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Patrick Gilmore's famous American band roster included a contrabass saxophone in 1892, and at least two dozen of these instruments were built by the Evette & Schaeffer company for US military bands in the early 20th century which, despite their size, were able to be played while marching using a strap. Saxophone ensembles were also popular at ...
In the 2000s, J'Élle Stainer made contrabass saxophones for the popular large church orchestras of the Christian Congregation in Brazil. In 2010 they produced the first working subcontrabass saxophone, albeit in a more compact form than originally envisaged, more than 160 years after Sax first described it in his 1846 patent. [1]
Contrabass (from Italian: contrabbasso) refers to several musical instruments of very low pitch—generally one octave below bass register instruments. While the term most commonly refers to the double bass (which is the bass instrument in the orchestral string family, tuned lower than the cello), many other instruments in the contrabass register exist.
The baritone saxophone was created in 1846 by the Belgian instrument maker Adolphe Sax as one of a family of 14 instruments. Sax believed these instruments would provide a useful tonal link between the woodwinds and brasses. The family was divided into two groups of seven saxophones each, from the soprano to the contrabass.
[9] [10] Other sizes are also available, such as a 1 ⁄ 2 size or 1 ⁄ 4 size, which serve to accommodate a player's height and hand size. These names of the sizes do not reflect the true size relative to a "full size" bass; a 1 ⁄ 2 bass is not half the length of a 4 ⁄ 4 bass, but is only about 15% smaller.
The E♭ and B♭ tubax have the same lengths of tubing as the contrabass and subcontrabass saxophones respectively, but are much more compact. [4] They are built with a narrower conical bore, somewhere between a regular saxophone and a contrabass sarrusophone, and use comparatively smaller baritone or bass saxophone mouthpieces.
Although described in Adolphe Sax's patent in 1846, a practical, playable subcontrabass saxophone did not exist until the 21st century. [2] An oversized saxophone that might have qualified was built as a prop circa 1965; it could produce tones, but its non-functional keywork required assistants to manually open and close the pads, and it was reportedly incapable of playing a simple scale.
A catalogue showing various Adolphe Sax instruments, including saxhorns, saxophones, and saxotrombas. The saxhorns form a family of seven brass instruments (although at one point ten different sizes seem to have existed). Designed for band use, they are pitched alternately in E ♭ and B ♭, like the saxophone group.
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