There are many different kinds of musical instruments you can play in band. They can usualy be broken up into 4 groups; brass, woodwinds, percussion, and occasionaly strings. Brass instruments have bell-shaped mouth pieces, and have either valves or a slide. Some examples of brass intruments are trumpets, tubas, and trombones. Woodwind instruments, on the other hand, are quite different. For a mouth piece they either have a reed attachted to a plastic mouthpiece, or they have a simple hole that you blow over like a bottle. Woodwind intstruments also don't have valves or a slide. They have keys, which cover holes along the body of the instrument to change the pitch of the sound. There's also percussion, which includes everything from snare drum to marimba to the ratchet. Generaly, percussion instruments make music by banging things together, in a sense. Finaly, there's the stringed instruments. While not common in most high school bands, every once in awhile you see some. Stringed instruments play music by plucking or dragging a bow across the strings. Some examples of stringed instruments are guitars, cellos, and upright basses.