Music is my oldest daughter’s favorite special class at her elementary school. The other day when I picked her up from school we talked about music class and how I played the trumpet, trombone, and tuba in school. That prompted her to ask how to play those instruments which led to my impromptu explanation of how to buzz your lips into a brass mouthpiece. A better explanation of how brass instruments make sound is found in a TED-Ed lesson on the topic.

How Brass Instruments Work is a TED-Ed lesson that provides an overview of how sound is produced and changed through trumpets, trombones, and tubas. The lesson within the video is rather basic but it does do a nice job of clearly conveying how a musician makes music on a brass instrument.