In addition, a smaller woodwind instrument plays higher pitches while the bigger woodwind instrument plays lower pitches. The most commonly known woodwind instrument is called flute whereby we have learnt it in our primary school before.

Percussion Family

Percussion family is the largest instrument in the orchestra. It can produce sound when it is hit, shaken or scraped. For this family, the percussionist needs a lot of practices because he/she needs to know how to hit by using an appropriate strength, place and time during the piece of music. Percussion instruments keep the rhythm on-going, make special sounds and excitement. Basically, we would say it adds “colours” to the music. Piano is one of the great examples in this family.

String Family

String instruments, such as violin, viola and so forth, fall into this family as it uses strings to vibrate within the hollow body and creates sound. Normally, string instruments are played by drawing a bow on the strings. The bow is usually made up of horsehairs from horses’ tails. Sometimes, musicians will also use their fingers to pluck the strings. Same as woodwind instruments, smaller string instruments produce higher pitches whereas bigger string instruments produce lower pitches.