Tuesday 20 March 2018

Exploring Musical Instruments


Before we start designing and creating our own musical instruments we needed to find out different ways instruments could be played.
We also wanted to find out how we could make the instrument play loud, soft, high and low sounds. 
Here we are experimenting and recording our findings. 



Thursday 8 March 2018

Learning about instruments

Today we had Shaun O'Kane visit our class from Musiqhub.
He showed us some different instruments and explained to us how they work.

Brass Instruments
He taught us how brass instruments make sound by blowing or 'buzzing'.
He said you stretch your lips like an e, then blow them together like a b.

Trombone:
He moved the trombone slide down longer or up shorter to change the note.
He said if he blowed gently, it was a quiet sound
If he blowed hard it was a loud sound

Trumpet
On the trumpet, he moved his fingers on the valves, it opened and closed the pipes and made them longer or shorter. That made the notes higher (a short pipe) or lower (a long pipe).
He could change the sound without moving his fingers too.
If he changed his mouth so his lips were tighter, he could play different notes called 'overtones'

Saxophone
The saxophone is a conical pipe - it gets wider as it goes down.
The buttons open holes to make the pipe long or short.
You can blow harder to get higher notes called overtones.
As he opened up the holes, the notes got higher.
The saxophone and clarinet have a reed mouthpiece
When you blow, the reed vibrates.
The saxophone didn't sound very good without the reed!
It sounded funny with a trumpet mouthpiece on!

We learnt a lot about sound!
Check out our video!