Sackbut

The sackbut is a member of the brass (Hornbostel–Sachs 423.22). Learn how it makes its sound and explore related instruments.

How the sackbut makes its sound

In the Hornbostel–Sachs system, which classifies instruments by how they produce sound, the sackbut belongs to the brass (lip-vibrated aerophones): the player's buzzing lips set the air column vibrating – trumpets, horns, trombones, tubas and the didgeridoo.

More broadly it is one of the aerophones (wind instruments), where sound comes from vibrating air.

Players shape its sound through technique and materials; the resonating body filters the raw vibration, boosting some harmonics and damping others.

From Wikipedia

A sackbut is an early form of the trombone used during the Renaissance and Baroque eras. A sackbut has the characteristic telescopic slide of a trombone, used to vary the length of the tube to change pitch, but is distinct from later trombones by its smaller, more cylindrically proportioned bore, and its less-flared bell. Unlike the earlier slide trumpet from which it evolved, the sackbut possesses a U-shaped slide with two parallel sliding tubes, rather than just one.

Records of the term trombone predate the term sackbut by two decades, and evidence for the German term Posaune is even older. Sackbut, originally a French term, was used in England until the instrument fell into disuse in the eighteenth century; when the instrument regained popularity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the Italian term trombone became dominant. In modern English, an older trombone or a replica is called a sackbut.