Tuba
A bass tuba in F with front-action piston valves | |
| Brass instrument | |
|---|---|
| Classification | |
| Hornbostel–Sachs classification | 423.232 (Valved lip-reed aerophone with wide conical bore) |
| Inventor(s) | Wilhelm Friedrich Wieprecht and Johann Gottfried Moritz |
| Developed | 1835 in Prussia |
| Playing range | |
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| Related instruments | |
| Musicians | |
| List of tubists | |
| Sound sample | |
The tuba (Latin, "trumpet"; UK: /ˈtjuːbə/; US: /ˈtuːbə/) is a large brass instrument in the bass-to-contrabass range with a wide, bugle-like conical bore and between three and six (usually four or five) valves. It first appeared in 1835 in Prussia as the Baß-Tuba, an application of five valves to a bugle scaled up to 12-foot (12′) F, providing a fully chromatic contrabass range with a deep, full timbre. Subsequently, the Paris instrument designer Adolphe Sax developed the E♭ and B♭ band tubas with piston valves as members of his saxhorn family by the 1850s, and Václav František Červený in Austria-Hungary developed contrabass tubas in 16′ C and 18′ B♭ with rotary valves in the 1870s.
As with any brass instrument, sound is produced with a lip vibration or "buzz" in the mouthpiece. A person who plays the tuba is called a tubist or tubaist, or simply a tuba player. In British brass bands and military bands, they are known as a bass player.