(JPG of a ChapmanStick) "Mentioned"

"Music scholars divide orchestra instruments into five families:
  • Instruments You Blow Into and Eventually Have to Get the Spit Out Of (tubas, whistles, cormorants, tribunes).
  • Instruments You Hit (drums, triangles, rhomboids, homophones).
  • Instruments That Are Easily Concealed (piccolos).
  • Furniture (pianos).
  • Instruments That Could Turn out to Be Worth a Million Skillion Dollars (violins)."
Dave Barry
To Dave Barry's classification I'd like to add:
  • Instruments which make the ground rumble (contrabass sarussophones, contrabass clarinets, contrabass saxophones, contrabassoons, mastodons, limbaughs).
I usually play bari sax, bass clarinet, flutes, and contrabass sarrusophone (in jazz ensembles), or bassoon (in orchestras), or contrabass clarinets (Eb and Bb) and bass sarrusophone (in wind ensembles), and have played contrabassoon in the past (Holst's "The Planets", Brahms' 1st). I also play bass guitar and Chapman Stick®.  In flute choirs, I like to play alto and/or bass.

I've started playing the renaissance alto/tenor and great bass racketts . The rackett is an interesting instrument in itself. It has nine parallel (cylindrical) bores through the body, joined by caps at each end. The effective length of the bore is thus about nine times the size of the instrument: my great bass racket is about twelve inches tall, but plays as low as a contrabassoon. Its double reed is immense.

Rackett
I've also been working on cortol, rauschpfieff, shawm, bass kortholt, and great bass sordune, along with a few crumhorns (I'm still building the alto and bass). 

 
 
 

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